What would you do if you found out that a congressman’s wife had written a series of romance novels? Would you read them? And what would you do, hypothetically, if you read one of them, and found it not only creatively lacking but surprisingly racist? You can answer those questions for yourself; I discovered my own answers last week.
Around 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, June 14, a man dressed as a police officer knocked on the door of a home in New Hope, Minnesota. When the inhabitants, a married couple in their 50s, opened the door, he shot them to death. His target was the woman, Democratic Speaker Emerita of the state House of Representatives, Melissa Hortman. An hour earlier, the killer had shot another couple, that time targeting the man, Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman. In the killer’s car, police later found a target list including information on other Democratic lawmakers, abortion rights activists, and a Planned Parenthood clinic.
Millions of us took to the streets last Saturday to participate in more than 2,000 local protests under the unified banner of a foundational American principle: No Kings. From international hubs like New York to tiny towns like Genesee, Colorado, following on the heels of the protests against Immigration & Customs Enforcement actions in L.A., Americans of all ages gathered together to protest Donald Trump.
A good woman passed away last week. Ruth Eggenburger was 93 years-old when she departed this world from a Texarkana hospice. Right until the end, she never let anyone tell her what she couldn’t do — especially if their reason was that she was a woman. In fact, they’d be lucky to live long after such a suggestion.
Last month, supporters of a would-be charter school made their case to the Montrose County School Board, hoping to receive an official charter which would allow it to open in the district. The meeting on May 20 was not the first time the leaders of Montrose Classical Academy sat before the county school board to discuss their charter application: this whole saga played out last year as well, and ended with the school board rejecting the classical school’s charter application.
Andrew Wommack has not been shy about his desire to take over Woodland Park, the small Teller County town where his global ministry has its headquarters. Ever since the prosperity gospel minister exhorted his followers to conquer the town in 2021, they have been working to do so. First, they took control of the local school board. Then they came for the city council. Now, a year after the conquering ministry’s first attempt to control the council was beaten back, forces aligned with Andrew Wommack Ministries and Charis Bible College are once again working to reshape the town’s local government, this time through recall elections.
About ten years ago, when I was working in the Colorado legislature, one of my brothers made an observation. “All of the craziest people in the country are state legislators,” he said. He didn’t mean that all state legislators are crazy, or that all crazy people are state legislators, but that each legislature has among its ranks a handful of its state’s craziest citizens. In my ongoing work with state legislatures around the country, I’m reminded of the quip at least once a week – because it turns out my brother was right.
I want you to imagine for a moment that you’re back in high school. You were a child pretty recently and you’ll be an adult pretty soon, but for now, things are weird. Your body and brain are both changing, you smell weird sometimes. You’re in the years-long process of both creation and discovery, carving your own identity out of a formless block of stone, trying to separate what you really like from what you think it would be cool to be seen as liking. Sometimes, you worry that all of your friends might secretly hate you, or that you’re ugly, or that you’re the only one who occasionally smells weird.
This Monday marked the 80th anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s last journey: from a village on the shores of Lake Como, where he had been held since his capture the day before, to a farmhouse a little ways to the north, where partisans positioned him in front of a wall and executed him by gunfire. When Adolf Hitler took his own life in a Berlin bunker two days later, it became clear that the first fascist era had come to a sudden, bloody, and well-deserved end.
Last week, dozens of Colorado school board members and administrators issued an open letter to the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA), making what they called “an urgent and resolute demand” that the organization “immediately adopt rules” to ban trans-identifying teens from participating in high school athletics in Colorado. Signed by 80 signatories representing 14 public school districts, ten charter schools, and one BOCES (Board of Cooperative Educational Services), the letter references President Trump’s February 5 Executive Order, “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” and suggests that CHSAA will be subject to federal investigation if it does not comply with the letter’s demands.
