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A couple of weeks ago I wrote to you expressing our concern over a well-intentioned but very flawed property tax initiative, #50. We were the first conservative organization to speak up about its unintended consequences.

Since then, a host of organizations, including our friends at the Colorado League of Charter Schools and Ready Colorado, have expressed their concern, and lobbied for the initiatives to be pulled in exchange for a legislative special session on a property tax cut.

The basics of a deal have been agreed to and the governor has called the session.

The polling numbers for Initiative # 50 and Initiative #108 indicated near certain death at the ballot box. So, this special session is a happy outcome.

In exchange for pulling the Initiatives, the legislature will add some minor tax cuts to the substantial property tax reform created in Senate Bill 233, championed by legislators Barb Kirkmeyer and Lisa Frizell.

No one wants to hear what they don't want to hear, even if it's true. That's why some people get angry at Independence Institute for always telling the truth. As the first conservative organization to publicly come out against Initiative #50 for its unintended consequences, we made it easier for others to do so. And we're very glad we did.

In that spirit we again ask our friends to take a closer look at what on the surface looks like a great educational reform, Initiative #138. It has a great chance of failing at the ballot box and that defeat will embolden legislators to attack the school choice, like charter schools, we have fought so hard for decades to win.

As I wrote previously, all school choice citizen initiatives in Colorado have failed, even back when we were a Red state. Nationally such initiatives almost always lose. Colorado is now a very blue state. It will be a herculean challenge to pass this initiative by the required 55% supermajority required for a constitutional amendment.

When Initiative #138 likely fails, the enemies of educational choice will cry, “The people have spoken, and they don't want school choice. It's a mandate.” And it has been tough enough to keep charter school safe from this choice-hating legislature.

Initiative #138 does not create a new school choice program (or even framework for a program) of any kind. It only creates a new avenue for lawsuits that may or may not lead to some sort of jurisprudence many years in the future.

Should it pass, Initiative #138 would put a “right to school choice,” including “private” schools, in the Colorado Constitution, but doesn’t define what “private schools” means. The legislature and the courts will have to interpret it, and that could lead to regulating private schools.

The Colorado Supreme Court will be the final arbiter of what this initiative does or doesn’t do. And if we’ve learned anything from how the courts have treated TABOR, we can expect hostility.

While Initiative #138 says parents have a right to direct their children’s education, it also says that children themselves have a constitutional “right to school choice.” Having already passed a bill to allow children to choose their own genders and names without parental permission, one can only wonder what the legislature will do with this. This might be why the Christian Homeschool Educators of Colorado (CHEC) have come out so strongly against Initiative #138.

If the supporters of Initiative #138 don’t pull it from the ballot, they better make sure it wins, which will take millions and millions of dollars, and prepare for the years of legal battles.

An Initiative that I feel is likely to pass is a ban on so-called trophy hunting. In my latest column I make the case that politics follows culture and the left in Colorado has changed the culture to anti-hunting.

In Complete Colorado, Savana Kascak reports on Bloomfield’s city-run trash services.
Brandon Wark pens a guest op-ed urging residents of Greeley to end food tax.
Joshua Sharf explores Colorado’s public pension problems.

Tonight on PBS channel 12 at 8:30 P.M., scientist Roger Pielke did something unforgivable. He questioned the prevailing assumptions of climate science. For that, the Obama administration tried to discredit him, and the University of Colorado pushed him out of his job.

My friend, filmmaker Stephen Tubbs, shines a light on the horrific fentanyl problem in Colorado in his new film “Devastated”. Please watch or to listen to this episode of Devil's Advocate. It could save someone's life.

The US Supreme Court's decision to repeal the Chevron Doctrine leaves many industries feeling the consequences. How does it affect Colorado's energy policies? PowerGab Hosts Jake Fogleman and Amy Cooke discuss with Senior Fellow in Constitutional Jurisprudence Robert Natelson.

Even out-of-favor political minorities need protecting

By Jon Caldara

(You can listen to this column, read by the author, here.)

Hunters are deviant perverts.

Men convinced they’re women are to be celebrated.

The left works hard to make the bizarre mainstream. The transgender movement is a shining example of just how good they are at it. Ya know, if only you’d learn about all 64 genders and the associated newspeak, you’d understand.

You’d learn transsexuals, cross-dressers and transgendered re-creating “The Last Supper” is loving artistic interpretation. Men punching the hell out of women, once called domestic abuse, is now an Olympic boxing event. Celebrate it or be canceled.

If you get anything from my ramblings over the years, I hope it’s that proper investments in cultural change ultimately create political change, not the other way around. Politics is the lagging indicator of culture.

The right in Colorado lost, and will continue to lose, because they spend almost no money on political culture and infrastructure (the boring stuff).

Instead, they just spent a decade and a half funding political “Hail Mary” passes like candidates de jour and unwinnable initiatives.

We’ll continue to pay the price this fall as voters will likely pass a ban on so-called trophy hunting.

First, let’s recognize the public choice theory problem. There was a time when more than 40% of Americans smoked. They would have never passed tobacco taxes or smoking bans. But now about 11% of Americans smoke. The culture changed. So, the 89% who don’t smoke are happy to tax and ban tobacco.

Smokers of today are treated with the disregard of the LGBTQIA+ communities of the past.

Before the explosion of the urban and suburban elite, most families in Colorado were familiar with, if not participating in, the rural lifestyle. They never would have voted to import violent wolves to kill livestock and our food supply. But the new urbanites who buy their steaks wrapped in plastic are now happy to let farmers’ pets become wolf chow.

Likewise, most families in Colorado understood, if not participated in, hunting. But hunting has gone the way of tobacco use.

In a recent memo, Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis wrote, “In 2023, total rifle license sales for elk have declined to about 126,000 or -80,000 fewer licenses than in the early 2000s. This decline in license sales is not indicative of a declining elk population.”

So, though Colorado’s population has grown by a third since the early 2000s, hunting has dropped by about 45%.

Consequently, while Coloradans want to protect the LGBTQIA+ lifestyle, they have no sympathy for tobacco smokers, hunters or gun owners — all constituency groups that have learned nothing from the success of the gay movement.

What was a diffused but large constituency of hunters is now a minority special interest. And like those in the fossil fuel industry, they never took the threat to their existence seriously.

If they invested in cultural change, selling and celebrating the hunting lifestyle to the millions who came to Colorado in the last two decades, no one would dream of trying to vote away their lifestyle.

When concentrated minority special interests work to change culture, they can. The gay movement did just that. Only 5% of the population is said to be gay, yet we have a Pride Month where businesses out-gay each other for customers. Double that, 11% of the population, are smokers, but there ain’t no Smokers’ Pride Month. Instead, everyday is “Treat Smokers Like Lepers Day.”

Mothers Against Drunk Driving is another concentrated minority interest that changed culture, which then changed the laws. There was a time when driving drunk was so accepted people joked about their own drunken driving. Thankfully that’s no longer the case.

I’ve rarely hunted pheasant and doves, nothing larger. But I have learned a lot about hunters. And, just as gays were falsely stereotyped as perverts, hunters are falsely stereotyped as cruel.

I’ve never known a group of people more committed to environmental stewardship than hunters. They provide an essential service making sure different herds stay in balance. Hunting licenses are issued by the experts in Colorado Parks and Wildlife only for game that needs to be thinned.

If you love Colorado’s wildlife, thank a hunter, even those who hunt the mountain lions the state says need to go. And if you think political minorities, like the LGBTQIA+, deserve protection, apply the same logic to political minorities you don’t like.

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Think Freedom!

Jon