February 28, 2012 12:53 AM UTC

GOP Senators Proving Godwin's Law Accurate

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• by: Colorado Pols

The AP’s Kristen Wyatt reports:

Hospitals with religious objections to procedures such as abortions would have to tell patients in a special notice Colorado’s Senate approved Friday.

The measure was approved over vigorous objections from Senate Republicans, who called the notification bill a thinly veiled attempt to stigmatize religious hospitals…

The bill’s sponsor, Democratic Sen. Morgan Carroll of Aurora, said the notices are needed because hospital consolidations can confuse patients about where to get certain services.

“It’s really about a patient’s right to know,” Carroll said.

Republicans strongly objected to Carroll’s proposal, which passed on a narrow voice vote. Some compared the requirements to the religious labeling used in Nazi Germany. [Pols emphasis]

As anyone who has ever gone to the emergency room knows, the first thing a patient gets upon arrival is a clipboard full of forms and disclosures the patient is required to complete and acknowledge. Senate Bill 12-093 would require hospitals that refuse services due to religious objections to provide a notification of that, along with privacy policies and other notifications routinely given to every patient “as soon after admission as practicable.”

Having listened to the audio of Sen. Ted Harvey’s shrieking comparisons of this bill to “Communist Vietnam” Friday, Sen. Kevin Lundberg’s repeated statements that the bill would force hospitals to “wear a patch on their clothes,” and Sen. Shawn Mitchell’s follow-up about “emblems” not successfully affirming rights of “religious groups to live in a country in Europe,” we can say it was really unmistakably obvious what Republicans were getting at.

But we’re happy to report that the endless references to communists and Nazis and ghettoes and patches on clothes eventually became too much to take, even for fellow GOP Sen. Ellen Roberts–who nonetheless opposed the bill. With this caveat:

I must distance myself from references to stars and ghettoes. I do not in any way equate this to what has happened in our, uh, global history, to those of Jewish faith, and what the Holocaust was about.

Thank goodness one of them didn’t go there, right?