Welcome to Colorado, the Mississippi of the West.

My, my, my. The elections are over and we have managed to position our state so others can view it as a backward, repressive, intolerant place to live. I hope the people who were responsible for this are happy. We managed not only to pass a law defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, we stuck it in our constitution to make sure it glaringly makes its point with a sense of permanence about how intolerant we are.

We also decided to not let same sex couples have some of the same rights as other couples. From what I read, most of the people who were responsible for these shameful acts belong to some narrow-minded groups that are headquartered in Colorado Springs. If that's the case, it's too bad we can't trade cities the way we trade players on sports teams. I'd trade Colorado Springs for Fargo and Tucson and a suburb to be named later.

If this small group of bigots continues to have its way, it probably won't be long before we will be removing evolution from school curriculums and replacing it with some hazy theory that says the world magically appeared a few thousand years ago. Maybe these people will remove all science from the schools. That would be interesting. It would certainly assure that we fall even further behind in educating our children.

Speaking of education, we sure shine in that area, don't we? What have we got now, a 30 to 50 % high school dropout rate? Does that include all the young women in rural areas of Colorado who aren't finishing school because they are having children they can ill afford because narrow-minded adults don't allow them adequate sex education. Who knows how these people would treat women if they could have their way? I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted them reduced to chattel. They certainly wouldn't want them to be educated or be independent in any way. Maybe they'd like to bring back foot binding or some other past indignities that were forced on women to keep them in their place.

Considering how dismal our neighboring states are as far as competition, Colorado should be the absolute hands down winner for anyone wanting to move a company or establish a business. Yet, every chance we get, we shoot ourselves in the foot. For a state that is supposed to have a highly educated populace, how do we manage to hurt ourselves so often and come across as so stupid? Utah manages to bring in high tech enterprises. New Mexico gets loads of film business. What do we get? We get companies taking their business out of the state. Would you bring a company to a place that publicly shows itself to be so prejudiced and backward? Would you bring your business to a state that can't provide an educated work force? Do you want your employees to have to live in communities that are so repressive that they want a sculpture that features nude figures removed from public display?

Too much of the publicity about Colorado shows us as intolerant and stupid. We come across like satirical characters created by Jonathon Swift or maybe Sinclair Lewis's "Babbitt" carried forward to the 21 st century.

We make a mockery of the arts when we refuse to have "Plainsong" a homegrown novel as our one book to read because it may offend some people and replace it with a worn out book whose story doesn't even deal with Colorado.

I'm sick of these people pushing their bigoted, repressive agenda on the rest of us and making Colorado look bad. I know many people who would agree with me but they don't want to come across as being politically incorrect or seen as intolerant themselves. Well, it's time to stop being so passive. It's time to speak out against these people and turn Colorado into a state that embraces diversity, truly respects education, honors the arts and stands tall among the western states as a leader, a forward thinking, high-minded state that people in other places will wish to emulate. Colorado, "cowboy up" and get it done.