The Post editorial:
Political protesters tarnished their cause by harassing U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado at his home.
On New Year’s Eve, political protesters tarnished their reputation and their cause by harassing a U.S. senator and his family at their home.
Colorado’s junior senator, Cory Gardner, brought in the new year with his wife and three young children — ages 3 to 14 — in their rural Yuma home, and activists gathered outside shouting and creating a spectacle that alarmed the family and neighbors.
As 9News’ Marshall Zelinger reported, one protester even went to the front door at a late hour and rang the bell repeatedly. Some lights along the residence’s sidewalks were broken.
Law enforcement came out, not to stop the demonstration, but to ensure that at least basic laws concerning the private property rights of homeowners in the community were followed.
The small group of activists were led by some of the same wheelchair-bound protesters who occupied Gardner’s Denver offices for several days last summer. The goal of the Coloradoborn ADAPT activists at that time was to protest changes to Medicaid funding during the Republicans’ failed effort to gut Obamacare. Now they are pressing Gardner to support a Senate bill meant to prohibit discrimination against those with disabilities.
Most considered ADAPT’s Obamacare protests a brilliant stroke, but realists must admit it was also politics of the bareknuckled and vicious variety. We faulted Gardner then for not directly talking to the group one final time before deciding to have them arrested. But the activists weren’t without their fair share of fault in the events that led to the arrest of several protesters. They shut down access for other constituents at the office, greatly inconvenienced other building tenants, forced staff to work night and day to care for them and created unhealthy and disgusting conditions all around.
This most recent protest isn’t a hard call. We cannot condone the kind of treatment ADAPT handed Gardner and his family New Year’s Eve. Elected officials and high-level appointees understand that one of their responsibilities is to endure activist theatrics as part of the package deal of meeting with constituents and the public. Fair enough. Yet government officials and their families are also human beings, deserving of the same respect activists must expect for themselves.
Gardner isn’t the only target for this kind of harassment. Antifracking protesters targeted Boulder County commissioners at their homes this spring. Unknown protesters gathered outside former Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey’s home in 2015.
We hope this isn’t a growing trend, but fear that it is fast becoming one. How can such exploits be justified in a civil society? Such antics only further corrode the diminishing state of our public discourse.
Targeting officials at their homes is antithetical to any hope of sending and keeping thoughtful and decent people to represent us in our government, from school boards to city halls to Congress and the White House.
Do we really want a society led by only those hardhearted or mean enough not to care?
Charity begins at home. Our system offers plenty of avenues for creative and hard-fought protests in the public sphere, including the senator’s offices. Activists should let families be families. The members of The Denver Post’s editorial board are William Dean Singleton, chairman; Mac Tully, CEO and publisher; Chuck Plunkett, editor of the editorial pages; Megan Schrader, editorial writer; and Cohen Peart, opinion editor.