Colorado Politics

Polis serves national Dems red meat on abortion | DUFFY

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Sean Duffy



Any good carnival needs a loud huckster barking about the attractions. 

At this year’s Democrat convention, where the serious issue of abortion became a cause for weird celebrations — including a truck doling out miscarriage-inducing medication — who would earn the title of the most shameless, morally obtuse evangelist for pregnancy termination? 

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Enter Gov. Jared Polis. 

Our governor turned up with a prop copy of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that looked like an oversized children’s book parents read from at bedtime.  

He was about to share a grim fairy tale. 

Polis invented a scary scenario in which the conservative blueprint contains the plan for former President Donald Trump to ban abortion in all 50 states, eliminate in vitro fertilization and even prescribe families be comprised of mom, dad and baby (unless mom got an abortion first).

None of it was true.

By the time fact checkers (including an excellent, detailed piece in The Gazette) explained Project 2025 contained nothing like what Polis alleged, the red meat had been gobbled up on the convention floor and by viewers, and voters, around the country. 

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Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets around the world before the truth has the chance to put on its pants.”  

There are only three scenarios to account for this deeply flawed and cynical speech. One, he didn’t understand what he was saying or two, he (or his speechwriters) didn’t bother to check the source material. 

Jared Polis is neither stupid, nor lazy. 

The third is he knowingly presented this howling cavalcade of falsehoods to score points with a rabidly extreme pro-abortion convention crowd. Find a way to say something just a bit more sensational and attention-grabbing than the last abortion cheerleader. 

Remember me, he cries, whether Harris wins or loses. It’s shameful and cheap. 

This is just the latest outlandish pro-abortion stunt by a governor whose strategy is to make Colorado the top destination for abortion-seekers. An initiative on the ballot will cement that status. 

Advocates say Initiative 89 is an innocuous route to constitutional enshrinement of abortion rights; a state-level restoration of Roe v. Wade. In fact, Roe looks moderate by comparison.

First, the ballot measure overturns a 40-year constitutional prohibition against taxpayer funding of abortion.  

Back in the quaint old days when abortion was a deep, difficult and serious moral issue to be wrestled with, Democrats and Republicans drew a line at taxpayer’s money being spent on abortion.

Some guy named Joe Biden once had that position.

Even if one was personally pro-choice, this consensus recognized others had profound moral objections to abortion and, therefore, should not be forced to pay for it through their tax dollars.

Now that eminently reasonable position will be tossed aside. 

It gets worse. 

The proposed language says “government shall not deny, impede or discriminate against the exercise” of the constitutional right to abortion. 

No exceptions.

That means laws that would prevent late-term abortions, or, as Roe v Wade did, seek to prevent the aborting of viable babies, would be invalid, because those concepts would “impede” such pregnancy terminations. 

Parental notification that a minor child is about to have an abortion? Forget it. This too would be a prohibited impediment. 

Remember former President Bill Clinton’s claim abortion should be “safe, legal and rare?”

In Colorado, this amoral amendment — which will likely pass — makes abortion available anyplace, anytime regardless of the age of the mother or her unborn child. There’s no pauses for medical information, or discussions of alternatives. 

No sane person should hold this view.  

Now, to be a viable Democrat you must be eagerly pro-abortion, celebrating it with abortion trucks parked next to taco wagons and hot dog stands, as happened at the Chicago convention. Today’s progressives believe the decision to end a pregnancy has no more weight than what to have for lunch.

Their convention, and their Colorado constitutional amendment, trivialize a tragic crossroads faced by women in crisis. This is a decision that carries profound consequences. Their message ignores this fundamental human reality. Swing by our truck, they say, take a pill and grab a burrito on your way out. 

This is the new commandment in the progressives’ abortion religion: thou shalt place no speed bumps in the path of our abortion truck — a truck Jared Polis wants to drive.

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.

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