Tessa Cheek Posts

“The bill does two things,” says Colorado State Senator Pat Steadman. “It changes last year’s civil unions law to remove the prohibition against civil union partners filling joint returns… And it removes language from the state income tax law that talks about married couples or makes reference to husbands and wives. Basically, it makes the language gender neutral.”

Bolstered by roughly 245 sunny days per year and a stringent voter-approved renewable energy standard, Colorado’s solar industry has grown 20-fold in the last half decade. And a coalition of 280 businesses and organizations and 11,000 individuals are now petitioning Governor John Hickenlooper to keep the momentum going, asking him to help push their “3,000 solar megawatts by 2030” goal.

Every year, the Obama administration pushes to raise the royalty rate on onshore oil-and-gas production, looking to channel more of the profits from extraction on public lands to federal and state coffers. The efforts have been unsuccessful. Today’s 12.5 percent rate hasn’t changed since the 1920s. Analysts say that low rate has cost Colorado taxpayers an estimated $300 million since Obama took office in 2008.

They aren’t happy, and they don’t make for good eating because they’re more susceptible to illness. Yet a lot of cows are stressed in America. They’re shuttled around and crowded onto the massive feedlots where so many of them live out their short lives, breathing, eating and drinking in the same crowded space where they leave their waste.

At the state capitol in Denver Wednesday, a handful of mothers from towns sited in the Northern Front Range drilling fields delivered petition signed by 8,000 mothers to Governor Hickenlooper's office asking him to push for tighter air-quality regulations than the draft versions released to the public last week. The women, mostly members of the group Colorado Moms Know Best, arrived arms full of stuffed dolls, Cabbage Patch Kids, which they rechristened Gas Patch Kids.

New Jersey moved from same-sex civil unions to gay marriage in a flash. It will be a longer road for Colorado. Although Colorado legalized civil unions in 2013, a 2006 amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage stands in the road like a high hurdle.

This month, major health care insurer Kaiser Permanente announced it would no longer exclude transgender Coloradans from treatment and, more than that, would offer transgender-specific health care to its all of its policies. With protections in place under the still-in-tumult Affordable Care Act set to go in effect this year, transgender Americans could soon be afforded the same type of health coverage as their neighbor.

If there were any further evidence needed that Colorado’s state-lawmaker recall elections scheduled for September 10 were from the start a proxy national battle over gun policy, that evidence came yesterday, when campaign finance reports in the races came due. The reports included major donations from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, California entrepreneur Eli Broad and the National Rifle Association.

Campaign mailers underlining the anti-abortion views of Republican state senate candidates Bernie Herpin and George Rivera reportedly landed in southern Front Range voter mailboxes over the last two days, stoking flames in the already hot recall elections organized in response to gun-control legislation passed in the spring.

Exodus International, the oldest and largest institution in the Christian ex-gay movement, is shutting down and the organization’s president, Alan Chambers, has issued a formal apology for harms resulting from the ministry’s work. It's the first step in a long road to helping "ex-gay survivors" recover from these harmful tactics.