Commies despise the First Amendment.
Colorado, a state that embraces crime, drugs, and illegal immigration, plainly abhors fundamental freedoms. To the socialists who rule it, freedom of speech and freedom of religion are anathema. Secularism is their shield. Behind it, socialist authority spreads like an invasive species in a country founded on self-governance.
The latest casualties of these “Democratic” socialists, early-stage communists all, are children who depend on homeschool enrichment programs to pursue their dreams.
Most people know about cake artist Jack Phillips and web designer Lorie Smith, who beat Colorado in religious-discrimination cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. In Phillips’ case, the Court rebuked the state for official hostility toward his faith. That hostility —akin to a hate crime — conjured images of goons roughing up an artist in the alley for obeying Jesus instead of the mob boss.
For every Phillips and Smith, there’s an obscure nurse, physician, preschool, or school trying to live by the creed that built Western law. That doctrine holds that gender is a genetic trait determined at conception, that every person is equal in the eyes of God without exception, and that children are not raw material for authoritarian ideologues bent on crushing the values of families and communities.
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The state’s belief is quite different. Gender, it says, is a social construct rather than a fact of nature. It can and often should be altered, at great expense, through procedures unknown for nearly all human history. Individuals are judged by genetics and group identity, as authorities define them, and can never be seen as equals. It’s the same philosophy that gave us Jim Crow and blackface. Now the left has cleverly revived womanface with fashionable drag shows — revivals of the racist, misogynist minstrel shows of the 1800s. It stages these disgusting mockeries of women in children’s libraries as celebrations of diversity. Up is down, wrong is right, and anything goes if cloaked in modernity’s faux notions of virtue.
Public schools teach that Western values are those of thieves who stole a country. Got that, children. You may have been conceived as a mistake, and your family’s home is a crime scene.
Our schools seldom credit the people who launched 250 years of progress toward God’s truth that all are created equal. They don’t teach about the roughly 365,000 Americans who died in the fight to end slavery, driven by Judeo-Christian values and their nation’s declaration that “all men are created equal.” Nor do they mention that slavery persists around the globe today — all of it in countries stolen by whichever regime won the last war.
The state quietly punishes anyone who stands on Western values, especially those who enter the marketplace or work with children. The penalties include trumped-up code violations and fines, denied permits and funding — even mandatory re-education, like the indoctrination course imposed on Phillips as a condition of keeping his business license.
The Supreme Court has reminded Colorado several times in the past decade that the First Amendment doesn’t stop at the Kansas border, no matter how many socialists control the legislature. Colorado officials thumb their noses at the Court. They do it from inside the bubble wrap of an ideology that says Judeo-Christian values are racist. Haters are bad, unlike us — the enlightened and superior, anointed with intelligence the rubes don’t have. So, to hell with the Court.
They don’t despise all faith, just the Judeo-Christian kind. Burn an American flag or urge a mob of teenagers to stomp on a Star of David smeared with mock blood – which happened during a Denver school walkout this month organized by communists, as proven on camera — and the state calls it free speech. Try the same with a Palestinian flag, and the state will cry “hate crime” faster than radical Islamists can chop off your head.
Which brings us to the now-beheaded Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, better known as ERBOCES. Led by Ken Witt — a former superintendent, school board member, tech genius, and polymath — the Monument-based organization spent 13 years authorizing online schools and homeschool enrichment programs across Colorado. The program was widely respected and selfless. It added a special layer to the school-choice market, clearing hurdles so every child, from any conceivable circumstance, could find an educational path that works.
Then one move made the ruling class gasp in indignation. ERBOCES authorized Riverstone Academy, a Pueblo County elementary school billed as Colorado’s first public school with a Christian foundation. The socialist legislature and the Colorado Department of Education went full commissar.
Colorado’s constitution contains a relic called a Blaine Amendment, which bans public money for “sectarian” schools. Blaine laws spread in the 1800s to keep public dollars away from schools in which nuns taught immigrant children the Protestant-run public schools turned away. The Supreme Court has spent the past decade dismantling these bigoted laws, enacted to benefit a state government’s favored demographics and hold down minorities.
Colorado’s authoritarian bigots cling to Blaine like sacred scripture. The Supreme Court keeps telling them no:
Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer (2017): Missouri could not lock a church preschool out of a playground-resurfacing grant simply because a church ran it. The state can’t leave children playing on dangerous surfaces because their school teaches the Ten Commandments.
Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020): Montana could not bar religious schools from a state scholarship program. Doing so discriminates based on religion, which the First Amendment forbids. (No one needs a law degree to see what’s plain as day in the Bill of Rights.)
Carson v. Makin (2022): Maine could not exclude “sectarian” schools from tuition aid it offered to secular private schools. The rule is simple. A state need not fund private education, but once it does, it can’t disqualify schools for being religious.
It is sickening that a church had to sue before a state would honor the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom for Lutheran kids and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. The Constitution protects all children, not just those who fit the state’s favored secular identity.
Socialism’s coerced secularism is evil enough to put children at greater risk because of their parents’ faith. Sadly, too many Americans can’t see this for what it is.
Once Riverstone’s Christian identity surfaced, the Colorado Department of Education warned that the school was ineligible for per-pupil dollars and put ERBOCES under a hostile audit (read: witch hunt). Socialist legislators, openly offended by the school’s religion, rewrote the 1965 BOCES law (passed a year after Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act). As Chalkbeat Colorado put it, lawmakers were out to rein in “one particular BOCES.”
Education Commissar (oops, bad typo, we mean “Commissioner”) Susana Córdova demanded repayment of roughly $300,000 tied to the school. The state forced ERBOCES to close just as students were beginning the new school year. None of that satisfied the tyrants. This week, they ordered a “specialized” forensic audit of ERBOCES and its largest homeschool program. Complete Colorado, the state’s premier objective news source, calls it a “proctology exam.” The message is clear: Teach Jesus and we will shut you down, then violate you personally. Socialism cannot tolerate individual defiance. Ultimately, as history proves, socialism crushes resistance with violence when all else fails.
ERBOCES was an asset, a gift to Colorado’s endlessly diverse K-12 children. The state set out to destroy it the moment the word “Christian” left Ken Witt’s mouth. Thomas Sowell, a Marxist turned free-market economist, described socialism’s slow revolution from within: “The barbarians are not at the gates. They are inside the gates — and have academic tenure, judicial appointments, government grants, and control of the movies, television, and other media.”
From inside those gates, they’ve quelled the hopes and dreams of thousands of Colorado children, First Amendment be damned, because someone said “Jesus.” Give them a year and they’ll make all homeschooling a crime. From there, the central planners will gradually take control of everything we do. You read it here first.
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