By Karen Abbott
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

They wouldn't drink our tea. Or our beer.

Movie stars shunned our ski slopes. Big cities coast-to-coast ordered their officials not to travel here. Conventions were cancelled. A lucrative Stephen King movie wound up being filmed in Utah.

Most painfully, Colorado was dubbed "the Hate State."

"Those were really emotional times," lawyer Tim Tymkovich recalls of the furious battle that raged nationwide over Colorado's Amendment 2 in 1992.

Now in private practice, Tymkovich then worked for the state attorney general's office. His job: defending the amendment -- "not whether it was moral, just whether it was constitutional," he notes -- before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Colorado voters approved Amendment 2 on Nov. 3, 1992, changing the state constitution to prohibit laws aimed at protecting gays and lesbians against discrimination. Denver, Boulder and Aspen already had adopted such laws.

Pollsters had predicted that Amendment 2 would fail. But it passed with almost 54 percent of the vote.

The backlash came almost immediately.

In New York, gay activists tossed replicas of Colorado-made Celestial Seasonings tea, Coors beer, Monfort meat and Holly sugar into the Hudson River, chanting, "We're here, we're queer, we won't drink Coors beer."

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, Lotus Software, the Women's Sports Federation, the National Education Association, the Latin American Studies Association, the National Organization for Women and the National Association of Social Workers cancelled meetings in Colorado. So did many other groups.

In Aspen, there was talk of seceding from the state.

"I had no idea the magnitude of what I was getting involved in," Colorado Springs car dealer Will Perkins, who chaired the group that sponsored Amendment 2, says now.

Amendment 2 never went into effect, because Denver District Judge Jeffrey Bayless stayed it, then ruled it unconstitutional, setting up a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But it would take almost four years for the angry boycotting to die away -- after the nation's high court struck down Amendment 2 in 1996. The Supreme Court said the measure illegally excluded homosexuals from the equal protection of the law granted to everyone else by the U.S. Constitution.

Perkins says he still is amazed that gays and lesbians took Amendment 2 so personally. He characterized it as a rule against unfair special protections for one group's behavior that others traditionally have viewed as wrong, often on religious grounds.

"If you don't happen to agree with or affirm what they're doing, they equate that to hating them or disliking them," says Perkins, who lost a bid for mayor of Colorado Springs last April. "That makes it very difficult to deal with."

An attorney on the other side says the boycott brouhaha has cooled.

"Most people have completely forgotten about it," says lawyer Jean Dubofsky, who successfully argued against Amendment 2 before the nation's highest court.

But the gay rights debate is far from over.

The Colorado legislature last April killed a bill to prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians statewide.

A year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a Cincinnati city charter amendment denying gays and lesbians formal protection against discrimination.

In January, the Colorado Springs City Council refused to consider a charter amendment that would have done the same thing.

Two more Colorado communities -- Breckenridge and Telluride -- have adopted laws prohibiting discrimination against gays and lesbians. Fort Collins and Greeley decided not to.

Tymkovich says the legal impact of Amendment 2 never would have been as great as its opponents feared.

"We had a live-and-let-live state then, and we do now," he says.

Gays and lesbians hailed the high court's Amendment 2 ruling as a landmark victory, the first U.S. Supreme Court decision recognizing the rights of their community.

But Tymkovich says the ruling had little real impact and seldom is cited as a precedent in other cases.

Not so, Dubofsky says.

"It gets cited all the time," she says -- in gay rights cases and other types of equal protection disputes.

"I've been pretty gratified to see the decision popping up in other cases around the country," says Lori Girvan, executive director of Equality Colorado, an organization founded to fight Amendment 2.

"The most recent example I know of was a case in Long Island, where the judge mentioned it in awarding a discrimination claim to a police officer who had been discriminated against.

"It was also a very, very important catalyst for the civil rights movement in Colorado around issues of sexual orientation and gender identity."

Equality Colorado is growing, has new programs and still is fighting for equal rights and necessary protections for gays and lesbians, Girvan says.

Colorado for Family Values, the Colorado-Springs based group that Perkins chaired to fight for Amendment 2, still is fighting what it views as unfair "special rights" for homosexuals.

"The issue is exactly the same as it was in 1991," Perkins says.

But Dubofsky says the Amendment 2 battle changed people.

"I think that first the adoption of Amendment 2 and then the legal fight to get rid of it helped a lot of people think harder about what sorts of discrimination were all over the place," she says.

People became more sensitive to discrimination and even to nasty jokes -- "things that everyone has seen since they were children and not really questioned," she says.

Girvan says that even gays and lesbians aren't as aware of discrimination as they need to be. Many who hailed Amendment 2's death as a victory haven't realized how much of the war is still to be waged on the battlefield of public opinion.

"The reality is, we still have no civil rights protections in this state," Girvan says.

Colorado Milestones, which appears Tuesdays, is part of a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society. Digital and print copies of historical images available at the Colorado Historical Society (303) 866-2305.

Online: InsideDenver.com, keyword "2000."

On TV: Sunday at 10 p.m.: Colorado History: From early miners and homesteaders to today's developers, Coloradans have made use of its greatest natural resource: its land.

November 30, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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