On This Day In Gay History: Colorado's Romer V Evans

The Human Rights Campaign tells us that 3 out of 5 citizens live in jurisdictions that don't have antidiscrimination protections. Federal legislation to include those protections nationally, known as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, remains stuck in Congress.

In Tennessee the legislature has given final approval to do away with antidiscrimination laws enacted by local governments. The push is specifically targeted at a Nashville ordinance which includes sexual orientation & gender identity to the list of groups who are protected from discrimination.

Republicans in the Tennessee House & Senate have succeeded in passing this anti-gay legislation. The final bill now goes to Governor Bill Haslam, a Republican.

It seems to me that Tennessee is wasting valuable time & money on this issue when the United States Supreme Court ruled on this issue  in the case of Romer v Evans, decided 15 years ago on this very day- May 20th.

Amendment 2 was an antigay initiative prohibiting all branches of state government in Colorado from passing legislation or adopting policies prohibiting discrimination against lesbians, gay men or bisexuals based on their sexual orientation. The measure was passed in 1992 by 53% of Colorado’s voters.

Working with the ACLU and the Colorado Legal Initiatives Project, Lambda Legal won preliminary court rulings that kept the measure from taking effect until this lawsuit was resolved. The case went before theSupreme Court, which struck down Amendment 2 in a landmark 6–3 ruling. In declaring Amendment 2 unconstitutional, the Court made clear that antigay sentiment does not justify governmental discrimination & shattered the “special rights” rhetoric of those who oppose equal treatment for lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

The Court’s ruling made clear that gay people have the same right to seek government protection against discrimination as any other group of people. The decision also marked a new level of legal respect for LGBT people & rejected the notion that it is legitimate for the government to discriminate against gay people based on moral objections to homosexuality.

Justice Kennedy wrote the decision: & stated: To the contrary, the amendment imposes a special disability upon those persons alone. Homosexuals are forbidden the safeguards that others enjoy or may seek without constraint. Its sheer breadth is so discontinuous with the reasons offered for it that the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.

Amendment 2 is at once too narrow & too broad. It identifies persons by a single trait and then denies them protection across the board. The resulting disqualification of a class of persons from the right to seek specific protection from the law is unprecedented in our jurisprudence.

"It is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort. Finding that laws of the kind now before us raise the inevitable inference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons affected, the Court implied that the passage of Amendment 2 was born of a bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group."

The always charming Justice Anoin Scalia wrote a dissent, which was joined by the lovely Justice Clareneve Thomas. Scalia wrote: Amendment 2 is a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a politically powerful minority to revise those mores through use of the laws.

In 2007, a law was passed that banned discrimination based on sexual orientation & gender identity in Colorado.