Some of the teabagger candidates revel in it: Paul, Angle, O'Donnell, in the few occasions when their handlers let them out, let the freak flag fly. Colorado's Ken Buck, however, doesn't seem to be wholly comfortable with it. His flip-flops from teabagger to more mainstream positions are piling up. Here's another, on Colorado's "personhood" amendment, the extreme anti-choice effort to legally enshrine fertilized eggs human beings in the state's constitution. Although this one is more of a flip-flop-flip.
U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck (R-Colorado) says he is "not taking positions on any of the state amendments." This comes after an earlier backing and then, reversal, of his stand on Amendment 62, the so-called Personhood Amendment that voters will decide in November.
Monday night, at a forum sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council and the National Council of Jewish Women, Buck answered a question about whether government should be in the business of enforcing laws that criminalize abortions. Supporters say the amendment would make abortion illegal in Colorado.
"I am pro-life and I believe that life begins at conception," he said. "We should do everything we can in this country to promote life."
"I'm dealing with an issue that's out there right now; I am not taking positions on any of the state amendments," he said.
During his August primary campaign against Jane Norton, Buck filled out a survey for the Christian Family Alliance of Colorado stating that he supported Amendment 62 which voters will decide this fall.
Amendment 62, beyond being scientifically unsound, is extremely dangerous for women and extremely dangerous for blasting open the fight the forced-birth contingent has been itching for--criminalizing contraception. Many forms of birth control don't prevent fertilization, but prevent a fertilized egg from implanting, and they would be illegal in Colorado under this amendment, as would emergency contraception, treatment for miscarriages, tubal pregnancies, some cancers, and even infertility treatments. That's what happens when you let zealots try to legislate.
By all accounts, Ken Buck is one such zealot. Which we already knew:
I am pro-life, and I’ll answer the next question. I don’t believe in the exceptions of rape or incest. I believe that the only exception, I guess, is life of the mother. And that is only if it’s truly life of the mother.
To me, you can’t say you’re pro-life and say — if there is, and it’s a very rare situation where one life would have to cease for the other life to exist. But in that very rare situation, we may have to take the life of the child to save the life of the mother.
In that rare situation, I am in favor of that exception. But other than that I have no exceptions in my position.
But he's still trying to convince Colorado that he's not.