Background and Early Political Career
Musgrave was born Marilyn Neoma Shuler in Greeley, Colorado. She graduated from Eaton High School in 1968, and attended Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, graduating with a B.A. in social studies in 1972. Musgrave married while attending CSU. She and her husband Steve Musgrave settled in Fort Morgan, south of Greeley, where they owned and operated a bale stacking business. Musgrave also taught school. The Musgraves have four children and eight grandchildren.
Musgrave's career in elective office began in 1991, when she served one term on the Fort Morgan School Board, where she focused on changing the local sex education curriculum to abstinence-only. She was also involved in the Fort Morgan Right To Life chapter, at one time serving as its president. Musgrave was then elected to the Colorado State House of Representatives in 1992, and served there until after her successful 1998 campaign for a Colorado State Senate seat. While serving in the state senate, Musgrave was selected the Senate Republican Caucus Chairman. In 2002, Musgrave ran for the Fourth Congressional District seat being vacated by Bob Schaffer.
Musgrave is a devout Pentecostal (she is a member of the Assemblies of God), and was one of three Pentecostals serving in the 110th Congress. The others — Republicans — were Tim Johnson of Illinois and Todd Tiahrt of Kansas.
Musgrave was one of the most conservative members of the state legislature, often sparring with more socially moderate and liberal legislators. She focused her time on social issues. She staunchly opposed granting civil unions and marriage for same-sex couples. In another area she was active on small business and agricultural issues, particularly authoring bills to exempt farm equipment dealers from sales tax and lowering taxes on small business.
Read more about this topic: Marilyn Musgrave
Famous quotes containing the words background and, background, early, political and/or career:
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The people of Western Europe are facing this summer a series of tragic dilemmas. Of the hopes that dazzled the last twenty years that some political movement might tend to the betterment of the human lot, little remains above ground but the tattered slogans of the past.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)