June 05, 2015 10:48 AM UTC

Ellen Roberts' Self-Immolation Continues

• 8 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Planned Parenthood Votes Colorado slams Ellen Roberts in a new statement:

“Sen. Roberts’ positions and votes on choice issues over the last few years have been erratic at times – even opposing teen pregnancy prevention and sex education programs. We no longer consider her to be pro-choice, and understand why she’s having a hard time defining her own ‘label.’ It’s been confusing for a lot of us,” said Cathy Alderman, VP of Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood Votes Colorado.

And NARAL Pro Choice Colorado:

“Unlike Sen. Roberts, Colorado voters know where they stand on Roe v Wade, without parsing or equivocation – they’ve said over and over again at the ballot box we are a pro-choice state. And at a time when abortion rights are under constant assault at the state and federal level, Colorado women need allies we can count on.

This isn’t a hypothetical discussion. Women in other states are facing the humiliation of mandatory ultrasounds and waiting periods. The US Senate is about to vote on a 20-week abortion ban, while in Colorado we saw an unprecedented 6 bills designed to limit a woman’s right to choose this year alone. By sponsoring a fetal personhood bill and voting against funding common sense programs like LARC for Colorado, which actually reduced the abortion rate, Ellen Roberts proves she can’t be trusted to stand up for pro-choice Coloradans, no matter what she says.”

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The Durango Herald’s Peter Marcus follows up our story yesterday about state Sen. Ellen Roberts’ interview with conservative radio host Dan Caplis this week, in which Roberts claimed she has “never” referred to herself as “pro-choice.” As we demonstrated yesterday with a 7 second video mashup (above), that was a really stupid thing for Ellen Roberts to say.

Confronted with the obvious question by the Herald, Roberts had no choice but to backpedal:

[H]er response offers fodder to Democrats and pro-choice advocates who have increased attacks on Roberts in recent weeks after The Durango Herald reported that Roberts was seriously considering a challenge to incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet in 2016 for the U.S. Senate seat. With Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman no longer considering the Senate seat, much of the focus has turned to Roberts.

When asked by the Herald about her pro-choice talk show comment, Roberts said she did not offer an accurate answer.

“I would like to correct my statement from the ‘Dan Caplis Show’ in that I spoke in error when I was on the radio show the other day and said I never described myself as pro-choice,” Roberts said.

“I would like it out there that I made a mistake,” she said. “I should not have used that word ‘never,’ and it’s been a continual learning curve to me in terms of how the labels are attached to people.” [Pols emphasis]

A…”learning curve?” As sagely columnist Mike Littwin at the Colorado Independent writes today, that’s not really the problem:

The problem is that she has said many times she was pro-choice. And it wasn’t long before Colorado Pols had the video of her on the floor of the state Senate saying she was “pro-choice.” The fact is, she has said, adamantly and repeatedly, she is pro-choice. She might as well have said she never claimed to have two feet.

So why did she lie? That’s easy: Because she didn’t know what else to say. She had voted for the fetal-homicide/personhood bill in the state Senate this year to try to make the problem go away. We saw how that worked out. Her pro-choice allies dumped her, and all her anti-abortion foes were unswayed…

She didn’t just speak in error. She didn’t just make a mistake. She told a gigantic, easily provable whopper that she can never walk back. All politicians lie. No successful politician breaks the Pinocchio machine the first time out. [Pols emphasis]

This wasn’t the only problem Roberts created for herself during her interview with Dan Caplis. Her refusal to answer a simple question about whether Roe v. Wade was properly decided, saying that she would “try and answer in detail once I decided that I was getting into the race,” was inadequate to the point of being laughable. If she wasn’t prepared to answer such basic questions, she should never have agreed to this “friendly” interview.

As for lying about having called herself “pro-choice,” then attempting to back away from it with a tortured excuse about how telling the truth is a “learning curve?”

Amateur hour, folks. Ellen Roberts is not ready to run for the U.S. Senate.