Columns

In the waning hours of the legislative session earlier this month, leadership in the Colorado House of Representatives used procedural delaying tactics to kill a civil-unions bill that otherwise had the votes to pass. In a special session less than a week later, the same bill was assigned to a different committee, resulting in it being killed a second time — again, when it had the votes to pass the whole House.

As work in the state House of Representatives ground to a halt on the second to last night of the legislative session last week to ensure that no vote would be taken on legislation to create civil unions, I found myself reflecting on the role my hometown of Steamboat Springs played in the debate on same-sex unions way back in 1975.

I always make it a practice to ask my Metro State journalism students to explain what a mill levy is, because few things are more central to covering governments than understanding how taxing entities get money from the public.
Usually, the students look at me as if I’m speaking in an obscure Klingon dialect: A mill? A levy? What are those, and what do they have to do with government funding? These are typically intelligent, well-informed students, and they have not the slightest idea what I’m going on about.

After a 12-hour day spent making bone grafts in October 2009, I was in a small locker room changing out of a pair of sweat-soaked long-sleeve scrubs. The day, exhausting, had been routine until I sat down on a stainless-steel bench to check the single message on my phone left by the man who is now my editor, Doug Bell.
Since no one was around to enforce my self-congratulatory inhibitions, I jumped up and did a little dance, a moment to which I happily confess but remain glad no one else had to witness.