Don’t Let Gabe Evans Fool You

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by Sara Loflin

Betrayal and broken promises. That’s the legacy of conservative politicians in Colorado like Gabe Evans who claimed to protect women and then became the prime movers in the wholesale destruction of rights that women have taken for granted for generations.

In 2014, another young conservative named Cory Gardner promised Colorado women that his career working to eliminate abortion rights wouldn’t pose a threat–on the assumption that he would be unable to ever make good on his throwback beliefs. The Denver Post called Gardner’s opponent’s dire warnings that abortion rights were in mortal danger a “tedious refrain.”

Ten years later, we know that was all a lie. In a single term in the U.S. Senate, Cory Gardner voted to appoint three conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justices who proceeded to repeal Roe v. Wade – casting deadly uncertainty upon women’s reproductive care and threatening to go further. Since the fall of Roe, almost two out of every five women between the ages of 15 and 44 live in states where abortion access is restricted or outright banned without exceptions. Meanwhile Colorado is fighting to enshrine abortion access into the state constitution to prepare for the future where the right to basic and fundamental reproductive care is no longer guaranteed.

In Colorado’s newest and most competitive congressional district, a new fast-talking conservative ideologue, Gabe Evans, is running for Congress attempting to unseat Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo, an unwavering champion for women’s and reproductive freedom. Evans is running a deceptive campaign on abortion rights straight out of the Cory Gardner playbook, made even more dangerous by the Project 2025/MAGA agenda Evans would vote into law if elected to Congress.

Gabe Evans has called a fundamental right to abortion “ridiculous” and proudly used to claim he is “as pro-life as they come.” Evans is a homeschooled religious zealot educated alongside Kristi Burton Brown, the infamous “poster child” for the numerous defeated “Personhood” abortion ban ballot measures who later became chairwoman of the Colorado Republican Party. Only as a candidate for Congress has Evans pretended to back off his strident record against abortion rights, now claiming to support exceptions for victims of rape and incest that he never bothered to take into consideration previously.

The old saying remains true: fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Gabe Evans expects Colorado women to believe the same lies Cory Gardner told us ten years ago, but now we have the benefit of experience to know when we’re being lied to. In Congress, if a bill to restrict abortion rights, end public education, protect Medicare or Medicaid, keep life-saving medication affordable comes to a vote, Gabe Evans will not stand in the way no matter what he tells us today. We know where Gabe Evans really stands on abortion rights because before he had an incentive to hide it, just like Cory Gardner, he made no effort to conceal it.

Even though Colorado voters have repeatedly upheld abortion rights in statewide votes as recently as 2020’s Proposition 115 which Evans preposterously claims he can’t remember how he voted on, the hard reality in the post-Roe world is that abortion rights are just one election away from being taken from us. The disaster of Cory Gardner is also a warning that we can never again allow ourselves to be deceived by fast-talking conservative hucksters like Gabe Evans with a hidden agenda.

After rejecting Donald Trump for a third time, keeping Gabe Evans out of Congress is the most important thing Coloradans can do in this election to protect our families, our rights, and our freedoms.

Sara Loflin is the Executive Director of ProgressNow Colorado and Mayor Pro Tem of Erie.