May 22, 2024 10:47 AM UTC

May 21st, 2024: The Day The Colorado Republican Party Died

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• by: Colorado Pols

As 9NEWS’ Kyle Clark reported last night, the Colorado Republican Party sent out an email blast yesterday that if we’re to take it at face value completely resets the debate over education policy in Colorado, making claims and recommendations so far from the mainstream no matter what your views on public education may be that we’re all struggling this morning to come to drips with the implications.

The Colorado Republican Party is issuing a call to its members to pull their children from public school, saying Democrats are using schools to “turn more kids trans.”

The message was delivered in an email blast to Republicans statewide Tuesday.

“All Colorado parents should be aiming to remove their kids from public education,” [Pols emphasis] read the directive from Darcy Schoening, director of special initiatives for the Colorado GOP.

It’s one thing to complain about public schools in the abstract as Republicans are fond of doing, but the paradox in attacking public education is that parents consistently believe that their kid’s own public school is the “exception” to the bad stories they see on the news. Republicans in the Colorado legislature celebrated alongside their Democratic colleagues the increases in public education funding achieved this year. Crucial constituencies Republicans can’t lose in the suburbs and rural areas care about their public schools. You can’t just tell voters, even conservative-leaning voters, to pull their kids en masse from the public schools their kids have attended for years.

And why are parents supposed to take this life-changing drastic action? Trans panic, naturally!

If your child decides he identifies as a girl because he is angry with you, or all of his friends are doing it, the Colorado government will actively encourage his new fetish by allowing him to identify as “she,” “they,” or whatever nonsensical terms your son’s teachers and peers may dream up…all without notifying you of your child’s disturbing behavior, which should be treated rather then encouraged.

If you haven’t been paying attention over the past year, Colorado Republicans under the party’s far-right bomb-throwing chairman Dave “Let’s Go Brandon” Williams have heavily invested in scare tactics about transgender people as an election turnout issue, which resulted in some of the most acrimonious debates in the state legislature this year and an incipient anti-trans ballot initiative campaign. It’s a continuation of the message from 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl, who became obsessed in the late days of her losing campaign with “furries” supposedly taking over the hallways of Colorado public schools.

The problem, as Ganahl discovered in 2022, is that anti-LGBTQ scare tactics simply don’t work on a majority of Colorado voters. Voters who are agitated by anti-trans messaging are already in the GOP camp, and swingable voters are repelled by the intense animus directed at such a small percentage of the population.

In short, the GOP’s latest election-year moral panic is another dud, just like the “furry panic” of 2022–and by calling on parents to pull their children out of public school over this sideshow issue the Colorado Republican Party has, to borrow the meme, “jumped the shark.” Every single Republican in Colorado now must either repudiate the position taken by their own party, or explain why they will not.

It’s an embarrassment that there’s just no coming back from. Or there at least there shouldn’t be.