May 20, 1996– Amendment 2 Is Struck Down

It seems nearly impossible to believe today in our progressive modern era, but there was a time, long ago, when states were attempting to limit the Civil Rights of gay people.

Amendment 2 was a statewide anti-gay initiative prohibiting any branch of government in the state of Colorado from passing legislation or adopting policies prohibiting discrimination against gay people. The measure was passed in 1992 by 53 percent of Colorado’s voters.

“Don’t ski in Colorado, don’t hike there, don’t convention there, don’t visit there…”: this was the message coming from our friends in Hollywood, indeed from gays and their friends and family across our beautiful country, in the weeks after Colorado became known as “The Hate State”. Among the celebrities calling for a boycott of Colorado were Martina Navratilova, Barbra Streisand and Elizabeth Taylor, all who owned homes in beautiful Aspen.

The ACLU, the Colorado Legal Initiatives Project, and Lambda Legal won preliminary court injunctions that kept the measure from actually taking effect until all the lawsuits were resolved. The case went before the US Supreme Court, which, on this day- May 20, 1996, struck down Amendment 2 in a landmark 6–3 ruling. By declaring Amendment 2 unconstitutional, the Supremes made clear that anti-gay sentiment does not justify governmental discrimination and shattered the “special rights” rhetoric of those who oppose equal treatment for gays.

All over the USA, the bigots and the haters in the early 1990s mounted voter initiatives at local and state levels to block and repeal the passage of laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. This case was supposed to put an end to those efforts and pave the way for other states and local governments to ban discrimination.

This landmark victory was the single most positive SCOTUS ruling in the history of the Gay Rights Movement when it was decided 20 years ago. It was the first Supreme Court case to address Gay Rights since the dreadful Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), when SCOTUS had held that laws criminalizing sodomy were constitutional. It was the beginning of a turn around in our culture. The Court’s ruling made clear that gay folks have the same right to seek government protection against discrimination in the USA as any other group of people. The decision also marked a new level of legal respect for the LGBTQ community, rejecting the notion that it is legitimate for the government to discriminate against gay people based on religious objections to homosexuality. So it was decided.

In the four years after the vote, as the case made its way through the courts, Proposition 2 never actually became the law in Colorado.

In May 2013, civil unions became legal in Colorado. The state joined eight other states with similar laws. In October, 2014, Colorado joined 10 others states, plus the District Of Columbia, permitting Same-Sex Marriage. Today, 66% of the residents of Colorado support the rights of gay people to live full lives with equal rights.

Possibly related, also on this day in 1873, Levi Strauss, a Jew and very possibly a homosexual, received a US patent for jeans with copper rivets. A year later, in 1874, the “Castro Clone” look began and gym memberships soared.