Gay Rights Through the Looking Glass: Politics, Morality, and the Trial of Colorado\u27s Amendment 2

Courts have long struggled to resolve the question of how far a community may go in exercising its power to treat minority members differently. Popular prejudice, community morality and invidious stereotypes repeatedly have had their day in court as judges work to reconcile equal protection and privacy rights with their own attitudes about the place of people of color, women and gay people in society. In the early 1990s, the tension between the American ideal of equality and the reality of human diversity starkly emerged. A national wave of citizen-sponsored initiatives seeking to amend state constitutions and local charters to prohibit governments from protecting lesbian, gay and bisexual citizens from discrimination spread across the country