Guest Commentary by Joy Overbeck
Here in Colorado we just finished our midterm nominating elections. Now we have our Republican and Democrat candidates, all the way from county and city offices like clerk and recorder, sheriff, and town council, to statehouse senators and representatives and the two most consequential jobs on the ballot, the person who will take the governor’s office, and the man who will represent Coloradans in the U.S. Senate.
The primary season was a hard-fought, pitched battle for many offices, particularly the U.S. Senate campaign between construction company owner Joe O’Dea and Colorado statehouse Representative Ron Hanks, as well as the governor’s primary race between Greg Lopez and Heidi Ganahl. O’Dea and Ganahl emerged from the fray victorious and will be the Republican challengers, running against Democrat incumbents Governor Jared Polis and Senator Michael Bennet.
As always, the primaries leave behind disappointed and upset devotees of the losers whose gripe against the winners is that they “just aren’t conservative enough.” But no matter who we championed in the primaries, we must now leave that battlefield behind and gird ourselves for the main event: the November Midterms. Let’s remember the wise words of the great Ronald Reagan:
“The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally – not a 20 percent traitor.”
Reagan understood that advancing our values of freedom, faith and family will never happen if we insist on candidates who agree with us 100% of the time and refuse to vote for candidates who stray from our views here and there. Our system of government is based on the rule of the majority. If we want to take back the majority in our statehouse and in Congress and stop the relentless destruction of our great nation being rapidly achieved by the Democrats, we must vote for the Republican candidate every time.
If we can win back the majority in the Colorado Statehouse, we can reclaim the sacredness of human life by repealing the Democrats’ barbaric law (HB22-1279) that allows the murder of a baby even as that precious soul is traveling through the birth canal and to the light. Every single Democrat voted yes on this horrific bill, while every Republican voted no, after a 25-hour floor fight during which Republicans tried unsuccessfully to convert Democrats to the value of life.
If we can win back the governor’s office, evil bills like this will be vetoed by Governor Ganahl rather than signed by Governor Polis.
Also on the family front, Democrats passed radical sex education laws that now have innocent children as young as toddler age questioning their gender and wondering if they were “born in the wrong body.” More and more youth are becoming “transgender” with puberty-blocking drugs and eventually surgeries that maim them for life. God’s assurance that He made us “male and female” is ignored and mocked.
Democrats are destroying families by pitting youth who have been captured by the LGBTQ agenda against their horrified parents; and teachers are even trained to conceal a child’s gender confusion from the parents. The Democrats have also defeated Republican bills to notify parents before their minor child’s abortion, Republican bills to opt their child out of destructive CRT in class, Republican bills to post school curriculum online so parents can see what their kids are taught, and many others. All of these strong family bills would have passed with a Republican majority, and the terrible bills would have been vetoed by Republican governor.
In decimating the Colorado energy industry, Democrats are forcing disadvantaged families deeper into poverty with astronomical gas prices. They’ve robbed workers of good-paying jobs that provide for their families.
The Democrats are also trying, bit by bit and bill by bill, to erase our God-given Second Amendment rights by legislating ever-tighter gun-control restrictions on what firearms a citizen can possess, and the magazine capacity for those firearms. In every murderous dictatorship around the globe, from Hitler’s Germany to Mao’s China and Putin’s Russia and Iran, the citizens were deprived of self-defense before being deprived of their rights and their lives.
With the very survival of our nation at stake, being a one-issue voter is not a good strategy for taking back our state and our nation for our foundational Christian belief system. This is the long game and the long game is all about the Big Picture. It took the radical Democrats decades to transform America from a strong, compassionate, God-fearing nation to an unrecognizable disaster where our rulers care more about pronouns than they do about millions of illegals destroying our sovereignty, the crippling of our military, or about the terrible hardships they are creating for millions of Americans.
To uphold the values of faith, freedom and family that are mandated by our Lord, we must act boldly and without caring about criticism or reprisal. The first step is to go to your county party’s website and sign up there to help promote Republican candidates, locally in your area, as well as statewide. There are many jobs, and you have been equipped by God with the talents to take on some of them. Election Integrity may be one of your primary concerns; you can also sign up at your county party website to be an election judge, or a poll-watcher. And be sure to check out the candidates’ websites where you will find their views on the issues, volunteer for their campaigns, and donate to help them win.
Beware Democrats who pose in the upcoming election as “moderates” and “bipartisan” because they know, and the stunningly negative polls show, that their radical-left destructive agendas are resoundingly rejected by the American people. Once elected, they will vote 100% with their fellow Democrats in a complete reversal of the positions they ran on. That’s what they do. But even Republicans whose views may differ substantially from yours on important issues can be convinced by party leadership and party loyalty to vote the right way with their more conservative Republican colleagues. That’s why any Republican is a better choice than any Democrat. Again, it’s a numbers game.
All the Republicans running are just volunteers, ordinary people like all of us. They are willing to literally risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to save our state and our nation from the tyrants’ oppressive control – just as the founders vowed to do in the Declaration of Independence. Let’s honor them by stepping up to help.
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado based journalist and author who has written for Townhall, American Thinker, The Washington Times, The Federalist, the Daily Caller, and others. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter @joyoverbeck1.