Colorado Health Department statistics directly implicate homosexual behavior in 85% of that State's AIDS cases. 85.2% of those cases are to be found in the Denver Metropolitan area alone -- which probably means that more than 80% of Colorado's homosexual community resides in the Denver Metropolitan area. Yet Colorado gays insist on trying to secure statewide "gay rights" laws. Who's trying to force their "values" on whom? What gives gay special interests the license to impose their sense of "political correctness" on society -- and at the same time imagine they can forbid opponents of the gay extremist agenda to express traditional values politically? The right to express opinions on issues, the right to freely choose one's associates and the right to work to achieve political ends through State, local and Federal political systems are inalienable under our Constitutions. It is gay extremists like Robin Miller who, in fact, wish to deny other citizens' exercise of these rights and impose gay extremists' sense of "values" on the rest of society. Attorney Shawn Mitchell, president of the Colorado Chapter of the Federalist Society, a national organization of law students, attorneys and judges, comments:

"The advocates of gay rights legislation do not seek rights in the sense of limits on government's coercive powers. No, what the advocates want is to wield government power to assure that employers, landlords and others, in their private choices, cannot take into account their negative personal feelings about homosexuality.

"...The difference between this kind of assertive right and the more narrowly defined rights that are really limitations on goverment is that the assertive rights are actually a species of entitlement that requires the participation of others whether they like it or not. Until now, only a few categories of disadvantaged minorities have been judged as entitled to such favored treatment under the law. No such group has been defined solely on the basis of shared behavior, let alone on the basis of a behavior that much of the population considers unnatural or immoral.

"...[`Gay rights' proponents] have successfully hidden that it is the passage of gay rights legislation that restricts free choice and imposes a government-ordained set of values, and that [rejecting `gay rights'], far from legislating morality, merely establishes government neutrality, leaving individuals free to work out their own satisfactory arrangements. When government prohibits a person from making judgments based on a personal philosophical or moral code, government is rejecting that person's values and mandating conduct according to other values. In contrast, [merely rejecting `gay rights'] does not prohibit any behavior, beliefs or relationships, or any acts in pursuit of the above. [It] would prevent government from choosing winners and losers in this arena."

Ironically, gay extremists have used the concept of "local control" as an excuse to maintain unjust "gay rights" laws against statewide efforts to overturn local ordinances that favor them. Yet in Oregon, where a statewide anti-protected status for gays proposal was defeated last year, and communities have attempted to enact local measures achieving the same purpose, "gay rights" advocates have argued just the opposite -- i.e., that new state legislation bars such measures, because "[t]he issue of discrimination based on sexual orientation is a statewide concern, and [opponents'] divide and conquer mentality will not be tolerated" (See "Oregon Lawmakers Ban Local Votes on Gay Bias," The New York Times, July 30, 1993, p. A-10, emphasis added). In fact, gay militants and their supporters are pushing at all levels, federal, state and local, for special gay advantages. After Colorado voters approved that state's Amendment 2, forbidding protected class status for gays, gay extremists mounted a nationwide boycott of the state. If gay militants' wishes are granted, no individual, state or municipality or government agency will have any choice but to accept their political agenda.

Opponents of the "gay rights" agenda have every right, through our system of government, to "push back." And while gay activists accuse opponents of special gay advantage of "mixing questions of church and state," they themselves never hesitate to appeal, with the active assistance of "liberal" clergy, to falsely-construed notions of "biblical" compassion to support their cause. Kirk and Pill suggest in this regard:

"... [publicizing] support for gays by more moderate churches, raising theological objections of our own about conservative interpretations of biblical teachings... Second, we can undermine the moral authority of homophobic churches by portraying them as antiquated backwaters, badly out of step with the times and with the latest findings of psychology. Against the mighty pull of institutional religion one must set the mightier draw of Science and Public Opinion... Such an unholy alliance has worked well against churches before, on such topics as divorce and abortion. With enough open talk about the prevalence and acceptance of homosexuality, that alliance can work again here." ("The Overhauling of Straight America," op. cit.)

Kirk and Madsen's antidote? Again, Kirk and Madsen, with shameless duplicity, suggest some sort of moral or social code of their own devising! "What gay men want, without knowing it," they say, "is a return to the sacred, and a framework of ethics within which they can begin to trust and believe in one another" (After the Ball, op. cit., pg. 294). Indeed, society cannot exist in a moral vacuum. But we see no reason to allow special gay advantage legislation to impose a new brand of gay extremist "morality" on our nation.