The death of a proposed civil unions bill in the Colorado House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee deeply angered Tim Gill, the multi-millionaire gay activist whose smartly targeted campaign spending has helped re-shape Colorado politics.
Gill’s lawyer Ted Trimpa said Gill will now be spending millions more to defeat Republicans across the state, starting with GOP members of the statehouse, Fox 31 News reports.
“It might be a difference of, before, spending $200,000 [on 2012 House races], and now spending $2 million,” Trimpa said.
Or at least, that’s what he said before Fox 31 edited the story to remove the quote.
The National Organization for Marriage blog caught the edit.
Fox 31 reporter Eli Stokols’ story now closes with Trimpa saying “It's very likely there will be consequences for not allowing full debate and consideration by the full House.”
The story no longer mentions dollar amounts.
An inquiry about the edit sent to Fox 31 and Mr. Stokols received no reply.
Regular news writers know there can be many reasons for modifying a quote. Perhaps Trimpa was talking off-the-cuff and the dollar amounts were inexact and inflated.
Or perhaps the writer or editor of the story felt forced to keep a key source happy and spiked revealing inside information about the 2012 election.
Colorado’s Republicans have a bare 33-32 majority in the House and a big money man could have disproportionate impact on the future of our state.
Of all issues to swing elections, the civil unions issue is one of the least important. While support for such unions has increased in the U.S. since they were first created in Vermont in 2000, their possible ramifications are under-debated.
We have heard little about the burdens to over-regulated business owners and objecting religious organizations, the potential for abuse, and even the basic financial costs of implementation to cash-strapped state, county and municipal governments.
The debate’s focus was entirely on gay rights even though the bill also allows unrelated heterosexual couples to contract unions – which in France has resulted in more civil unions than civil marriages!
In hard times, we should look not to create new facsimiles of the family. Rather, we should look to the tried and tested family policy of the New Deal. Scholars like Allan Carlson have praised that era’s focus on shaping economic policy specifically to help a working man support a wife and kids.
But that’s not an option Tim Gill and friends would like to be on the agenda.
When an obsessed multi-millionaire aims to change the political landscape and rewrite the social constitution of our state, his activities deserve more media scrutiny, not less. Fox 31’s edit suggests the news media is telling us less than we deserve to know.
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