We're having our own culture war here in Colorado. We just haven't admitted it, yet.

There is a stark contrast between Mayor Hickenlooper's effort to promote Denver as a 'new Bohemia' , and the fact that the radical right controlling Colorado has successfully re-labeled us the Hate State;

Colo. sparks racists' interest

"We're very happy with what's happening in Colorado," Walker (of the country's largest white supremacist group, the National Alliance) said in a phone interview from his Millpoint, W.Va., office. "Colorado wasn't even on our map three years ago. Last year, it started stepping up and getting into shape. And since August, we've had an enormous response."

They've been littering yards with hate speech;

Fliers promoting an all-white society have been tossed in the front yards of homes - some of which are occupied by minorities - across the state during the past week.

So far, the fliers have been found in Broomfield, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, Clifton, Grand Junction, Delta and Montrose.

It's not just the media's hyper-focus on the Bryant case. And it's not just white supremacist extremists who are finding a Rocky Mountain home here.

The fact is that the state's right-wing leadership's success promoting divisive positions of all sorts (usually drafted by and at the behest of Beltway extremists) has sent a loud and clear signal to the world that Colorado is open for hate business.

Again.

Some have been around long enough to remember the Amendment 2 campaign in Colorado a decade ago. That effort to exorcise all but heterosexuals from the State went down in flames, but severely burned the Colorado economy along the way.

Colorado became known as 'the hate state' in media across the country. Conference business declined by some $80 million. Major corporations refused to relocate to Denver based on the campaign. It took years for the state to lose the 'hate' moniker.

Each of the following is easy to dismiss as right-wing rants that won't mean much. Collectively, they send a very clear signal to the world about who we are;

1. U.S. Rep Tancredo demonizes immigrants (and first grade teachers who disagree with him) incessantly, most recently raising money at a fund-raiser sponsored by vigilante groups . Tancredo has long been the "Welcome to Colorado!" poster-boy for hate groups like the National Alliance.

2. Governor Owens (CONTINUED)

promises to abolish Affirmative Action in the state -- the day after the Supreme Court upholds it as the law of the land

3. State Senate President Andrews spear-heads an effort to establish review boards at colleges and universities which will act as judge and jury over any faculty deemed insufficiently Conservative. The groups behind this effort get the African American woman who as President of Metro State's student body opposed this position -- fired.

4. State Rep Schultheis launches the FRC's anti-other-than-Christian marriage "Pledge" campaign in Colorado, threatening to blacklist any legislator who won't sign it. He also suggests that judges are above the law if they deem their interpretation of God's word superior.

5. U.S. Rep Musgrave launches an FRC-generated bill to amend the Constitution to outlaw all but the marriages the fundamentalists deem appropriate. (Ironically one argument she makes is that this is to resist 'judicial activism'. But presumably she'd agree with Schultheis and Paschall that God's word-induced activism is fine....)

6. JeffCo County Treasurer "Pusillanimous" Paschall distributes pamphlets at the JeffCo county courthouse promoting juror nullification based on jurors' personal interpretation of God's will. (And all the rest of his act...)

Each of these is divisive; by using the power of the majority to beat back a wide range of minorities, often abusing the rhetoric of fundamentalist Christianity to do so.

Collectively they tell the rest of the country that as ground zero for the radical rights' most extreme actions, we're once again a state that is centered around divisiveness, that opposes diversity, and that represses dissent and difference.

Colorado was once vaunted for its independence. The right-wing believes that time is long-gone, and instead views the state as a passive training ground for what is, as Paul Krugman recently observed, a national effort;

"Election Boils Down to a Culture War" was the title of Mr. Fineman's column. But the analysis was all about abortion and euthanasia, and now we hear that opposition to gay marriage will be a major campaign theme. This isn't a culture war ý it's a religious war.

The Washington Post affirms that the national Hate Campaign is being waged centrally by the GOP:

According to a report from The Post's Mike Allen, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie predicts that the party platform will proclaim that the sacrament of marriage is for straights only. But party strategists and right-wing activists aren't content to stop there.

You can understand the Republicans' concern. With polls showing more than half the American public now doubting the president's capacity to handle both foreign and economic policy, the administration needs an issue to distract the disgruntled. More pointedly, as Karl Rove himself has noted, 4 million Christian evangelicals did not bestir themselves to vote in the election of 2000. At the rate things are going, Bush will need every one of those votes next year.

So here's where we are.

The radical right running the GOP nationally channels hate campaigns through a passive (either due to ideology, ambition, or ineptitude) local leadership in Colorado.

While new arrivals like Mayor Hickenlooper try on the progressive romance of Denver as a new Bohemia, structured to entice the new creative class, the vast majority of Coloradans are too self-focussed to get involved, leaving the state prone to whatever the right wing decides they'd like to try.

The results for Colorado will be exactly as they were ten years ago -- a body-hit to the local economy, and terrible p.r. for our region.

The Governor, the Senate President, and every Republican politician in a position of power and influence in this state needs to listen to the vast bulk of the population and politicians who are united in saying Stop Hate Now.

If only for the sake of their pocketbooks.

The rest of us, that vast majority, has to turn outward and act. We have to spend significant time in the next twelve months opposing divisive policies, arguing against extremism, making our voices heard to stop hate every time it's proposed, in whatever guise, in every venue.

For the sake of our state.