May 20, 1996: The United States Supreme Court hands down its decision in landmark LGBT case Romer v. Evans.
Prior to Romer v. Evans, the United States Supreme Court had deliberated a limited number of cases related to LGBT rights, coming down both in favor of and in opposition to their advancement. In 1958, the Court ruled in One, Inc. v. Olesen to affirm right to free speech of a gay interest magazine against censorship by blasphemy laws. Nearly thirty years later, the Court upheld in Bowers v. Hardwick the constitutionality of a Georgia law and therefore any local and state statutes criminalizing homosexual sex as illegal sodomy.
The Supreme Court once again took up the issue when Richard G. Evans and three other individuals brought a suit against Colorado governor Roy Romer in opposition to Amendment 2 to the Colorado constitution. As gay rights activists made impressive strides across the nation, so then did a increasingly politically vocal, nationally mobilized Christian Right push back in equal measure. The “culture clash” that unfolded, centering on these tensions, embroiled the nation in numerous legal and political battles throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1992, Colorado voters passed an amendment to the state constitution that rescinded protections for individuals from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation while precluding future protections of the kind. Evans’ challenge of the amendment passed to the Supreme Court in late 1995.
On May 20, 1996, the Court found in a 6-3 decision that Amendment 2, by transgressing the “commitment to the law’s neutrality where the rights of persons are at stake,” was in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority opinion, described the Amendment as a “status-based classification of persons undertaken for its own sake,” whose flimsy justifications only “[raised] the inevitable inference that it is born of animosity toward the class that it affects” - homophobic pushback thinly and unconvincingly disguised as policy.
On the opposing side, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the dissenting opinion that the Amendment was merely a “modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores.” Scalia moreover accused the Court of siding “with the Templars” in a “culture war” in which the courts had no place. Of course, the Supreme Court’s engagement in the “culture war” only deepened following Romer v. Evans. In 2003, the Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas overturned Bowers v. Hardwick and in effect all anti-sodomy laws still in place across the country.