BOULDER — Throughout Boulder attorney Jean Dubofsky’s fight against Colorado’s Amendment 2 in the early 1990s, her uncle sent her newspaper clippings of every story written about the issue.

Though it was never discussed directly in her family, Dubofsky knew her uncle was gay. The clippings were his quiet way of thanking Dubofsky for the work she was doing to guarantee equal rights for Colorado’s gays and lesbians.

“He and his partner were a whole part of society that people just never acknowledged,” said Dubofsky, now 74.

Twenty years ago Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court — in a landmark gay rights ruling — struck down Amendment 2, Colorado’s voter-approved ballot initiative that banned state and local laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Dubofsky led the legal fight against Amendment 2, personally arguing the case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Two decades later, she sees echoes of that struggle in the national debate currently raging over transgender rights.

But it wasn’t just her uncle and his partner, who were together for 60 years before their deaths, that inspired Dubofsky to challenge the amendment to the state constitution. A former Colorado Supreme Court justice, Dubofsky had made a career representing women, people with mental health issues, low-income individuals and other populations that were being denied equality.

Colorado voters approved Amendment 2 by a vote of 53 percent to 47 percent in November 1992. By then, Dubofsky and a team of dedicated attorneys and volunteers already had been working for several months on a lawsuit to challenge the law.

Dubofsky, on behalf of Boulder, Denver, Aspen and a handful of individual plaintiffs, including Richard Evans, a gay man who worked for Denver’s mayor, filed suit in Denver District Court seeking to overturn Amendment 2 less than two weeks after its passage.

Those three cities went to court because, prior to Amendment 2’s passage, each had enacted local ordinances prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Had it been adopted, Amendment 2 would have voided those local laws.

“It was very clear that this was against the policies and, even more importantly, against the values of Boulder,” said Leslie Dur gin, who served as the city’s mayor from 1990 to 1997.

Dubofsky said she believes Colorado’s support for third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot in 1992 contributed to the passage of Amendment 2, as people who didn’t typically vote turned out at higher rates that year.

Overturn of the law

In early January 1993, the state court granted a preliminary injunction, stopping the law from taking effect.

Although then-Gov. Roy Romer had opposed Amendment 2, he was named as the defendant in the case. Romer’s administration defended the law before the Colorado Supreme Court, and then the U.S. Supreme Court.

All over the country, Dubofsky and her team found volunteers willing to serve as expert witnesses without pay and lawyers who sat in on depositions free of charge.

“There were more people who wanted to help than we could possibly use,” Dubofsky said.

Dubofsky and then-Colorado Solicitor General Tim Tymkovich faced off before the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 10, 1995. On May 20, 1996, the court ruled 6-3 that Amendment 2 was unconstitutional.

“We must conclude that Amendment 2 classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy, delivering the majority opinion. “This Colorado cannot do. A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.”

In Boulder on that day in 1996, celebrations broke out on the Boulder County Courthouse lawn on Pearl Street, said Durgin, the mayor at the time.

“It was really very, very heartwarming to know justice prevailed in the case,” Durgin said. “There was a pride as part of the immediate outcome, and it was sort of like, ‘You can fight and do the right thing.’

“And in this case, the court upheld our position and it made you think, ‘Huh, the system works.’ “

Dubofsky said she never imagined how quickly opinions about gay and lesbian individuals would change, nor how quickly they would be granted certain rights, such as marriage equality.

She believes the number of people, including well-known people, who came out during and after the Romer vs. Evans decision helped to change public opinion.

“All of a sudden people just started understanding that, ‘Oh, yeah, this is not a mortal danger, this is not a threat, these are the people who’ve already been around me all the time,’ ” she said.

A similar fight

Susan Casey, who served on the Denver City Council from 1996 to 2001, said she believes Romer vs. Evans was one significant reason for that relatively quick sea change.

“If there’s a tipping point or a pivot point or a time when the earth moved and things shifted, it was Romer vs. Evans,” said Casey, who is three years into writing a biography of Dubofsky.

Dubofsky sees parallels between the hostile climate for gay and lesbian individuals in the 1990s and the current backlash against transgender people.

The North Carolina law banning transgender people from bathrooms and locker rooms that do not match the gender on their birth certificates also blocks local governments from passing anti-discrimination rules for transgender people.

That law, like Amendment 2 in Colorado, was prompted by an anti-discrimination ordinance approved by the state’s largest city, Charlotte.

Many people boycotted Colorado during the months leading up to and after the vote on Amendment 2. Similarly, people are calling for boycotts of North Carolina.

Dubofsky said she has no doubt that the North Carolina law will be declared unconstitutional.

“It’s so hard for someone to be transgender, and to hurt them is, in my way of thinking, just inexcusable,” Dubofsky said.