Court Rejects Colorado Amendment Banning Protections For Gays

WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, May 21) -- In a major ruling, the Supreme Court struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment that bans laws protecting homosexuals from discrimination. The 6-3 ruling Monday is the biggest legal victory to date for gay-rights activists, and signals a major shift by the court since its last major gay-rights ruling in 1986, which dismissed a constitutional challenge to Georgia's sodomy law.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy declared that the Colorado amendment "identifies persons by a single trait and then denies them protection across the board... It is not within our constitutional traditions to enact laws of this sort."

In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said the majority had taken sides in a cultural dispute. It's not the courts' business "to take sides in this culture war," he wrote. Calling the Colorado initiative purely democratic, he said, "The amendment prohibits special treatment of homosexuals and nothing more."

"This is a huge decision," TIME correspondent Wendy Cole reports, adding that gay-rights groups had been braced for a defeat. "It will be very interesting to see how local municipalities that have anti-gay laws pending will deal with the ruling. Will they quietly withdraw them or step up opposition to gay rights?"

The court rejected Colorado's argument that anti-discrimination laws give homosexuals special rights, saying it gave them "protections taken for granted by most people either because they already have them or do not need them." The Colorado amendment was approved in 1992 by 53.4 percent of the state's voters, but a state court blocked the law from being enforced. The law would have nullified gay-rights ordinances in Denver, Boulder and Aspen and barred any other state or local government from enacting similar laws.

The ruling comes at a critical moment when a constitutional battle over another aspect of gay rights -- the right to marry a person of the same sex -- is gaining steam. Though both presumptive GOP nominee Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.) and President Bill Clinton are on the record as opposing gay marriage, gay issues could well figure prominently in the fall campaign. Many conservatives have criticized any support of homosexuality as undermining traditional values, and lashed out at Clinton for his support of gays in the military.

A Hawaiian court is expected to rule in July on the legality of gay marriages. Under the U.S. Constitution's full faith and credit clause, states in most cases must accord reciprocity to other states in such matters as marriage and drivers' licenses.

Anticipating the possibility that Hawaii will make gay marriages legal, several states, including Utah, are moving to deny recognition of out-of-state marriages that do not conform to their own state laws so that people married to someone of the same sex in Hawaii cannot claim recognition of their marriages in those other states. If Hawaii sets this conflict in motion, the ensuing battle is likely to end up before the Supreme Court.

TIME Daily contributed to this report.

TIME: Conservatives Take On Gay Rights -- April 29, 1996

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Court Rejects Colorado Amendment Banning Protections For Gays

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