Political minorities must be protected, whether you like them or not.

Freedom Unaffiliated

Political minorities must be protected, whether you like them or not.

By Jon Caldara

Hunters are deviant perverts.

Men convinced they’re women are to be celebrated.

The left works hard to make the bizarre mainstream. The transgender movement is a shining example of just how good they are at it. Ya know, if only you’d learn about all 64 genders and the associated newspeak, you’d understand.

You’d learn transsexuals, cross-dressers and transgendered re-creating “The Last Supper” is loving artistic interpretation. Men punching the hell out of women, once called domestic abuse, is now an Olympic boxing event. Celebrate it or be canceled.

If you get anything from my ramblings over the years, I hope it’s that proper investments in cultural change ultimately create political change, not the other way around. Politics is the lagging indicator of culture.

The right in Colorado lost, and will continue to lose, because they spend almost no money on political culture and infrastructure (the boring stuff). Instead, they just spent a decade and a half funding political “Hail Mary” passes like candidates de jour and unwinnable initiatives.

We’ll continue to pay the price this fall as voters will likely pass a ban on so-called trophy hunting.

First, let’s recognize the public choice theory problem. There was a time when more than 40% of Americans smoked. They would have never passed tobacco taxes or smoking bans. But now about 11% of Americans smoke. The culture changed. So, the 89% who don’t smoke are happy to tax and ban tobacco.

Smokers of today are treated with the disregard of the LGBTQIA+ communities of the past.

Before the explosion of the urban and suburban elite, most families in Colorado were familiar with, if not participating in, the rural lifestyle. They never would have voted to import violent wolves to kill livestock and our food supply. But the new urbanites who buy their steaks wrapped in plastic are now happy to let farmers’ pets become wolf chow.

Likewise, most families in Colorado understood, if not participated in, hunting. But hunting has gone the way of tobacco use.

In a recent memo, Colorado Parks and Wildlife Director Jeff Davis wrote, “In 2023, total rifle license sales for elk have declined to about 126,000 or -80,000 fewer licenses than in the early 2000s. This decline in license sales is not indicative of a declining elk population.”

So, though Colorado’s population has grown by a third since the early 2000s, hunting has dropped by about 45%.

Consequently, while Coloradans want to protect the LGBTQIA+ lifestyle, they have no sympathy for tobacco smokers, hunters or gun owners — all constituency groups that have learned nothing from the success of the gay movement.

What was a diffused but large constituency of hunters is now a minority special interest. And like those in the fossil fuel industry, they never took the threat to their existence seriously.

If they invested in cultural change, selling and celebrating the hunting lifestyle to the millions who came to Colorado in the last two decades, no one would dream of trying to vote away their lifestyle.

When concentrated minority special interests work to change culture, they can. The gay movement did just that. Only 5% of the population is said to be gay, yet we have a Pride Month where businesses out-gay each other for customers. Double that, 11% of the population, are smokers, but there ain’t no Smokers’ Pride Month. Instead, everyday is “Treat Smokers Like Lepers Day.”

Mothers Against Drunk Driving is another concentrated minority interest that changed culture, which then changed the laws. There was a time when driving drunk was so accepted people joked about their own drunken driving. Thankfully that’s no longer the case.

I’ve rarely hunted pheasant and doves, nothing larger. But I have learned a lot about hunters. And, just as gays were falsely stereotyped as perverts, hunters are falsely stereotyped as cruel.

I’ve never known a group of people more committed to environmental stewardship than hunters. They provide an essential service making sure different herds stay in balance. Hunting licenses are issued by the experts in Colorado Parks and Wildlife only for game that needs to be thinned.

If you love Colorado’s wildlife, thank a hunter, even those who hunt the mountain lions the state says need to go. And if you think political minorities, like the LGBTQIA+, deserve protection, apply the same logic to political minorities you don’t like.