The law was called Amendment 2. Voters in Colorado had approved it in 1992. Its text was simple and sweeping: no governmental entity in the state could enact or enforce any law or policy that protected persons from discrimination based on their “homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation.” On May 20, 1996, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled the amendment unconstitutional by a vote of 6-3. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, stated it imposed a “special disability” upon one class of citizens for no rational reason other than animus. The ruling was Romer v. Evans.
This decision mattered because it was the Court’s first major pro-gay rights ruling. It came a decade before Lawrence v. Texas struck down sodomy laws and seventeen years before United States v. Windsor. The case was not about marriage or intimacy, but about the basic right to participate in the political process. Amendment 2 did not just deny protections; it placed gay Coloradans in a legal solitary confinement, barring them from even seeking anti-discrimination ordinances from their city councils. The Court found this a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
A common misunderstanding is that the ruling immediately granted sweeping federal protections. It did not. It was a negative right—it struck down a uniquely harsh law. It left states free to pass their own non-discrimination statutes, or not. Its power was in its logic. Kennedy’s opinion framed the issue as one of bare political inequality, a “status-based enactment” born of hostility. This language became the bedrock for future arguments.
The lasting impact was doctrinal and psychological. Romer v. Evans established that laws targeting gay people required more than a mere rational basis; they needed something more than moral disapproval. It gave the LGBTQ+ rights movement its first definitive victory at the nation’s highest court, energizing legal strategies for the next two decades. The ruling told a minority group that the Constitution saw them as citizens, not as a problem to be legislated away. It was a shield, not a sword, but it was the first one the Court provided.