Voting For Common Sense In Colorado

Tuesday was a crazy election day in America, and I'll have to admit there were a lot of election outcomes I didn't particularly like (for instance, Rand Paul and Ron Johnson becoming U.S. Senators).   But it wasn't all bad.   There were some choices made by voters that made a lot of sense.   Among these were a couple of ballot initiatives voted down by Colorado voters.

One example is initiative 300 in Denver.   This would have created the world's first government commission for "extraterrestrial affairs".   The commission, to be funded by a combination of grants, gifts and donations, would evaluate the risks and benefits of extraterrestrial contacts and would require Denver officials to post on the city website any evidence of extraterrestrials.

The ET commission would be composed of seven members appointed by the mayor of Denver.   At least one commission member would have to be someone "who had consulted at least 100 people regarding their alleged close encounters with extraterrestrial intelligent beings."   The initiative also said that commission members "who are not Denver residents may participate from anywhere in the universe by any means available."   Sounds like they expected someone like Marvin the Martian (pictured above) to be appointed to the commission.

Denver officials had campaigned against the measure, thinking if it passed it would make the city the butt of world-wide ridicule -- and it certainly would have.   Fortunately, the people of Denver are not that nutty.   The measure was easily defeated with about 84% of voters voting in the negative.

While it needed to be defeated, initiative 300 was just silly.   Far more serious was the statewide Amendment 62, also called the Personhood Amendment.   This was a sneaky back-door effort to ignore the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision and outlaw abortion in the state.

The amendment would apply protections of the Colorado Constitution to "every human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being."   This would give a fetus, no matter how small or undeveloped, the same rights as all Colorado citizens -- meaning abortion could be prosecuted as murder (possibly treating any woman who paid for an abortion as someone who instigated a murder-for-hire).

Opponents of the ridiculous amendment said it would also ban "emergency contraception in rape cases, and would limit treatment for miscarriages and tubal pregnancies and would impact infertility treatment."   But the people of Colorado saw through this nefarious amendment and 70% of them voted to defeat the amendment.

Colorado voters also did their fellow countrymen a favor by electing a Democratic governor and a Democratic U.S. Senator (while defeating teabaggers running for those seats).   Thank you Colorado.   You did good.