Cory Gardner…The Far Right's Very Own Champion Of Free Sex?

Cory Gardner has never tried to sell himself as anything but a hard core right-wing ideologue. His district, CO-04 is the eastern third of the state, most of it the part that wants to secede. It's 91% white and very, very Republican. The R+11 district gave Romney a 210,019 (59%) to 140,855 (39%) victory over Obama-- even while Obama was winning the whole state, 51-46%. As we explained last month, Gardner never had any reason to paint himself as a moderate or even a mainstream Republican. His reputation is hard right. Part of the deal to get him the Republican Senate nomination this year was to give lunatic fringe teabagger Ken Buck the congressional district. The crackpots who live there have no problem with that and the DCCC isn't contesting the seat or backing the local Democrat who's running against Buck.

If Gardner has been known for one thing, it's been his fanaticism when it comes to opposing women's Choice. His ProgressivePunch lifetime vote score on abortion is ZERO and his ProgressivePunch lifetime vote score on availability of contraception is also ZERO. In the eyes of the fanatic anti-Choice fringe, you don't get any better than two fat zeroes. Well, one thing was better… he was a sponsor of a so-called personhood amendment, the most radical right anti-Choice move short of bombing a clinic or murdering an abortion doctor. Gardner wanted to give fertilized eggs the same rights as people. That even failed in Mississippi! That didn't stop Gardner from co-sponsoring legislation in Congress to make it the law for the entire country.

But now Gardner is running not among a bunch of lunatics in the High Plains who listen to Fox, Hannity, Limbaugh and religionist claptrap all day, but in his first statewide election, in a state that has been trending away from extremists like himself. So he tossed aside the whole Personhood thing, claiming, incongruously, that he never really understood what it meant. Oh, and when the voters voted on Gardner's Personhood Amendment in 2010, it lost 71-29%. Many on the far right see him as a flip-flopper and worse. But worse was yet to come-- for them. See that ad up top? It's the new avatar of free love, Cory Gardner. He's trying to woo the women of Colorado as their champion.

Yesterday, trailing Democrat Mark Udall, Gardner released that bizarre new ad embracing the pill. Will anyone believe it? Will he get tarred as an opportunist? How much damage will it do him on his right flank? The Denevr Post ran the ad-- along with a press release from Udall's campaign:

Congressman Gardner today released a jaw-dropping ad in which he claims he wants to expand access to birth control, despite still supporting a bill to ban it. Gardner is a cosponsor of the Life at Conception Act, the federal Personhood bill that would ban common forms of birth control in addition to outlawing abortion nationwide.

“Congressman Gardner will do anything to hide his backwards agenda from Colorado women,” said Udall for Colorado spokesperson Kristin Lynch. “The undeniable fact is Gardner continues to push radical, anti-woman measures that would ban common forms of birth control. One 30-second ad doesn’t make up for that.”

FactCheck.org, PersonhoodUSA, and Planned Parenthood have all weighed in and confirmed that Gardner’s bill in Congress is the same as the statewide ballot measures that Coloradans twice rejected by overwhelming margins.

Just keep in mind if you're trying to sort this out in your mind and trying to figure out what Cory Gardner really stands for, if his bill were to ever pass, a doctor performing an abortion on a woman who was raped could face a harsher sentence than the rapist. That's the twisted Republican position that has turned Cory Gardner into a pretzel.