Romer v. Evans
Citation and Court
517 U.S. 620 (1996). United States Supreme Court. Justice Kennedy, writing for the Court (6-3).
Facts
After several Colorado municipalities enacted ordinances prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, Colorado voters passed Amendment 2 to the state constitution, which prohibited all legislative, executive, or judicial action at any level of state government designed to protect gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from discrimination. Amendment 2 effectively nullified existing anti-discrimination ordinances and barred future enactment of similar protections. Richard Evans and other plaintiffs challenged the amendment as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
Issue
Does a state constitutional amendment that prohibits all governmental action designed to protect gay and lesbian persons from discrimination violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?
Holding
Yes. Colorado’s Amendment 2 violated the Equal Protection Clause because it imposed a broad disability on a single named group — gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons — without a rational relationship to any legitimate governmental purpose.
Rule / Doctrine
Animus as Irrational Basis: A law that singles out an identifiable group and denies them protections available to all other groups, while serving no purpose other than to disadvantage that group, fails even rational basis review. Bare animus toward a politically unpopular group is not a legitimate governmental interest. A classification must be tied to a genuine purpose and must bear a rational relationship to that purpose; desire to harm a particular group is not a legitimate state interest.
Significance
Romer v. Evans was the Supreme Court’s first major decision protecting gay and lesbian persons under the Equal Protection Clause. It established that laws motivated by animus toward a disfavored group fail rational basis review, a principle later extended in United States v. Windsor (2013), which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Justice Scalia’s dissent, which argued the Court had taken sides in a culture war, frames the ongoing constitutional debate about LGBTQ rights.