I’ll say it again: Progressives care about consensual relationships only when people are naked.
I promised you an update on a simple customer transparency bill in the legislature which would allow, not require, hospitals to include the hospital provider fee (a bed tax on your hospital stay) on the invoice they send you.
Keep in mind this is the same legislature that works to force hospitals to publicly post the prices they charge for medical services, to force them to be transparent to their customers.
So, in that spirit, the legislature would surely want those same patients to know about the costs the legislature forced on their hospital bill.
Well, that’s what Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg bravely argued in front of the “kill” committee. His simple bill would give hospitals at least the option to be transparent.
The Democratic majority on the committee euthanized his bill with extreme prejudice, Seal Team 6 style. There were no questions to the witnesses, no stated reasons for their votes, no discussion at all — just a fast bullet to transparency’s head.
Sens. Julie Gonzales, James Coleman and Sonya Jaquez Lewis did their party’s dirty work and proved how this Democratic majority feels about transparency, taxpayers and the hospitalized.
This is just another example of the hubris from the left under our Gold Dome. It seems they are gleefully willing to wade into every part of our lives, keeping information from us that they prefer we don’t know — like stealth taxes. Their motto for the state is, “we know how you should live.” I mean, right down to how you order a hamburger.
Rep. Brianna Titone’s kitchen drawer has too many ketchup packets for the representative’s liking.
Instead of cleaning out that drawer and asking the teenager at Chick-fil-A to hold the barbecue sauce packet next time, Brianna is going to empty out all such drawers in all of Colorado — at gunpoint.
The representative’s solution not only restricts consensual relationships, but it’s another tiny step in the coerced-speech progressives love to ma
ndate.
House Bill 1134 bans restaurants and food delivery services (like Uber Eats, which Titone and Team Tyranny taxed last session with another tax called a “fee”) from giving you a packet of ketchup, unless you affirmatively, expressly, on the official record request said ketchup packet.
Is this really the state of our command-and-control legislature? Ketchup packets? Regulating the speech and activity between you and the McDonald’s cashier?
The left promotes the image of victimhood in all aspects of life, right down to the oppressive hamburger flipper forcing a packet of honey-mustard sauce on you against your will.
If only you had the empowerment to say, “Dude, hold the ketchup packet please.” Sadly, the oppressed classes haven’t that power.
Given the systematic racism and misogyny of Colorado, only white men are empowered to direct condiments away from their Taco Bell order. Brianna’s bill is the social justice needed to bring condiment equality.
So, let me do what I constantly, and inappropriately, do — turn just about any subject into talking about sex (really, it’s a gift).
Progressives, over the scorn of social conservatives, fought for consensual adults to have the sexual freedom to do in their bedrooms what they wished.
If any group values the right of voluntary relationships it SHOULD be the woke majority in the state legislature.
Brianna Titone is the first transgender official in the Colorado legislature. So, I’m assuming here, and could be wrong, that the representative is supportive of consensual sexual relationships.
But when folks are clothed, that principle goes out the window.
Clothed relationships, say between employers and employees must be controlled and regulated, a la raising the minimum wage or the “equal pay” act — which made front-page Wall Street Journal national news for injuring remote workers in Colorado.
A clothed store owner can’t gift you a plastic bag. A clothed appliance repairman can’t fix your gas stove, and so on and so on.
It all leads to the obvious question: If the cashier at Arby’s is in a gay relationship with the guy buying a “2 for $6 special” for them to consume later in bed, and they both like Horsey Sauce, is it a crime for the cashier to slide in an extra packet without asking?
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
