OutRight

by Dale Carpenter

VICTORY FROM DEFEAT

Colorado's Amendment 2 threatened gay progress but yielded unintended results

Ten years ago this fall, Colorado voters narrowly approved an amendment to the state constitution repealing existing civil rights protections for gays in the state and prohibiting them in the future. The passage of Amendment 2, as it was known, was hailed as a great victory for social conservatives and augured more such efforts in states around the country that would rollback the momentum for gay equality. Today, the unintentional result of Amendment 2 is that gay equality is on stronger ground than ever before.

Social conservatives in Colorado in the early 1990s, like social conservatives across the country, feared the rise of gay rights and the piecemeal erosion of what they view as "traditional family values." In Denver, Boulder, and Aspen, gay equality advocates had succeeded in getting their cities to adopt ordinances protecting gays from discrimination in areas like employment, housing, and public accommodations. State universities and some state agencies had taken similar steps to forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation. Social conservatives believe these measures signal approval of what they consider a dangerous and immoral lifestyle.

As long as decisions about these matters were made at the local level in Colorado, gay advocates could successfully marshal their political clout in relatively tolerant urban, affluent, and university-dominated areas. In these areas, gays have not only been present in disproportionately high numbers, but have also been more politically organized and more apt to live openly. Therefore, more citizens in these areas have been familiar with actual gay people and less likely to believe hysterical claims about them. The opposite has been true in smaller towns and rural areas, where citizens are often less personally familiar with gay people.

The political strategy for antigay social conservatives was thus simple: Take the issue of "gay rights" out of the hands of local communities (where, ironically, conservatives generally believe policy decisions should be made) and put them in the hands of voters statewide. This strategy would dilute the political power of gays and of people familiar with gays by overwhelming them with votes from socially conservative voters unfamiliar with gays.

On the eve of the election, supporters of Amendment 2 distributed 800,000 flyers asserting, among other things, "homosexuals commit between one-third and one-half of all recorded child molestations." These false claims successfully diverted attention from the issues of job and housing discrimination that were at the heart of Amendment 2 and the laws it repealed.

Amendment 2 passed by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. Buoyed by this victory, social conservatives started antigay rights drives in more than a dozen other states.

But then something happened. Gays across Colorado and the nation mobilized politically in response to Amendment 2. Legal advocates sued to stop its implementation.

At the national level, the successes for gay equality since Amendment 2 are well known. The number of states protecting gays from discrimination has doubled, from six to 12. The number of businesses protecting gay employees from discrimination has risen exponentially. More and more employers extend health and other benefits to same-sex domestic partners. Unprecedented numbers of gay characters have flooded TV screens and movie theaters. On and on it goes.

The legal challenge to Amendment 2 resulted in the most gay-positive decision yet from the U.S. Supreme Court, Romer v. Evans, which held that the measure unconstitutionally denied gays the equal protection of the law. Though the long-term legal significance of Romer remains to be seen, at the very least it halted similar statewide initiatives across the country.

More telling is what happened in Colorado itself. Gays in every part of the state, stunned by what they saw as a personal rebuke from their fellow citizens, came out of the closet for the first time and got politically active.

Gay activism was most intense in Colorado Springs, the home of antigay organizing in the state. A new gay-rights group, Ground Zero, began within a month. At the group's first press conference, several people walked in with bags over their heads, removed them, and declared publicly for the first time they were gay.

An accountant placed a picture of her lover on her desk at work. A car salesman wore a gay pride ribbon on his lapel as he greeted customers. When his co-workers at a construction firm began telling antigay jokes, one previously closeted employee announced, "If you want to talk that trash, you better say it to my face, because you are talking about me, too."

The leader of the Amendment 2 effort ran for mayor of Colorado Springs and lost to a moderate, who immediately announced a policy of "zero tolerance" for discrimination against city employees. The city even passed its own ordinance banning discrimination against gays, an unthinkable event before the fight over Amendment 2.

A local high school ran an article about the experience of gay students. When social conservatives demanded the school board ban such articles, the board refused.

"In the long run, we didn't achieve our goal," Kevin Tebedo, one of the Amendment 2 drafters, recently told the Denver Post. "As a result of that, nationwide, it was a boon for the homosexual political lobby."

Colorado gay activists agree. As one told the Post, "We know now that we have allies and can defend ourselves. Amendment 2 created a gay community. It is the best thing that ever happened to us."

Another such defeat, and we shall overcome.

Writing from the conservative end of the political spectrum, Dale Carpenter began his column for OutSmart in 1994, when he lived in Houston. Now residing in Minneapolis, Carpenter is a University of Minnesota Law School professor. He can be reached at OutRight@aol.com.