Focus on the Family Wants a Special Rights for Christians Amendment in Colorado

Apparently, Daddy Dobson's always foul and hate filled Focus on the Family ("FOTF") has a short memory that omit the U. S. Supreme Court decision in Romer v. Evans which struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment which stripped the LGBT citizens of Colorado of non-discrimination protections> Why so? Because FOTF is now pushing a constitutional amendment in Colorado that would give religious groups free reign to discriminate against LGBT people. The proposed amendment is disingenuously called the "Religious Freedom Amendment”even though the amendment's real affect would be to allow Christianists to trample on the religious freedoms of others. It sounds precisely like something that would cause the bitter old men in dresses in the Catholic Church hierarchy to have near orgasms since it would quasi-legitimize the hierarchy's anti-gay jihad. Think Progress looks at this nasty amendment and the bigotry - and bigots - that is the moving force behind it. Here are highlights:

Focus on the Family and the Alliance Defense Fund are apparently organizing to again pursue a constitutional amendment in Colorado that would give religious groups free reign to discriminate . . .

The so-called “Religious Freedom Amendment” asserts that a “sincerely held religious belief” cannot be “burdened” by the government:

(1) The right to act or refuse to act in a manner motivated by a sincerely held religious belief may not be burdened unless the government proves it has a compelling governmental interest in infringing the specific act or refusal to act and has used the least restrictive means to further that interest.

(2) A burden includes indirect burdens such a [sic] as withholding of one or more benefits, assessing one or more penalties, exclusion from one of [sic] more government programs, and/or exclusion from one or more government facility [sic].

[T]he amendment not-so-subtly demands that religious groups have more power over citizens than the government by essentially giving them veto power over all policy decisions. This language could easily be construed such that the government would be permanently tethered to subsidizing religious groups, no matter how exclusive the policies of that group would be.

For example, after civil unions legislation passed in Illinois last year, the state decided to stop subsidizing Catholic Charities’ adoption services with taxpayer funding because the agencies refused to serve same-sex couples. Were this amendment to pass in Colorado, the state could never back out of such funding if organizations claimed their discrimination was based on a “sincerely held religious belief.”

Conservatives failed to place a similar amendment on the ballot in 2010. Ideally, this proposal will meet the same fate