A state lawmaker’s Twitter reference to “homosexuals in Denver” caught the attention of two gay lawmakers from Denver with whom he will serve on the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee and who didn’t appreciate the remark.

Rep. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, elected last week to the state Senate, said he sent the tweet last month in response to remarks once made by Democratic candidate for governor John Hickenlooper, who had said there was some “backwards thinking” in Colorado toward gays.

“What he (Hickenlooper) did was compare people in rural Colorado to terrorists and murderers because of the homosexual up in Wyoming that was assaulted,” Lambert said.

Hickenlooper made his comment last year when a reporter asked why he thought it was appropriate for the Matthew Shepard Foundation to be located in Denver when Shepard, a gay student, was killed in Wyoming in 1998.

Lambert, a prolific Twitter user, sent a tweet: “Hickenlooper actually calls rural Coloradans ‘backward-thinking,’ unlike the homosexuals in Denver.”

Lambert, who said he has religious objections to homosexuality, said Hickenlooper was contrasting those with such objections to “the gay and lesbian agenda in Denver which he (Hickenlooper) said is so forward-thinking.”

Lambert will be serving on the Joint Budget Committee with two gay Denver Democrats: Rep. Mark Ferrandino and Sen. Pat Steadman.

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Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs Photo by