Kent Lambert, a Republican state senator from Colorado Springs, has offered up a valuable lesson in how not to learn from your mistakes.
It wasn’t his mistake, actually. It was Ken Buck’s mistake. And it was a mistake for which the entire Republican Party would suffer grievously.
I’m talking, of course, about Buck’s assertion on “Meet the Press” that being gay is “a choice.” And, as you’ll recall, Buck then quickly moved into major-gaffe territory by likening homosexuality to alcoholism.
At that moment, the Buck-as-extremist argument didn’t sound quite so extreme. And given that Buck lost his bid to unseat Sen. Michael Bennet by less than a percentage point, you’d have to say that as mistakes go, this was a fairly monumental one.
I don’t know how Buck managed to get himself involved in the old and dated gay-lifestyle-choice argument. But for Lambert, it was easy enough.
It began, as it so often does these days, with a tweet. This tweet was about John Hickenlooper’s own gaffe — his “backwards thinking” quote about attitudes of some in the rural West toward gays.
Lambert was outraged. And like many people, when Lambert is outraged, he tweets — in this case about Hickenlooper’s quote and “homosexuals in Denver.”
And in explaining his Twitter feed, Lambert not only brought back the choice argument — he would call it “chosen behavior” — but it would be laid at the feet of two gay colleagues who will serve with him on the Joint Budget Committee. This is how mistakes are made and remade.
Rep. Mark Ferrandino, a Denver Democrat, is one of the two. Democratic Sen. Pat Steadman, also of Denver, is the other.
“I don’t really care too much what they do,” Lambert told Denver Post reporter Tim Hoover. “I think that’s a chosen behavior they have that I don’t agree with.”
Lambert took it further, of course, bringing in the so-called “gay and lesbian agenda.” It seems that gays and lesbians always have an agenda. I’m not sure what straight people have, but it must be something else.
And there must be something else to explain why Republicans, who just took back the House, want to go there. It wasn’t so long ago when then-Rep. Jim Welker was comparing gay marriage to people marrying horses. This is how legislative bodies are lost and re-lost.
And so I call Ferrandino, who says he gets along well with Lambert — they served on the JBC together last year — and expects to get along well with him this year, even as they face another round of budget woes.
“It’s just something we don’t discuss,” he says, laughing, of their differences on gays.
Lambert says he called Ferrandino and that they had a “good laugh about it.” But Ferrandino says words like “chosen behavior” are not funny.
“When gay people hear that, the response you usually hear is, ‘When did you decide to be straight?’ ” Ferrandino says. “Nobody wakes up one day and decides this is the day he’ll like girls.”
The “choice” word is a loaded one, with loaded meaning. It’s a word Lambert chooses to use. If being gay is not a choice, of course, all the arguments against gay rights fall apart.
“People have choices to make in their lives,” says Lambert. “There are different codes as to how people live their lives. I don’t think it’s accurate to say it’s predetermined.
“What about people who make the choice not to be gay? They’re in various kinds of relationships and say, ‘I’m not going to do that anymore.’ Isn’t that discrimination against them?”
Discrimination? Really? You can see where the argument is going — or not going.
This story began when Hickenlooper was asked on camera why Denver was the proper site for the Matthew Shepard Foundation. Shepard was, of course, the gay student killed in Wyoming.
“We have some of the same, you know, kinds of backwards thinking in the kind of rural western areas you see in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico,” Hickenlooper said. He then pointed out that Denver had a robust gay community.
Obviously, Hickenlooper could have used some help on his wording. There is backward — and forward — thinking in all parts of Colorado and everywhere else.
Ferrandino knows this. He knows about gay kids being bullied — and not just here. He knows about being bullied himself as a kid in New York, although it was not for being gay but as a special-education student with reading problems.
Eventually he told his family he was gay. When he told them he was moving to Colorado, his father’s biggest worry was that he was moving to the Colorado of Amendment 2 — which would have banned laws protecting gays from discrimination. That was long ago, of course. And it was long ago overturned.
“I told him how much things had changed in Colorado,” says Ferrandino. “Colorado is one of the most progressive states now. To think where we’ve come since Amendment 2, it’s just remarkable.”
You could say that most of us have chosen to learn from our mistakes.
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
