September 12, 2018 04:11 PM UTC

Andrews Deleted Tweet About Stapleton Due To The "Hysteria" It Was Causing

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• by: Jason Salzman

(Smashing choice of words – Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Former Colorado Senate President John Andrews created a mini-frenzy on Twitter yesterday, when he wrote that Walker Stapleton, Colorado’s Republican candidate for governor, told a luncheon crowd of 20 “faith leaders” that Stapleton would be “pro-life, pro-family, and pro-religious freedom.”

“I saw this thing spiraling away unproductively, the way it happens so often on Twitter, and I thought, I have better things to do with my time and better ways to support my preferred candidate for governor,” he said, adding that he knows there are screen shots of his Tweet out there. “I wanted to do my small part toward sanity and civility and pull the plug.”

“What I wrote was that Stapleton told us he is pro-life, pro-family,” he said, “and pro-religious freedom. I’m saying that if someone were to ask him today, ‘Is that so?’, he would treat it as a shrug: ‘Everyone knows that’s so.'”

While that’s generally true, the details about Stapleton’s positions on those topics aren’t fully known.

For example, he’s said he’d be a “pro-life governor,” and will protect the “born and unborn.”

But he wouldn’t tell a television reporter if he’d sign legislation making abortion illegal or harder to get in Colorado.

That’s a question that’s salient given the U.S. Supreme Court’s shift to the right and likely move back from protecting abortion rights.

“I was having words in my mouth,” said Andrews. “Stapleton was having words put in his mouth. I didn’t want to put Stapleton and his campaign team in a position of having to answer to some spittin’ match that Andrews started.”

“I’m proud of the photo [of himself and Stapleton that accompanied the Tweet],” he said, saying it was the “follow-on hysteria” that bothered him.