DeLay laughs when she hears some of the more extreme predictions about the amendment's potential effects. "Ask them where they get their crystal ball," she says. "They're assuming that [the law would impact child abuse laws]. That's up for the courts to decide."
Indeed, the only thing that both the opponents and proponents of the Parental Rights Amendment agree on is that if it passes, judges across the state will be kept very, very busy. As proponent Tom Tancredo of the Independence Institute puts it, "The reality is that almost everything [in the amendment] will have to be adjudicated."
Surprisingly, the prospect of a litigious tidal wave pleases the amendment's conservative supporters. "If we're in court for the rest of our lives, thank goodness," DeLay says. "Then we will have done our job. People litigate the First Amendment every day--that doesn't mean there's something wrong with it. We're not here to decide what parents can or cannot do. If it's litigated from day to day, we've done our job."
"Call it the lawyer's full-employment act," says Katie Reinisch, public affairs director for Colorado Planned Parenthood. "Don't call it the Parental Rights Amendment when it won't do anything to guarantee the rights that are already there. If this passes, then every time a teenager walks into our clinic to seek information or birth control, will we need to call her parents? If she can't get information or birth control from us, that doesn't mean she won't have sex; it just means she won't be able to protect herself from diseases or pregnancy."
And Reinisch envisions other potential legal points the courts will be left to sort out. "If a teen runs away from home and ends up at a shelter at Urban Peak, does this mean her potentially abusive parents will be notified?" she asks. "When a teen goes to a community center for gay and lesbian counseling, will they have to call his parents?" Reinisch pauses for a moment. "We see parents who bring their teenagers into the clinic and say, `Give my child an abortion,' and the teen would rather carry to term," she says. "We see that just as frequently as we see it the other way around. Does this amendment mean we must give the teen an abortion over her objections?"
DeLay needs to get about 54,000 valid signatures in order to get the amendment on the ballot. But her group can't start collecting those signatures until it has successfully steered the amendment through the state's ballot title process, which is designed to ensure that the ballot accurately represents the initiative to voters. The first hearing in that process, held in early November, resulted in the approval of DeLay's group's original language by an oversight panel headed by Secretary of State Buckley.
But the results of that hearing were appealed just two days later. Katie Reinisch, Lewis L. Kelley, executive director of the Colorado Coalition for the Protection of Children, and Dr. James Allen McGregor, an epidemiologist and adolescent health expert at the University of Colorado's Health Sciences Center, filed for a rehearing based on three issues. Their appeal argues that the proposed amendment violates Colorado's single-subject ballot law; that the explanation of the amendment fails to express correctly and fairly the meaning and true intent of the law; and, finally, that the fiscal impact statement doesn't provide sufficient detail. "We're prepared to take it all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to," says Reinisch.
But DeLay is anything but worried. "We will gather plenty of signatures; we will pass the quota for valid signatures, therefore putting it onto the 1996 ballot, and it should win with a high majority," she says confidently.
Denver political analyst and pollster Floyd Ciruli takes a more cautious view of the amendment's future. "This will be a pretty serious debate with a lot of people in the middle," he predicts. "The liberals will engage and say this is a back-door effort to make sex education illegal. Conservatives will say no, this is about parental versus government rights."
In addition, says Ciruli, Colorado voters traditionally have been leery about ballot initiatives that on their face appear innocuous. "During the last election, there was an individual who put on the ballot an initiative related to welfare," Ciruli says. "On its surface it was also appealing, [requiring that] biological parents refund state medical assistance payments as an inhibitor to children having babies. But it lost."
Passage of a parental rights amendment is "not a foregone conclusion, that's for sure," Ciruli concludes. "It depends who lines up on what side. It's going to be a big battle."
And it's a battle John Spearing is more than willing to fight to the bitter end. "We don't want the clinics, social workers or anything like that" in schools, he says. "I may be accused of having a self-serving agenda, but that's okay. I'm not ashamed of it.
