One Colorado Talks Priority Bills Ahead of LGBTQ Lobby Day

One Colorado is back for their 2022 LGBTQ Lobby Day this Monday, March 14. LGBTQ Lobby Day ensures Colorado elected officials hear from community members about the most pressing legislation this session.

For this legislative session, One Colorado has two priority bills—HB 22-1153, “The Family Affirmation Act,” and HB 22-1267, the “Culturally Relevant Training Healthcare Professionals”—according to Development and Communications Manager Mikayla Rogers.

The Family Affirmation Act removes barriers from the adoption process for families who conceive using assisted reproductive technology (ART), ensures all parents have an equal opportunity to build a family, and ensures all children benefit from the security of legal parentage recognized nationwide.

“For many families who use ART, parents have to adopt their own child, undergoing home visits, court appearances, and criminal record checks, to confirm their parent-child relationship,” Rogers writes in an email to OFM. “Parenting should not be exponentially more expensive and time-consuming for LGBTQ and other non-traditional families. Even still, parents who do decide to go through the above outlined, current confirmatory adoption process are being denied by Colorado courts. This is not equality.”

The Culturally Relevant Healthcare Training Act creates a grant program to fund the development of culturally relevant and affirming healthcare training programs for healthcare providers. Those programs will be developed by approved nonprofits with a focus on providing care to priority populations, identified in the 2020 Statewide Behavioral Health Needs Assessment. These include LGBTQ people, racial and ethnic minorities, veterans, individuals experiencing homelessness or insecure housing, and people with complex behavioral health needs.

In addition to the two priority bills, Rogers says that One Colorado has their eyes on a number of other bills this session:

HB 22-1279, the “Reproductive Health Equity Act” or RHEA, affirms that reproductive rights are fundamental and asserts that everyone has the right to give birth or get an abortion. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, this bill would codify reproductive health protections into Colorado state law.

“The attacks on abortion intersect with LGBTQ health in very clear, direct ways,” Rogers says. “Should Roe be overturned, we know Supreme Court Justices have expressed doubts about LGBTQ rights, and their attention would be redirected towards our movement. Further, as states move anti-LGBTQ legislation, both providers and parents are the target of providing gender-affirming care, and the medications associated with transition and more.”

HB 22-1064, the “Tobacco Flavor Ban,” ends the sale of all flavored tobacco products in Colorado. Rogers notes that big tobacco uses flavored products to lure in children and get them hooked. She adds that these products not only fuel the youth nicotine addiction crisis in Colorado, but they also disproportionately affect LGBTQ folks and people of color.

HB 22-1157, “Fairness in Data Collection,” creates a data advisory committee under the Health Equity Commission to provide guidance and recommendations on how sexual orientation and gender identity, race, ethnicity, and disability data should be collected. Once the plan is established, providers report this information to the CDPHE, which will then be required to include in strategic plans and reports on public health conditions in Colorado.

One Colorado’s 2022 LGBTQ Lobby Day begins at the First Baptist Church of Denver on Monday, March 14 at 8 a.m., with breakfast and the day’s first training. From there, attendees will make their way in groups to the Capitol, where they will lobby legislators for the afternoon. Finally, they will reconvene at the church for lunch to close out the day.

For folks who can’t make it, Rogers says, “It takes less than two minutes to reach out to your legislators by taking the action alerts for HB22-1153 and HB22-1267.” (The action alert webpages for each bill are hyperlinked.)

Rogers adds, “If you have personal experience with either of these issues and would like to testify, you can reach out to us at info@one-colorado.org.”

One Colorado Executive Director Nadine Bridges also offered some parting words for Coloradans looking ahead at this session and beyond:

“We need our community to show up this legislative session, to vote in November, and beyond. This is a movement, and movements take numbers. The reason we’re seeing pro-equality legislation introduced in Colorado instead of the hateful anti-LGBTQ bills like the rest of the country is because we turned out to vote in record numbers. We elected a strong pro-equality majority into office, and they are out there fighting for us. We need to stay engaged, aware, and diligent as November approaches. We’ll have tight races across the state, and One Colorado will be hard at work to make sure that the voices of the LGBTQ community, especially the most vulnerable among us, are heard.”

Click here to sign up for 2022 LGBTQ Lobby Day.

Photo courtesy of One Colorado