Focus on the Family will build a coalition to back a constitutional amendment prohibiting state government from interfering with the religious freedom of a person or religious organization.

The draft language states that government may not directly or indirectly burden a person or organization by withholding benefits, assessing penalties or excluding a person or group from government programs or facilities.

The Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit Christian advocacy group dedicated to religious liberty, sent the proposed initiative to the Colorado Legislative Council on March 7. The amendment representative named is Tom Minnery, senior vice president of Focus on the Family.

Minnery said recurring problems of government interference with or exclusion of religious people and groups prompted the ballot measure. He denies it’s spurred by the national debate over religious freedom and conscience-based exemptions to national health care mandates, such as required coverage of birth control.

“It’s a set of Colorado issues we’re staking out,” Minnery said. “We feel we’ve seen this cloud coming for a long time. We tried to get this on the ballot two years ago.”

In 2008, Minnery said, state lawmakers tried to derail the proposed sale of two Denver-area hospitals to a Catholic health care system by mandating it agree to provide abortions and other “so-called reproductive services” in violation of its religious tenets.

In 2003, Colorado Christian University’s students were initially denied access to a state grant program because of a statute excluding enrollees of “pervasively sectarian” institutions. Five years later, Minnery said, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave CCU students the same rights as those of nonreligious colleges.

In 1999, Minnery said, the parents of slain Columbine High students were not allowed by school officials to express their sentiments, if religious in nature, on a memorial wall made up of individually decorated tiles.

The federal courts got involved, but ultimately the families lost their fight to express religious sentiments.

“We’re just trying to give people the freedom to grieve as they see appropriate,” Minnery said.

Critics of the measure in 2010, including the Anti-Defamation League, argued it’s unnecessary because the U.S. and state constitutions already guarantee religious freedom. Opponents also see an agenda of expanding rights of conscience in the workplace, such as protecting a pharmacist who refuses to dispense contraception.

The 2010 effort languished, Minnery said, because the ballot process and subsequent court challenges took too long for them to also gather the requisite number of voter signatures.

This election, petitioners must get valid signatures from 86,105 electors, according to the Colorado secretary of state’s office.

“We’re just starting to build the coalition,” Minnery said.

Electa Draper: 303-954-1276

or edraper@denverpost.com