Faith, Policy, and the Role of the Catholic Conference

In this episode of the Straight-Up 30, host Ross Izard sits down with Brittany Vessely, Executive Director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, to discuss the intersection of faith, public policy, and civic engagement in Colorado.The conversation explores how the Catholic Conference represents the state’s bishops in policy debates, how Catholic social teaching shapes its work, and why faith-based organizations remain active in issues like education, religious liberty, parental rights, human trafficking, and the role of families in public life.

What we cover:
• What the Colorado Catholic Conference does
• How faith-based organizations engage in public policy
• Education, religious liberty, and parental rights
• The role of Catholic schools in Colorado
• How people of faith can get involved

About the guest:
Brittany Vessely is the Executive Director of the Colorado Catholic Conference. Her background includes work in education policy, religious liberty, school choice, and public policy at organizations including the Heritage Foundation, EdChoice, and Catholic Education Partners.

Resources:
• Colorado Catholic Conference

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Straight facts. Straight talk. Straight to the point.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Welcome to the straight up 30, where we make policy make sense in 30 minutes or less. I'm your host, Ross Izzard, and today we are here to talk about the wild world of faith-based politics with Colorado Catholic Conference Executive Director. Did I have that right?

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Brittany Vessely, who I've known for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

So thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

So, Brittany, maybe you could start by telling us a little bit about your background. Because you and I actually met before you were doing the Catholic conference, working on Catholic. Was it before you were Catholic?

unknown 0:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Maybe I okay. Well, I want to hear about that too. But maybe tell us about your experience up to now because you've been in the political world for a long time. I know this is your latest home and it's probably your wildest home, I would imagine. But it was an interesting path to get here.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Right. So I grew up in Arizona, went to Colorado Christian University, graduated, went out east to Philadelphia first to a fellowship at the John Jay Institute, and then to the Heritage Foundation in DC for a few years, where I focused primarily on education policy. And that's where we met first, was when I was at Heritage and came out. These are all think tanks, so policy wonk all the way through. My background is actually more in philosophy. So I'm finishing my master's right now in philosophy proper. Um, but yes, stayed in the think tank world, went from the Heritage Foundation to the Freeman Foundation for Education Choice, where I worked in several states to pass school choice policy, then became Ed Choice. And then I helped the U.S. Conference of Bishops launch their first uh national school choice nonprofit called Catholic Education Partners. And it was from there that I spent a couple of years focusing on religious liberty and the intersection of school choice policy and joined the Catholic Conference in 2020.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Okay, favorite political philosopher.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

If you had to be modern would be Leo Strauss. Arguably, Thomas Aquinas is my favorite political philosopher and philosopher in general.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Interesting. I when I finished grad school, I had to drop a lot of that stuff because it's like there's only so many times you can hear the phrase Kantian tripod before you're like, okay, I have to do something else. But that's that's interesting. And it's cool that you can apply it in a real world.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Yeah, and my thesis is on uh the scholastic influence on the American founding. So I'm still a huge Lincoln fan, was a Claremont fellow, and come out of that Straussian world.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Okay, so Brittany's pretty smart, is the point. And she has been applying that for a while in this space. Like you said, we got to know each other in the school choice universe for anybody who doesn't follow education politics, which it's kind of hard not to these days, to be honest. But we both cut our teeth in that world. And those school choice fights are uh they're ugly in a way that I think a lot of people don't fully understand. And they tend to go all the way from the local level up to the federal level, obviously a lot of scrum at the state level, and they sort of touch all these other things, right? So religious liberty, you mentioned, uh, free speech issues, other constitutional issues, regulatory issues, the idea of the proper role of government, which is a philosophical issue to some extent. And it's kind of interesting that you took all that experience that you had and ported it into now the Colorado Catholic Conference, where I would imagine all the different pieces of that Venn diagram are in play. But for folks who are not familiar with this, because I think, you know, there are people out there like, I don't know what any of this lobbying stuff is, and they probably don't have a very good sense of how faith-based organizations interface with American government and politics. Tell us a little bit about the conference. Like, what does it do? How does it fit into the ecosystem?

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Sure. So the Colorado Catholic Conference is the four conferen the four Catholic bishops of the state of Colorado. So each state has a Catholic conference, which are the bishops of that particular state, and then they have a team that execute the will of the bishops in government relations and public policy. So that's what we do as a Catholic conference. We're the only entity that represents all three dioceses in the state of Colorado in the will of all four bishops. And it's basically a smaller version of what the U.S. Conference of Bishops does in DC with the federal lobbying to U.S. Congress.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

And how does that work with individual parishes? So you've got the bishops, obviously, at the top. And the Catholic Church has been doing politics for a long time, right? It's one of the oldest political organizations.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

The spheres of sovereignty have always been there.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a real big thing. And so how does that work as far as you've got the bishops and then you have these sort of fairly widely varied Catholic communities all over the state? And it's your job is to translate that into a cohesive policy agenda that you can go out and advocate for, which I would imagine is in some cases kind of a challenge.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Yeah, sure. So um the the bishops represent the voice of over a million Catholics in the state of Colorado. So just in a practical lobbying standpoint, that's a huge voting block, is a million Catholic voices in our state that um are directed by the Catholic teaching of the church. So Catholic social teaching governs the priorities that the bishops have set for the Colorado Catholic Conference. And the intersection of faith and politics, as you said, has always been there. Um there's a line from Dr. Larry Arne that I always love that politics rightly understood is a study of human nature. And there are, again, spheres of sovereignty between the state and the church, which are both interested in the human person. So we're both aiming for what is the common good. Now, our definitions of what the common good might be different from the state, especially in the state of Colorado, versus Catholic social teaching, as we have many disputes on religious liberty and what the family is, on sanctity of life, especially those issues in our state. Um, but yes, the church has a direct interest in the good of the human person and the common good of all Coloradans in our state, not just the interest of the faithful.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

So talk to me a little bit about the agenda itself. So as far as how you pick your issues, which issues you're working on, uh, one of the things that I'm consistently surprised by is that you have in the lobbying and advocacy space, you have a lot of folks who are uh hyper-focused, right? Like these guys do early childhood and those guys do higher ed and these guys do transportation, and these guys do a certain type of energy and they're specialized, but you're kind of working on a whole bunch of stuff all the time, which keeps you really busy. I mean, I see your name come up almost constantly down there on a whole variety of issues. So talk to us a little bit about those issues and where you're engaged.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Sure. So the Catholic Conference took a position on 60 bills this session, and that crossed on both sides of the political aisle. We supported 40 bills. Many of those were Democrat sponsored, many of those were Republican sponsored, many of our opposition bills were the same. The Catholic Conference doesn't fit neatly into any political party. So I get calls from each side of the political aisle from our faithful in the parishes that are mad about this, that, and the other. And I always uh turn to them and I say, are you looking at this through the lens of your faith or through the lens of your politics? Because as a Catholic in the public sphere, we always need to start from the lens of our politics and understanding a proper role of the human person engaged in civic life, um, which is honestly the root of a lot of the disagreement that we have in the public sphere right now as well. And your first question to the parishes, I mean so the Catholic Church uh operates it's a magisterium. So they're kind of the bishops are kind of kings in their own little kingdoms. They're the top of the magisterium, and then you have pastors who have jurisdiction over their parishes, but their leadership is coming from the bishops, and above the bishops, you have the archbishops, the cardinals, and then we have our holy father in Rome. So there is a hierarchy here, very political in its nature as well, the Catholic Church. Um, so we deal with politics both in the church as well as within state and federal government.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

At the same time, though, I mean, you're having to take, and we've talked to a lot of folks who are part of various associations, because it's it's hard to take those sort of hyper-local entities. In this case, it's congregations, right? Parishes, and give them the tools and the expertise and the mechanism to engage effectively with politics. And so the fact that there is an organization out there that's able to, for lack of a better term, aggregate that into a cohesive effort is a is a really big deal. And so when you say that you were down there and you've worked on 60 bills, which is a lot, uh just for reference for anybody who's paying attention, there are at least 500 bills every single legislative session. Usually there are more than that. Yeah, because then we get into late bills and everything else. Right. Uh, there's a lot of stuff going on. And all of those bills are their own sort of little individual wars. A lot of them are very complex. They take a lot of analysis, they take a lot of thought. Uh, there's a lot of work that goes into any one bill. And so for you to work on 60 and support 40 is not a small thing. Do you have any highlights from that kind of lineup?

SPEAKER_00 8:30

Oh, yes, especially the ones that we oppose, unfortunately. So there's many bills that we supported, many of them that was one was just signed today was Senate Bill 15 that dealt with human sex trafficking of minors, added more penalties to the sex trafficking of minors, which is a very good bill, and Governor Polis just signed it. Um, but there's other really bad bills as well. To your previous question about how do we assess priorities? So when I started the Catholic Conference in 2020, I asked the bishops, okay, can you give me a clear list of your priorities for our work in the Catholic Conference? Because we're a small team. It's just myself, my colleague, Nathan Fisher. We have an office manager, and then we have some great lobbyists like yourself, Ross, on our team as well that we can work with and broaden our reach into both sides of the political aisle. That said, um, some of the main issues we deal with, especially in the state of Colorado, which has took such a progressive turn in the last five to 10 years, are issues related to sanctity of life, issues related to religious freedom and the family. Parental rights has been under attack the last two years, and that's brought hundreds of Coloradans to testify against several bills that we can get into. Religious liberty has been a big issue this session, especially on education and its impact on faith-based schools or just individuals practicing their faith in the public sphere. And then sanctity of life has been a huge issue the last four years since the Reproductive Health Equity Act in 2022, its subsequent uh amendment 79, and several other abortion bills in between that have made us the most radical abortion state in the country.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

So, how do you prioritize between all these things, right? Because these aren't small things. You've got education, you've got religious liberty, you've got abortion, you've got social, I mean criminal justice, right? And all of those are, I mean, you could spend a lifetime on them probably and never fully understand them and never fully be able to fix them insofar as anything can ever be fixed in American government, right? So how do you how do you sort of allocate your time and your team and how do you prioritize across those different issues?

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Well, what's beautiful about working for the Catholic Church in this space is that we do have the compendium of social thought, Catholic social teaching, a robust array of documents and encyclicals that guide what we do. And then we have the bishops themselves. So we'll uh come up at the beginning of session, you know, big bill drops happen. We go through those bills, we collect what we know are hitting uh Catholic social teaching, some that are clear-cut and some that we're not so sure about. So we have a process where we have experts throughout the diocese that are working in those particular ministries. So for instance, with Senate Bill 18, we have a couple deacons who exclusively work on the issues uh related to human trafficking. So they're looking at all the human trafficking bills and telling us, okay, this one has this these issues that we need to have amendments on. This is a good bill to support and a good bill to oppose. Now, if you have a bill like the Reproductive Health Equity Act, clear-cut abortion bill, the reproductive health equity act, if um, for those who don't remember, that was the effort in 2022 to statutorily codify uh abortion for all 40 weeks of pregnancy without any restrictions whatsoever. Um, and then we had Amendment 79, which did that through the Constitution. So that we don't need the bishop's approval to go up against those particular bills because those are clear violations in Catholic social teaching. But we have our priority list of the 10 issues that are put in a something of a hierarchy. So we have sanctity of life is the top issue. The bishops on a national level have said this is the preeminent issue for the church and it's a big issue in the state of Colorado. But then we have marriage and family as a second issue, religious liberty as the third issue, and those are the three that consistently have been attacked the last four years and take up a lot of my time. But we also have great bills, like I mentioned, the sex trafficking bill. There are several others that have been very good when it comes to education, when it comes to welfare policy. So we those are all part of our priority list and allow us to work well across the aisle with the Democrats as well.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Yeah, and the education side is particularly interesting because I think a lot of people probably don't realize that there's a lot of overlap with a lot of faith communities, but Catholic schools in particular are a huge part of the private school universe. And a lot of those are run by parishes, some are not. There are a whole bunch of them out there, and they get wrapped up pretty often in some pretty serious debates around sometimes religious liberty, sometimes education generally, sometimes anti-discrimination requirements, sometimes larger school choice requirements. And it really, uh the Catholic Church and the Catholic Conference have been huge players in education for a long time. I mean, as long as I've been doing this work and I'm kind of an education nerd. So I would imagine that keeps you pretty busy too. And there were some big ones this session on that topic as well, including a couple that would have had some pretty big impacts and may still have some big impacts on Catholic schools.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

Right. So in the state of Colorado, the Catholic Church represents over 50% of all private school supply in the country. So that means more than half of all private school students go to a Catholic school. So that's a big chunk of the general demographic of the private school ecosystem is within the Catholic Church. And that's also why we're in fights like the Universal Pre-K program, where we sued the state based on the non-discrimination clause that was put into that bill. It's funny, right after that bill was signed, Governor Polis actually had lunch with the bishops at one of our board meetings and asked them to get onto the bill, and we sued very shortly after that, telling him we can't get, we can't approve our schools participating in a program that doesn't allow us to live out our beliefs on human sexuality and marriage faithfully to our convictions. And that's the case with the non-discrimination change, both within the UPK law and then broadly speaking, I think one of the most damaging bills we've seen in the state of Colorado was in 2021. It was HB 211108. And that bill changed Colorado's civil rights language under the Cholera Anti-Discrimination Act to change a non-discrimination clause and add protected classes of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression to that list of non-pro the non-discrimination clause, to the list of protected classes, and as it applies to the public accommodation section, which also includes education institutions. So it's interesting during the debate in 2021, Senator Moreno, who was a sponsor at the time and also the Senate my majority leader, he made it very clear that he wanted all private schools, all private faith-based schools to be part of that public accommodation clause, as well as faith-based hospitals, which is a huge system in the state of Colorado, homeless shelters and others. And what that means practically is that if faith-based schools like Catholic schools or faith-based hospitals disagree with the state's definition on gender ideology, on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression, they could be prosecuted by the state, lose their nonprofit status, um, be subject to criminal or financial penalty. And we've seen several bills since 2021 that have kind of reinforced that without a clear-cut avenue for potential litigation yet.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Yeah, and this so this is worth kind of tracking back, I think, for a while, which is, you know, when people hear, well, more than 50% of the private schools in the country or 50% of the enrollment are made up of Catholic schools and Catholic school students, they might say, well, why is that? And there are some really interesting historical reasons for that, right? Not the least of which is that the Catholics very often were the victims of serious discrimination for a really long time in the public education system, to the point where eventually it became necessary to set up their own system of education where they could freely practice their religious beliefs, right? Yeah. And that's a history that goes back a very, very long time, right? Which is how we kind of get to this religious liberty conversation now. And so it's interesting to me because these conversations very often the Catholic Church is sort of leading the charge, but they're not the only faith-based group that's involved, right? So uh a lot of Jewish organizations have similar opinions, Protestant organizations, Lutheran organizations, sometimes Muslim organizations have these same thoughts, all of which tether back to constitutional protections for the free exercise of religion, and all of which have been litigated pretty pretty heavily at this point, right? Which in some ways makes it interesting that we're even still having the policy debate because it's it's largely settled law.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

It is on the federal level. So it's it's shocking that to use an example, we just had the child's case be handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court this session. Literally the same day the US Supreme Court handed down Child's and the Senate, they were listening to uh HB 1322, which allowed for a private cause of action against therapists who uh practice compassionate care for those suffering from gender dysphoria. Exactly the opposite of what the Supreme Court just handed down. So I think what's interesting is the state of Colorado just doesn't care what federal precedent says, what the civil rights uh the federal civil rights statute says. There's even language in the most recent non-discrimination law that was signed on Monday, which is HB 261141, I think one of the worst bills of this session, um, that said that federal uh law is non-binding compared to state law as it applies to the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. So that's very suggestive of where the state is going. And if I were to characterize the last five years, I would say it's uh just clear attacks on the faith-based community in the state of Colorado and parental rights, broadly speaking. We've had three anti-parental rights bills now, one that was signed just a few weeks ago that the state can actually take your child away if your if the parent disagrees with their child on gender gender ideology of that particular child. But in this session, it I would call this the session of deception. There were a lot of bills that said one thing and clearly intended to do another or worked with another bill to make it a very bad situation for the state.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

Well, and a lot of it happened in a really complicated situation, right? So, I mean, you guys have heard us talk about this many times before, but the budget situation, the session sucked nearly all of the political oxygen out of the room, which means that, you know, everybody was focused on the joint budget committee and the budget process and whether or not their programs were going to be cut. And meanwhile, you had these 500 other bills that were floating around that uh were parked for a lot of session in Appropriations Committee or elsewhere. Others just didn't get a lot of debate. And at the end of the session, everything sort of broke loose. It was like a log jam letting go, and you had this flood of bills coming through that uh to your point were, you know, in some cases sort of designed to fly under the radar.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

I'm still not clear how many of those bills got out of appropriations. They came into appropriations with an 800,000 fiscal note, and then all of a sudden we're zeroed out, so they had no fiscal note and moved to committee a week before session ended, flew through the process. This uh one uh situation that we had with the bill I mentioned, which was HB 261309. It's a domestic violence bill. But in that bill, it adds that coercive control language that we all saw in 1312 last year that brought uh 700 Coloradans to the Capitol to argue against that bill and its provision that would strip parent authority away, parental custody away from their children for disagreements on gender ideology. That provision was inserted quietly back into 1309, a domestic violence bill. They pushed it through appropriations on the same day, two hours later, hit committee, and the only two testifying were myself and my colleague Nathan Fisher because nobody else could show up. The public is not given an opportunity to speak on these very heinous bills that are deceptive in their nature. And now we're going to be dealing with a lot of cases as it pertains to religious liberty and parental rights because 1309 was passed very unconstitutionally as well.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

Right. So I mean now we're gonna move into litigation in the next phase, and then we're gonna come back in 2027 and do it again. Yeah, we'll see another one.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

Yeah, yeah, that's what Colorado's MO is.

SPEAKER_01 19:55

Okay, so I mean, none of these are soft issues, right? Like you have folks that are down at the Capitol that are working on issues that are relatively easy, right? Uh no politics is easy, but some is easier than than others, right? Uh, and none of these are, right? And so you're working from a faith-based perspective in a legislature that is not very closely aligned with that in a political environment and frankly a political time that is not very aligned with that in Colorado, which is an interesting place. Uh what's that? What's that like? What's your experience kind of going in and and fighting these fights when a lot of people would say, no, thanks, it's not for me?

SPEAKER_00 20:33

Yeah, well, I the National Catholic Conference Directors Association has an ongoing listserv where we all talk about what's happening in their state, and nobody has it more exciting than Colorado and California. We deal with the exact same issues. We're constantly dealing with legislation that attacks some of the most fundamental principles of our theology, of our understanding of the human person, including sanctity of life, including parental rights. So these are issues that they're just ramping up year after year. So we saw in 2021 that change with the CODA, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. The next year we saw the change with the Reproductive Health Equity Act, statutory right to abortion. And then after that, it was a constant chipping away with a more of an erosion on religious freedom to the point where I would say the biggest issue we have in the state of Colorado is the state consistently attacks people of faith in their convictions. And I think that's only going to get worse. Uh, starting my career at the Heritage Foundation, it's something that really trained me to start paying attention to these things because I was there during DOMA in a Bergafell and some of the big fights at the US Supreme Court on those issues. Went to Indiana when Rifra was a mess. So started seeing that being part of the school choice movement, the issues around religious freedom and school choice were going to become a main issue. And I think it's going to be even bigger with the federal tax credit as it's being implemented in the next year, especially in the state of Colorado.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Yeah, and I so some of the work we're involved in, right? And some of it we're not, but I kind of watch all of it. And it's uh it's interesting how much animosity there can be, right? And again, this isn't necessarily just a Catholic question, it's a faith question for a lot of different faiths. Um, and the way that some of it's handled, both for by the public and candidly by the legislature sometimes, is uh it's concerning a little bit. And it's uh it's not easy work on pretty difficult issues.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

So yeah, I mean, anecdotally, we had Senator Sullivan attack us in the HB 1309 committee for our faith. So he, after my colleague and I gave our testimony, this is again that domestic violence bill where he said we agree with the majority of this bill. It was the provision of coercive control that it's considered domestic violence for a parent to do normal parenting decisions, like use the find a phone app to know where their child is or monitor their bank account to ensure there's proper financial management. These are for minors, so these are under 18. It also includes parents' disagreement with the child's perceived gender ideology. So this is a very clear issue on Catholic social teaching. And then we said if you take this provision out, we would support the bill. We don't have a problem with the bill broadly. Um, and then Senator Sullivan decided to use that opportunity after our testimony to say how ashamed he was to be a Catholic that the bishops would take a position on this. And I think that was very uh illustrative of where the legislature is going in their animosity to your point, all people of faith, because we do have a coalition with the LDS Church, with uh the Agudith of Israel, we have relationships with the Muslim church. So we we have relationships in the other areas of faith, people of faith in the state of Colorado that are feeling the same strain the Catholics are. We just happen to be the bigger voice in the Capitol right now.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

Right. And it's a, you know, there are people listening who probably aren't religious and others who are, and some who have differing opinions, right? I mean, all of these are controversial issues, but at the core of it is a constitutional right to be able to practice your religion, right? Whatever that religion may be. And it's it is interesting to watch state policy so consistently run up against that constitutional provision, which has been in place for a long time, has been litigated dozens of times, and at this point is is fairly well baked into the fabric of American society. So even if you don't agree on the issues, the idea that people of faith would be able to practice that faith and participate fully in American society and some of these programs that are offered by the legislature in the absence of discrimination or exclusion or anything else, is uh it's a core American tenet, right? But here we are in 2026, still still having the fight.

SPEAKER_00 24:29

Well, it's the first amendment. So it's interesting if you look at the American founders and how they understood the nation, they wanted to see uh state-level churches, establishment of churches. That was that was a federal provision, the the First Amendment. And even uh Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist, when he it wrote the famous wall of separation, he didn't mean a literal wall where you can't practice your faith in the public sphere. But in the state of Colorado, it's quickly becoming that. Um the American founders understood that you need to have a moral society, and they understood that moral shaped by religious sentiment is very important to promote civic sentiment as well. So as we see people be more and more detached from each other, from the notion of the common good in the country, let alone the state of Colorado, I think the attacks on the faith are largely at the core of that concern.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

Okay, lightning round. If you had to make a prediction about where we go from here, as far as what comes next for the state politically, for people of faith, policy issues, what do you think? Where are we going?

SPEAKER_00 25:29

Uh I've been calling Colorado the Valley of Death because I think we're only gonna get worse here until we see some uh big change. And we're trying to make strides to that. Um, we've asked to how we engage with parishes. We have leaders and parishes. We have this program called our Legislative Leaders Network, where we ask priests to identify somebody in every parish to work with us so we can train them and they can equip their fellow parishioners. Again, one million Catholics. We need to try to train that in our sphere of influence, at the very least. But if we have a potential situation where Bennett is governor, Jesse Danielson is the Secretary of State, and Jenna Griswold is the AG, that's a much worse situation than we currently are in. And we need to make sure that while the Catholic Church is not partisan, uh having a veto-proof majority is not going to be very helpful when we have very progressive legislation moving through the state, the General Assembly as well. So we are keeping close an eye, close eye on this election, which is a very important election for the state of Colorado. But until we see a drastic shift, and that might have to be done through a lot of litigation, especially with the faith-based community, in order to make Coloradans understand that the faith-based community is under attack here. Pre-born children are being slaughtered here. We're a destination state for abortion, probably the worst abortion state in the country. And there's not a lot of understanding in the broader population about that. So unfortunately, I see us getting worse before we can get better.

SPEAKER_01 26:53

Okay, so if somebody wanted to follow along with your work or learn more about it or support it or get involved, where would they go?

SPEAKER_00 27:00

Go to cocatholic.org. That's ColoradoCatholic.org. That's our website for the Colorado Catholic Conference. And we have a listserv that you can join, um, sign up, put your name in, and we also have a voter voice that you can actually contact your lawmakers straight through as well.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

Awesome. Brittany, thanks so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 27:18

Thank you for having me, Ross.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

That'll do it for today's episode of the straight up 30. We'll be back next week with another policy issue that matters.