A Stand for the First Amendment: For Our Children, For Our Future

By Chaz Evanson, Unaffiliated Candidate for Governor of Colorado

Chaz Evanson: Defender of the Faith, Defender of the Constitution, Defender of the People

Picture your child. Sitting in a classroom. Quietly bowing their head before lunch to thank God for their food. Or standing up during a classroom discussion to affirm that boys and girls are made in the image of God, equal in dignity, different by design. Imagine that child being told to be silent. Being punished. Shamed. Sent home. Branded intolerant or dangerous. This is not theoretical. It is happening. Right now. In schools across our state.

This week, while hardworking families across Colorado were striving to provide, serve, and raise the next generation in faith and freedom, the Supreme Court of the United States quietly chose silence over duty. By refusing to hear a pivotal First Amendment case, the Court effectively sided with anti-free speech activists and signaled a chilling disregard for one of our most sacred, God-given liberties: the right to speak truth without fear.

Our campaign is grounded in the eternal truth that rights do not come from government, they come from God. As our Declaration of Independence boldly proclaims, “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” And in the very first guarantee of our Bill of Rights, we find: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.”

Let us be clear: the failure to uphold these rights, especially for children in public schools, is not neutrality. It is betrayal. It is a blow to the foundation of our Republic, a stain on our courts, and an assault on the Constitution, both federally and here in Colorado.

Our Founders understood this danger. John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, warned: “Every member of the State ought diligently to read and to study the Constitution of his country… By knowing their rights, they will sooner perceive when they are violated and be the better prepared to defend and assert them.”

Justice James Kent, a towering legal mind and constitutional scholar, wrote: “The opinion of the community is the law of life. If public opinion be under no check, if it be not enlightened and purified by legal knowledge, by a sense of religion, and a reverence for the Constitution, it becomes a tyranny.”

These words echo even louder today as unelected bureaucrats and activist educators push political agendas on our children while silencing dissent and punishing moral conviction. But we must remind them: students do not forfeit their constitutional rights when they walk through the schoolhouse gate.

That truth was enshrined in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), where the Supreme Court held: “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” In that case, the Court sided with students who wore black armbands to peacefully protest the Vietnam War. Their right to free expression was affirmed, even within the classroom.

Yet today, children are punished for praying, disciplined for voicing a biblical worldview, and coerced into silence if their beliefs do not conform to the dominant cultural narrative. What was once protected is now prosecuted. What was once virtue is now vilified. What was once truth is now labeled hate. This is not progress. This is tyranny masquerading as tolerance. “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”  Isaiah 5:20 (NKJV)

As your next Governor, I will fight to restore the sacred liberties we’ve lost, reform the unjust laws and policies that suppress speech and belief and protect the moral and constitutional values that define our Republic. That includes:

• Passing a Student Rights Protection Act to ensure children retain their freedom of religious expression, speech, and conscience in all public institutions.

• Appointing and supporting state judges who uphold constitutional originalism and reject activist reinterpretations of fundamental rights.

• Defending parents’ rights to raise their children according to their faith, without government interference or ideological coercion.

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This is not about politics. It is about principle. It is about posterity. It is about the sacred charge entrusted to every parent. If we do not stand up now for truth, how will our children ever learn to? “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” — Proverbs 22:6

Let us remember the warning of President George Washington: “If the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

Let us also remember: our children do not belong to the government. They are not wards of the state. They are not ideological experiments. They are sons and daughters made in the image of God, entrusted to us by heaven, not to cower, but to stand.

This campaign is a movement to reclaim what has been forsaken. We do not seek power, we seek justice. We do not advance hatred; we speak the truth in love. We do not tear down; we rebuild what has been trampled underfoot by those who no longer reverence the Constitution or the God who inspired it.

I am not running to be a ruler, I am running to be a servant. I am not seeking power, I am answering a call.

This is not just a campaign. It is a rescue mission. A rescue of the Constitution. A rescue of truth. A rescue of our God-given rights and responsibilities.

Colorado, the time has come. We will not bow. We will speak. We will stand.

Join me. Restore what has been lost. Reform what is broken. Protect what still remains.

Chaz Evanson

Unaffiliated Candidate for Governor of Colorado