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Romer v. Evans
Encyclopedia
Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), is a landmark United States Supreme Court
case dealing with civil rights and state laws. It was the first Supreme Court case to deal with LGBT rights since Bowers v. Hardwick
(1986), when the Court had ruled that a law criminalizing homosexual sex was constitutional.
An amendment to the Colorado
state constitution ("Amendment 2") that would have prevented any city, town or county in the state from taking any legislative, executive, or judicial action to recognize gay and lesbian citizens as a protected class
was passed by Colorado voters in a referendum
. A state trial court issued a permanent injunction against the amendment, and upon appeal, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the amendment was subject to "strict scrutiny
" under the Equal Protection Clause
. The state trial court, upon remand, concluded that the amendment could not pass strict scrutiny, which the Colorado Supreme Court agreed with upon review. Upon appeal to the United States Supreme Court, the Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the amendment did not even pass the rational basis test, let alone strict scrutiny. The decision in Romer set the stage for Lawrence v. Texas
(2003), where the Court overruled its decision in Bowers.
wrote the majority opinion, and was joined by John Paul Stevens
, Sandra Day O'Connor
, David Souter
, Ruth Bader Ginsburg
, and Stephen Breyer
.
Rejecting the state's argument that Amendment 2 merely blocked gay people from receiving "special rights", Kennedy wrote:
Kennedy argued that protection offered by antidiscrimination laws was not a "special right" because they protected fundamental rights already enjoyed by all other citizens. Though antidiscrimination laws "enumerated" certain groups that they protected, this merely served to put others on notice (i.e., the enumeration was merely declaratory).
Instead of applying "strict scrutiny
" to Amendment 2 (as Colorado Supreme Court had required) Kennedy wrote that it did not even meet the much lower requirement of having a rational relationship to a legitimate government purpose:
And:
Kennedy did not go into depth in rejecting the claims put forward in support of the law (protecting the rights of landlords to evict gay tenants if they found homosexuality morally offensive, etc.) because he held that the law was so unique as to "confound this normal process of judicial review" and "defies...conventional inquiry." This conclusion was supported by his assertion that "It is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort." Finding that "laws of the kind now before us raise the inevitable inference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons affected," the Court implied that the passage of Amendment 2 was born of a "bare...desire to harm a politically unpopular group".
wrote a dissent, which was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas
. Scalia wrote:
Scalia argued that Amendment 2 did not deny homosexuals access to the political process but merely made it more difficult to enact laws that they favored. He noted that the majority's result stood in flat contradiction to the court's earlier decision in Bowers v. Hardwick
, 478 U.S. 186
(1986), in which it had ruled that laws outlawing sodomy
are not unconstitutional. That was based on the fact that Bowers had rejected a rational-basis challenge to sodomy laws on the grounds that traditional moral disapproval furnished such a rational basis. Scalia noted:
However Scalia’s reliance on the reasoning used in Bowers was undermined in 2003 when the Supreme Court overruled Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas
.
Justice Scalia also asked how the holding of the majority could be reconciled with Davis v. Beason
, :
Against what he saw as judicial activism
, he wrote:
Justice Scalia stated that the Court should take no part in what is termed the "culture war". After quoting a passage from Murphy v. Ramsey, , which had praised governmental favoring of heterosexual monogamy, Justice Scalia wrote the following:
The dissent ends as follows:
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
case dealing with civil rights and state laws. It was the first Supreme Court case to deal with LGBT rights since Bowers v. Hardwick
Bowers v. Hardwick
Bowers v. Hardwick, , is a United States Supreme Court decision that upheld, in a 5-4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults when applied to homosexuals. Seventeen years after Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court...
(1986), when the Court had ruled that a law criminalizing homosexual sex was constitutional.
An amendment to the Colorado
Colorado
Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...
state constitution ("Amendment 2") that would have prevented any city, town or county in the state from taking any legislative, executive, or judicial action to recognize gay and lesbian citizens as a protected class
Protected class
Protected class is a term used in United States anti-discrimination law. The term describes characteristics or factors which can not be targeted for discrimination and harassment...
was passed by Colorado voters in a referendum
Referendum
A referendum is a direct vote in which an entire electorate is asked to either accept or reject a particular proposal. This may result in the adoption of a new constitution, a constitutional amendment, a law, the recall of an elected official or simply a specific government policy. It is a form of...
. A state trial court issued a permanent injunction against the amendment, and upon appeal, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the amendment was subject to "strict scrutiny
Strict scrutiny
Strict scrutiny is the most stringent standard of judicial review used by United States courts. It is part of the hierarchy of standards that courts use to weigh the government's interest against a constitutional right or principle. The lesser standards are rational basis review and exacting or...
" under the Equal Protection Clause
Equal Protection Clause
The Equal Protection Clause, part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, provides that "no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"...
. The state trial court, upon remand, concluded that the amendment could not pass strict scrutiny, which the Colorado Supreme Court agreed with upon review. Upon appeal to the United States Supreme Court, the Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the amendment did not even pass the rational basis test, let alone strict scrutiny. The decision in Romer set the stage for Lawrence v. Texas
Lawrence v. Texas
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 , is a landmark United States Supreme Court case. In the 6-3 ruling, the Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas and, by proxy, invalidated sodomy laws in the thirteen other states where they remained in existence, thereby making same-sex sexual activity legal in...
(2003), where the Court overruled its decision in Bowers.
Supreme Court ruling
The case was argued on October 10, 1995. On May 20, 1996, the court ruled 6-3 that Colorado's Amendment 2 was unconstitutional, though on different reasoning than the Colorado courts. Justice Anthony KennedyAnthony Kennedy
Anthony McLeod Kennedy is an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, having been appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. Since the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor, Kennedy has often been the swing vote on many of the Court's politically charged 5–4 decisions...
wrote the majority opinion, and was joined by John Paul Stevens
John Paul Stevens
John Paul Stevens served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from December 19, 1975 until his retirement on June 29, 2010. At the time of his retirement, he was the oldest member of the Court and the third-longest serving justice in the Court's history...
, Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor is an American jurist who was the first female member of the Supreme Court of the United States. She served as an Associate Justice from 1981 until her retirement from the Court in 2006. O'Connor was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981...
, David Souter
David Souter
David Hackett Souter is a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served from 1990 until his retirement on June 29, 2009. Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat vacated by William J...
, Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Ginsburg was appointed by President Bill Clinton and took the oath of office on August 10, 1993. She is the second female justice and the first Jewish female justice.She is generally viewed as belonging to...
, and Stephen Breyer
Stephen Breyer
Stephen Gerald Breyer is an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and known for his pragmatic approach to constitutional law, Breyer is generally associated with the more liberal side of the Court....
.
Rejecting the state's argument that Amendment 2 merely blocked gay people from receiving "special rights", Kennedy wrote:
- To the contrary, the amendment imposes a special disability upon those persons alone. Homosexuals are forbidden the safeguards that others enjoy or may seek without constraint.
Kennedy argued that protection offered by antidiscrimination laws was not a "special right" because they protected fundamental rights already enjoyed by all other citizens. Though antidiscrimination laws "enumerated" certain groups that they protected, this merely served to put others on notice (i.e., the enumeration was merely declaratory).
Instead of applying "strict scrutiny
Strict scrutiny
Strict scrutiny is the most stringent standard of judicial review used by United States courts. It is part of the hierarchy of standards that courts use to weigh the government's interest against a constitutional right or principle. The lesser standards are rational basis review and exacting or...
" to Amendment 2 (as Colorado Supreme Court had required) Kennedy wrote that it did not even meet the much lower requirement of having a rational relationship to a legitimate government purpose:
- Its sheer breadth is so discontinuous with the reasons offered for it that the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.
And:
- [Amendment 2] is at once too narrow and too broad. It identifies persons by a single trait and then denies them protection across the board. The resulting disqualification of a class of persons from the right to seek specific protection from the law is unprecedented in our jurisprudence.
Kennedy did not go into depth in rejecting the claims put forward in support of the law (protecting the rights of landlords to evict gay tenants if they found homosexuality morally offensive, etc.) because he held that the law was so unique as to "confound this normal process of judicial review" and "defies...conventional inquiry." This conclusion was supported by his assertion that "It is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort." Finding that "laws of the kind now before us raise the inevitable inference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons affected," the Court implied that the passage of Amendment 2 was born of a "bare...desire to harm a politically unpopular group".
Dissent
Justice Antonin ScaliaAntonin Scalia
Antonin Gregory Scalia is an American jurist who serves as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. As the longest-serving justice on the Court, Scalia is the Senior Associate Justice...
wrote a dissent, which was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas
Clarence Thomas
Clarence Thomas is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Succeeding Thurgood Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the Court....
. Scalia wrote:
- [Amendment 2 is] a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a politically powerful minority to revise those mores through use of the laws. That objective, and the means chosen to achieve it, are [...] unimpeachable under any constitutional doctrine hitherto pronounced.
Scalia argued that Amendment 2 did not deny homosexuals access to the political process but merely made it more difficult to enact laws that they favored. He noted that the majority's result stood in flat contradiction to the court's earlier decision in Bowers v. Hardwick
Bowers v. Hardwick
Bowers v. Hardwick, , is a United States Supreme Court decision that upheld, in a 5-4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults when applied to homosexuals. Seventeen years after Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court...
, 478 U.S. 186
Legal citation
Legal citation is the practice of crediting and referring to authoritative documents and sources. The most common sources of authority cited are court decisions , statutes, regulations, government documents, treaties, and scholarly writing....
(1986), in which it had ruled that laws outlawing sodomy
Sodomy
Sodomy is an anal or other copulation-like act, especially between male persons or between a man and animal, and one who practices sodomy is a "sodomite"...
are not unconstitutional. That was based on the fact that Bowers had rejected a rational-basis challenge to sodomy laws on the grounds that traditional moral disapproval furnished such a rational basis. Scalia noted:
- If it is rational to criminalize the conduct, surely it is rational to deny special favor and protection to those with a self-avowed tendency or desire to engage in the conduct.
However Scalia’s reliance on the reasoning used in Bowers was undermined in 2003 when the Supreme Court overruled Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas
Lawrence v. Texas
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 , is a landmark United States Supreme Court case. In the 6-3 ruling, the Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas and, by proxy, invalidated sodomy laws in the thirteen other states where they remained in existence, thereby making same-sex sexual activity legal in...
.
Justice Scalia also asked how the holding of the majority could be reconciled with Davis v. Beason
Davis v. Beason
Davis v. Beason, 133 U.S. 333 , was a United States Supreme Court case affirming, by a 9-0 vote, that courts of the United States had jurisdiction to hear charges related to polygamy that is part of a religious belief, despite the free exercise clause of the First Amendment to the United States...
, :
- "remains to be explained how §501 of the Idaho Revised Statutes was not an "impermissible targeting" of polygamists, but (the much more mild) Amendment 2 is an "impermissible targeting" of homosexuals. Has the Court concluded that the perceived social harm of polygamy is a "legitimate concern of government," and the perceived social harm of homosexuality is not?"
Against what he saw as judicial activism
Judicial activism
Judicial activism describes judicial ruling suspected of being based on personal or political considerations rather than on existing law. It is sometimes used as an antonym of judicial restraint. The definition of judicial activism, and which specific decisions are activist, is a controversial...
, he wrote:
- Since the Constitution of the United States says nothing about this subject [homosexuality], it is left to be resolved by normal democratic means, including the democratic adoption of provisions in state constitutions.
Justice Scalia stated that the Court should take no part in what is termed the "culture war". After quoting a passage from Murphy v. Ramsey, , which had praised governmental favoring of heterosexual monogamy, Justice Scalia wrote the following:
- "I would not myself indulge in such official praise for heterosexual monogamy, because I think it no business of the courts (as opposed to the political branches) to take sides in this culture war. But the Court today has done so, not only by inventing a novel and extravagant constitutional doctrine to take the victory away from traditional forces, but even by verbally disparaging as bigotry adherence to traditional attitudes."
The dissent ends as follows:
- "Today's opinion has no foundation in American constitutional law, and barely pretends to. The people of Colorado have adopted an entirely reasonable provision which does not even disfavor homosexuals in any substantive sense, but merely denies them preferential treatment. Amendment 2 is designed to prevent piecemeal deterioration of the sexual morality favored by a majority of Coloradans, and is not only an appropriate means to that legitimate end, but a means that Americans have employed before. Striking it down is an act, not of judicial judgment, but of political will. I dissent."
See also
- 1996 in LGBT rights
- Colorado for Family ValuesColorado for Family ValuesColorado for Family Values is a socially conservative advocacy group in Colorado, USA.-Overview:It was co-founded by Tony Marco and Kevin Tebedo in the early 1990s. Will Perkins, a former car dealer from Denver, is the Chairman of the Board...
- Compelling state interest
- List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 517
- List of United States Supreme Court cases
- Lists of United States Supreme Court cases by volume
- List of United States Supreme Court cases by the Rehnquist Court
Further reading
- William M. Eskridge, Jr. "The Supreme Court's Regime-Shifting Opinion in Romer v. Evans (1996)." Pages 278-289 in Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America 1861-2003. New York: Viking, 2008. ISBN 9780670018628