The Colorado Law the Supreme Court Struck Down

In November of nineteen ninety-two, Colorado voters approved Amendment Two. The measure prohibited the state and any local government from enacting, enforcing, or maintaining any law that protected gay men and lesbians from discrimination. It passed with fifty-three percent of the vote.

Colorado Springs was the organizational center of the campaign to pass it. The city's large evangelical Christian community, several of whose institutions had become nationally prominent in conservative religious politics in the nineteen eighties, provided the leadership, the volunteers, and much of the funding for the initiative.

Gay and lesbian Coloradans, and their allies, went to court immediately. Within weeks a judge had issued an injunction blocking the amendment's enforcement. The case moved through the courts over the next four years, reaching the United States Supreme Court under the name Romer v. Evans.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion striking down Amendment Two in nineteen ninety-six. The state, Kennedy wrote, had made gay and lesbian citizens strangers to its laws. The opinion held that Amendment Two failed even the minimum constitutional test of rational basis. It was an unusual ruling: the Supreme Court had rarely struck down a state constitutional amendment on equal protection grounds.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissent that called the majority's reasoning what he termed terminal silliness. The dissent predicted that the ruling would be used to expand gay and lesbian rights significantly further. That prediction was accurate. Romer v. Evans became a legal foundation on which Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down sodomy laws in two thousand three, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which established marriage equality in two thousand fifteen, were both built.

A ballot measure passed in a Colorado Springs voting booth rippled forward through American constitutional law for the next twenty-three years.