As is so often the case, I’d love to be writing today about national issues. In particular, I’d love to write about the recent shameful behaviors we’ve seen at the United States Supreme Court. We could start with the fact that the three Trump appointees, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett all stressed the importance of precedent during their confirmation hearings. Each noted Roe was considered settled law and they did not anticipate voting to overturn it. Heck, even Alito, who wrote the opinion overturning Roe said, way back in his hearing, it was settled law and an important precedent that was “protected.”

They all had little quibbles, however, along the lines of not being able to foresee the future and who knows what will come along, and such. Well, I call shenanigans on that. The three Trumper appointees managed to overturn a 50-year precedent pretty darn fast. I posit a case can be made that they actually lied under oath, as I rather doubt they had a miraculous epiphany, that Roe should be completely overturned, after confirmation. Heck, GOP Sen. Susan Collins said Kavanaugh assured her in private conversations prior to his confirmation Roe was settled law.

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It’s been a while since we impeached a SCOTUS member, but if lying under oath isn’t a reason for removal from office – let alone taking big gifts from rich donors, including some that have business before the Court – I don’t know what is. It won’t happen, of course, but Chief Justice John Roberts is increasingly likely to have his term in office – the Roberts Court – be remembered not for any judicial brilliance, but rather for scandal and deceit. And the public is paying attention, with confidence in the Court falling to all-time lows, with only roughly a third of Americans expressing confidence in the Court’s non-partisanship and character, while fully two thirds report little or no confidence in the Court. Roberts’ legacy is severely tarnished.

But I’m not going to talk about any of that…

Instead, I’d like to bring up an issue that never causes any disagreements or fights: religion.

A recent Colorado Politics story examined the religious views of our elected legislative representatives. The report found various religious views are overrepresented in the legislature, when compared to the general population of Colorado.

A brief note on how I came to this issue: I spent my 25-plus-year Air Force career as an outlier (Editor: no!?). First, I was a Democrat, and that’s unusual, but I am also not traditionally religious. If anything, I’m a deist. And so, over those years, I was often confronted with overt religious behaviors I had to deal with. As a young lieutenant, I mostly had to just suck it up when someone offered, say, a prayer in Jesus’s name. As a lieutenant colonel with a secure pension, I was less tolerant.

I was reminded of those days by the CoPo story. And please believe what you wish. As Jefferson famously said, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg.” But problems can arise when elected officials feel empowered to act on policy decisions before them based on that most dangerous type of belief system: that I am following God’s will that I know exactly what God wants. When any man or woman states he or she alone knows exactly what God wants, well, be nervous and on guard.

Happily so far, here in Colorado, I haven’t seen too much outright religious certainty pertaining to legislation, unlike what we are seeing in many deep-red states around the country (cough… abortion bans… cough).

The survey shows there are a significant number of nonreligious folks in the House and Senate, with 24 identifying that way. But the data do show the General Assembly overrepresents religion significantly, where a third (34%) are unaffiliated, compared to 24% in the Colorado population at-large.

That concerns me, as often those who are deeply religious feel compelled to try to govern in what they perceive to be the path chosen by God, which by a remarkable coincidence, seems to always mirror the individual’s own beliefs quite nicely.

Anthropologists estimate that, over the course of human history, there have been “at least 18,000 different gods, goddesses and various animals or objects have been worshipped by humans.” There is, at least to me, a degree of hubris in thinking that you and your group, be it a church or a temple or a mosque, have narrowed in on the one, exactly correct, religious view.

Now, I suspect I’ve managed to irritate quite a few of you, but that’s not my goal. Rather, I’d like you to take a look at that CoPo story to see how you yourself feel about the religious (and nonreligious) makeup of our state legislature. Along the lines of James Madison in his classic Federalist No. 10, I’d argue as long as no one set of beliefs is able to conquer all the others, we’ll be basically OK. But I do worry, as the radical right more and more embraces a far-right evangelical point of view, that more and more of our rights will be at risk. Yesterday it was Roe, and in a recent dissent, Justice Thomas argued the Court should now take another look at the decision legalizing birth control purchases, with an eye toward overturning that ruling. Can anyone doubt his religious views have influenced this notion?

The CoPo story is an important one, and it establishes a sort of benchmark to which we should come back every session. Colorado has been lucky so far in that extreme religious zealots have not yet been able to control or deeply influence law making.

Let’s be sure to keep it that way.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.