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Making the "Hate State" · Hate State

0:00
SPEAKER_10: We were watching the election returns at a place called Mammoth Gardens.
0:04
SPEAKER_10: They had this big board up showing, you know, the returns coming in.
0:08
SPEAKER_10: And Amendment Two was losing when we first got there.
0:13
SPEAKER_10: And so we were like, oh yeah, wow, it looks looks it's really looking good.
0:17
SPEAKER_10: And then as returns came from, you know, further out in the rural parts of Colorado, it flipped from what it was.
0:26
SPEAKER_10: And it was, I just remember feeling this ghastly, icy feeling going down my spine, like this is horrible.
0:36
SPEAKER_10: We are now in a new world.
0:38
SPEAKER_10: There was just a feeling of desperation, and you know, it it was personal for people.
0:46
SPEAKER_10: It was like, I know people in my family voted for this.
0:50
SPEAKER_10: I know people I work with voted for this, and they didn't know what they were doing, and they don't know how much it hurts me.
1:02
SPEAKER_12: This is Phil Nash, and he's talking about an election that changed the course of his life.
1:08
SPEAKER_12: Sound familiar?
1:10
SPEAKER_06: The election he's talking about happened in 1992.
1:15
SPEAKER_06: That year, Colorado voters were presented with an unusual question on their ballots.
1:22
SPEAKER_06: It was a proposed state constitutional amendment that decreed the following.
1:27
SPEAKER_07: An amendment to Article II of the Colorado Constitution to prohibit the state of Colorado and any of its political subdivisions from adopting or enforcing any law or policy which provides that homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation, conduct, or relationships constitutes or entitles a person to claim any minority or protected status, quota preferences, or discrimination.
2:02
SPEAKER_10: Their effort was to enshrine anti-gay discrimination in the state constitution.
2:09
SPEAKER_12: The Wild West, the Weed State, John Denver's Pride and Joy.
2:14
SPEAKER_12: No matter how much you know about Colorado, you probably think of our state as a place where people get to do what they want.
2:21
SPEAKER_12: A freedom to make your own choices and be left alone.
2:27
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, and in the last couple decades, our state has routinely passed legislation protecting the rights of queer and trans people.
2:35
SPEAKER_06: Conversion therapy is outlawed in Colorado.
2:46
SPEAKER_12: From where I sit in Denver, I know Colorado to be a welcoming safe haven of sorts for LGBTQ Americans.
2:53
SPEAKER_12: But it wasn't always this way.
2:56
SPEAKER_12: Back in the 90s, the landscape of LGBTQ rights in Colorado and America was pretty stark, especially outside of big cities like Denver.
3:06
SPEAKER_06: You could even say there were actually two completely different Colorados happening all at once.
3:12
SPEAKER_06: And in 1992, those two Colorados ended up on a collision course over an amendment so egregious.
3:21
SPEAKER_06: It earned Colorado a big, bad nickname.
3:46
SPEAKER_06: I'm Xandra McMahon, and this is Hate State, a series about the two Colorados that have been battling it out over LGBTQ rights for almost half a century.
3:57
SPEAKER_06: And how the state became a testing ground for far-right legislation across the country.
4:13
SPEAKER_12: As we're recording this, Coloradans are about to vote on two measures that could have big impacts for trans people.
4:20
SPEAKER_12: One ballot measure would ban gender-affirming surgeries for minors, which right now are not a common practice in Colorado, anyways.
4:28
SPEAKER_06: The other measure would ban trans kids from the school sports of their choice.
4:33
SPEAKER_06: Colorado is one of at least five states that have put ballot measures like this in front of voters in recent years.
4:40
SPEAKER_06: This year, there's also Arizona, Missouri, Nebraska, and Washington.
4:47
SPEAKER_06: So in this series, we're trying to figure out two things.
4:51
SPEAKER_06: The first, why Colorado?
4:54
SPEAKER_06: Why is it so often the place where anti-LGBTQ initiatives get battle tested, packaged up, and imported to other states?
5:03
SPEAKER_12: And two, could Colorado's history as the hate state make a comeback?
5:09
SPEAKER_12: It's like every few years in this country, someone decides that the way to win an election is to make one group of people's lives a little less livable.
5:18
SPEAKER_12: The target changes, but the playbook doesn't.
5:22
SPEAKER_06: This is a story about Colorado, but it's also a story about Florida and Texas and Tennessee and Ohio and maybe wherever you're listening from right now.
5:34
SPEAKER_06: Because what happened here, it didn't stay here.
5:37
SPEAKER_06: And there's always another election around the corner.
5:48
SPEAKER_06: All right, Ann, in order to understand how we get to Amendment Two and eventually to Colorado becoming this like unthinkable hate state, we have to go back.
6:00
SPEAKER_06: Way back, actually, to the 1940s, World War II.
6:04
SPEAKER_06: World War II.
6:05
SPEAKER_06: Xander, we don't have to go back that far.
6:07
SPEAKER_06: No, no, no.
6:08
SPEAKER_06: It's okay.
6:08
SPEAKER_06: It's okay.
6:08
SPEAKER_06: We won't hang out in World War II for very long, but there are some important characteristics of Colorado we should set up.
6:14
SPEAKER_06: Specifically, Colorado Springs.
6:17
SPEAKER_06: Uh that happens to be my hometown.
6:19
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
6:19
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
6:20
SPEAKER_12: Let's hear it.
6:21
SPEAKER_06: So Colorado Springs has always been a big military town.
6:25
SPEAKER_06: So it's home to tons of bases.
6:27
SPEAKER_06: NORAD, the U.S.
6:28
SPEAKER_06: and Canada's joint air defense organization is there.
6:31
SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah, that's Santa trackers.
6:33
SPEAKER_06: Yes, the people who track Santa Claus.
6:35
SPEAKER_06: So that's headquartered right up in the mountains, right outside of town.
6:38
SPEAKER_06: Uh, the Air Force Academy is also there.
6:41
SPEAKER_06: That's actually where I had my high school graduation.
6:44
SPEAKER_06: Um, and Pikes Peak, the specific purple mountain majesty referenced in the song America the Beautiful, just looms over it all at 14,000 feet.
6:54
SPEAKER_06: So it's a gorgeous place because like you have the Rocky Mountains right up against the city, Garden of the Gods is there.
7:00
SPEAKER_06: That's like this iconic natural landmark, you know, with red rock formations that people have long visited for spiritual experiences.
7:08
SPEAKER_06: But my point in telling you all this is like this otherworldly landscape is where a deluge of defense spending around World War II gets funneled because the springs had been in economic decline for years and basically just started offering up land for free to the government.
7:25
SPEAKER_12: So you could say that defense became the industry of the springs, huh?
7:30
SPEAKER_06: Yes.
7:30
SPEAKER_06: So the city built itself up around the military, and after World War II, you know, without a war, that economic engine starts to stall.
7:40
SPEAKER_11: Uh-oh.
7:41
SPEAKER_06: So the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce sees this reality and thinks, oof, our economy is about to take a hit again, and we need to find some other sector to boost business.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: This is one of the things to emphasize.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: These Christian organizations are businesses.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: You know, they employ people, uh, some of them dozens or hundreds of people, some of them have budgets running into the millions.
8:08
SPEAKER_06: This is Will Schultz, an assistant professor of American religions at the University of Chicago, and the author of the book Jesus Springs: Evangelical Capitalism and the Fate of an American City.
8:20
SPEAKER_06: And can you guess which city that is?
8:23
SPEAKER_12: I certainly have a hunch.
8:25
SPEAKER_06: Yes, Colorado Springs.
8:27
SPEAKER_06: So the city's Chamber of Commerce did such a good job at finding a replacement for the military spending that by the late 80s and early 90s, Colorado Springs is known as the Evangelical Vatican.
8:42
SPEAKER_01: Once you get a reputation in that world for being a good place to do business, word spreads.
8:49
SPEAKER_01: And the people who lead these organizations talk to each other and say, hey, you know, Colorado Springs is a great place for Christian ministries.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: So you get from the 40s onward a kind of chain migration.
9:03
SPEAKER_12: Ah, so that's how Colorado gets organizations like Young Life, that group that teaches teens and college students to try to convert their peers to Christianity.
9:12
SPEAKER_12: Listener, you may have seen their club posters and public high schools around the country.
9:17
SPEAKER_06: I know, I sure did.
9:18
SPEAKER_06: Well, yeah, they bought a ranch in the springs and used it as a summer camp for young people.
9:24
SPEAKER_06: Uh, then the navigators follow Young Life, but this group focuses more on evangelizing to military service members.
9:32
SPEAKER_06: And they're still active on military bases around the country to this day.
9:36
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
9:36
SPEAKER_12: Well, they'll fit right in in Colorado Springs.
9:39
SPEAKER_06: And then in 1953, the navigators actually managed to purchase one of the Springs' most historic properties, Glen Erie Castle.
9:48
SPEAKER_06: Have you ever had tea there, Ann?
9:50
SPEAKER_06: No.
9:51
SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah.
9:51
SPEAKER_06: They do high tea at Glenerie Castle.
9:53
SPEAKER_06: It's this beautiful English Tudor-style mansion that was literally built by the founder of Colorado Springs, William Jackson Palmer.
10:01
SPEAKER_06: Acquiring that property wasn't easy for them to do.
10:04
SPEAKER_06: It was uh pretty, pretty pricey.
10:06
SPEAKER_06: So even uh Billy Graham was in touch with them, ready to give them some money if they needed it.
10:12
SPEAKER_12: Oh, the Billy Graham, one of America's most famous televangelists.
10:16
SPEAKER_12: That's the one.
10:17
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, I do know that these Christian organizations worked swiftly to sew themselves into the fiber of the city.
10:24
SPEAKER_12: And I know that by 1992, 53 ministries called Colorado Springs home.
10:29
SPEAKER_12: For reference, the city had a population of about 300,000 people at that time.
10:33
SPEAKER_12: Definitely not a major city.
10:35
SPEAKER_06: No, and many of those Christian organizations are still headquartered there today.
10:40
SPEAKER_06: You know, the navigators still own and operate Glen Erie Castle.
10:44
SPEAKER_06: Uh, I went to school with a lot of kids involved in Young Life.
10:47
SPEAKER_06: And finally, Focus on the Family, a massive global Christian organization that we're going to talk more about later.
10:54
SPEAKER_06: And you may already be familiar with if you grew up in any kind of conservative Christian environment.
11:00
SPEAKER_06: They build this evangelical mecca of a campus on the north side of the springs where I grew up.
11:06
SPEAKER_06: And let me tell you, Ann, it's four big brick buildings right off the highway, complete with a giant green tube slide that like spirals around the building's exterior.
11:18
SPEAKER_06: And I mean, like every time I rode my bike past that building, I wanted to be on the slide so bad.
11:24
SPEAKER_12: Well, yeah.
11:24
SPEAKER_12: What did they need a slide for?
11:26
SPEAKER_06: They basically have a McDonald's play place within Focus on the Family.
11:30
SPEAKER_06: That's why they need this slide, Ann.
11:32
SPEAKER_06: But my point in all of this is even for families like mine that weren't involved in a church at all, the influence of these evangelical organizations touched every part of the city.
11:44
SPEAKER_06: Like you just simply cannot talk about the identity of Colorado Springs without talking about the military and evangelicalism.
11:52
SPEAKER_12: But why, Xandra?
11:54
SPEAKER_12: I mean, like, did Professor William Schultz tell you anything about what it is that brought these organizations to Colorado in the first place?
12:01
SPEAKER_06: He did.
12:02
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
12:02
SPEAKER_06: One helpful selling point was that it was actually a pretty affordable place to live at the time in the springs.
12:09
SPEAKER_06: So, you know, these organizations didn't all operate with million-dollar budgets.
12:14
SPEAKER_06: A lot of them had people working for very little money, so they needed cheap housing.
12:20
SPEAKER_06: But the big factor was actually taxes.
12:24
SPEAKER_06: And I'll let Will Schultz explain.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: What happens in Colorado Springs and in Colorado is from the 50s to the 80s, this long-running battle over what is religious and what is taxable.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: You know, if a religious organization owns a summer camp, it's not a church, but is it religious?
12:51
SPEAKER_01: Should it be tax exempt?
12:53
SPEAKER_01: Young Life, the first group to move there, uh spends decades litigating this question.
13:00
SPEAKER_01: They own all of these summer camps around Colorado Springs, and they say, hey, we're doing religion here.
13:08
SPEAKER_01: And for a while, the state tax assessors say these things aren't churches, these aren't houses of worship.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: You're just, you know, camping and horseback riding.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: So you don't get an exemption.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: That finally changes in the 1980s.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: The Colorado Supreme Court reverses itself, reverses an earlier decision, and says, no, these camps are religious, and so they don't have to pay property taxes.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: The Colorado legislature at the same time passes a bill essentially saying that it's religious organizations and not the state of Colorado who get to determine what religion is for the purposes of taxes.
13:56
SPEAKER_01: You know, uh James Dobson, the leader of Focus on the Family, said that the tax code saved focus millions of dollars when they moved from California to Colorado.
14:11
SPEAKER_12: It's crazy to me that so much in this country always comes back to friggin' taxes.
14:16
SPEAKER_06: Right?
14:17
SPEAKER_06: And it also feels like a very obvious conflict of interest to me that these churches are the only ones who get to decide whether or not an activity is religious and therefore should not be taxed.
14:29
SPEAKER_06: But what do I know, and I'm just a reporter, not a tax law expert.
14:33
SPEAKER_06: But now I gotta tell you about one more person who was pivotal in this evangelicalization of the springs.
14:40
SPEAKER_06: His name is David Noble.
14:41
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, tell me about him.
14:43
SPEAKER_06: He moved to town in 1962 and is the founder of Summit Ministries.
14:48
SPEAKER_06: That's a Christian leadership training organization.
14:51
SPEAKER_06: And Will Schultz says that Noble is critical to this evangelical movement because he is the bridge from them being what he calls cold warriors to culture warriors, because Noble is through and through anti-communist, and he is convinced that popular culture is undermining America and its values.
15:13
SPEAKER_01: He writes books about how the Beatles are Marxist minstrels, how Bob Dylan is writing music to destroy America.
15:23
SPEAKER_01: So many of these groups have been fiercely, fiercely anti-communist.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: And by the 70s, some of them come to say the real danger of communism is not from the Soviet Union.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: Oh, of course, the Soviet Union is bad, but the real danger is from within.
15:44
SPEAKER_01: It's from groups within America who are promoting communist, socialist, or humanist ideas.
15:55
SPEAKER_12: Oh, wow, we're talking about some classic red scare kind of stuff.
16:00
SPEAKER_12: Okay, I can see how this resistance to secularism and pop culture is gonna spell some trouble because Xandra, let me tell you something.
16:08
SPEAKER_12: While the evangelical businesses are setting up shop in Colorado Springs and tweaking the tax code to fit their needs, a very different community is just starting to form 60 miles to the north in Denver.
16:20
SPEAKER_12: A community that Phil Nash plugs into when he moves to Denver in 1976 with his boyfriend.
16:27
SPEAKER_10: Bob and I had been together for a couple of years when we moved here.
16:31
SPEAKER_10: Because he had lived in Colorado when he was a kid, he'd always been attracted to coming back here.
16:38
SPEAKER_10: So I said, sure, why not?
16:41
SPEAKER_10: People were coming here after college because, well, number one, John Denver had written a song called, you know, Colorado Rocky Mountain High.
16:51
SPEAKER_10: Uh people wanted to come out to ski.
16:54
SPEAKER_10: People thought Coors Beer was just the best thing there was on the planet.
16:59
SPEAKER_10: When I was in college, people would drive out here and come home with a carload uh loaded up with Coors Beer to resell at a profit to sort of fund their fund their education.
17:14
SPEAKER_10: But Denver was not especially open and welcoming to the at that time we called it the gay community.
17:22
SPEAKER_10: We hadn't even really started saying the gay and lesbian community, let alone the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer plus community.
17:31
SPEAKER_10: So we began to plug into um the efforts to create the gay community center like the week after we got here, or at least within the month.
17:44
SPEAKER_12: Phil and Bob are married now.
17:45
SPEAKER_12: Phil likes to say he's been with the same man for over 50 years, but was only able to marry him in year 36.
17:52
SPEAKER_12: The gay community center that Phil helped establish in the late 70s is still active today.
17:57
SPEAKER_12: It's now called the Center on Colfax, and it's behind Denver's huge pride festival every year.
18:04
SPEAKER_12: But in 1978, with Phil at the helm, the Gay Community Center of Colorado was a scrappy group of volunteers helping people navigate big questions about their sexual orientation.
18:24
SPEAKER_10: So, like me, many of the people who were activists in the community at that time had come from other places.
18:32
SPEAKER_10: Local folks, gay and lesbian folks, were more afraid to come out because it would be a reflection on their families, their business associates, the people that they grew up with and went to school with, the people that they went to church or temple or because it it was scary to be out and gay.
18:59
SPEAKER_10: So we had a we had a hotline.
19:01
SPEAKER_10: I mean, all the calls of young people calling in and saying, How do I know if I'm gay?
19:07
SPEAKER_10: Where do I, where can I meet somebody?
19:09
SPEAKER_10: Or people calling and saying, My boyfriend just threw me out, uh, I don't know where to go.
19:16
SPEAKER_10: I I mean, we were dealing with people who were terribly downcast and depressed and just handicapped by by societal oppression.
19:27
SPEAKER_10: And uh, and unlike today, I'm it's hard for I think young people to imagine the level of self-hatred and self-denial and uh just you know the pressure of living your life after 10 o'clock at night as a gay person, but every other hour of the day pretending you're something else.
19:52
SPEAKER_10: We just became a haven for people who were just exploring their first steps out of the closet.
19:59
SPEAKER_12: The center served an important role, giving folks a space to gather beyond the atmosphere of the loud and cramped gay bars.
20:06
SPEAKER_12: And by the way, Denver did have a bustling gay bar scene back then.
20:11
SPEAKER_12: Some of the mainstays are still operating today.
20:13
SPEAKER_06: Oh, are you talking about RR Lounge?
20:16
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, so RR Lounge has been operating as a gay bar on Colfax since the 50s.
20:21
SPEAKER_12: Places like this existed in many major American cities.
20:25
SPEAKER_12: They were lifelines.
20:26
SPEAKER_12: The Center on Colfax's history archives say it started as a mixed bar, which was code at the time for an incognito gay bar.
20:36
SPEAKER_12: And then eventually it established itself publicly as a gay bar in the 70s.
20:41
SPEAKER_12: But as Phil said, people needed spaces to connect outside the bar scene.
20:45
SPEAKER_12: So the center hosted these support groups in the late 70s that were wildly popular.
20:51
SPEAKER_10: One of the programs that was something called the Men's Coming Out Group, which met at a church that I can see right out my window, the Warren United Methodist Church.
21:03
SPEAKER_10: And over the course of about 25 years, this Men's Coming Out group, the founder, said he estimated 25,000 unduplicated individuals would go to these discussion groups at seven o'clock every Monday night at the same place.
21:20
SPEAKER_10: I mean, what a revolutionary thing that was.
21:23
SPEAKER_10: Just a quiet place where you were safe and you could come and meet other gay men and talk about it.
21:30
SPEAKER_12: The center eventually creates a second coming out support group for women, which apparently was so popular, women would be lined up outside the door to get in.
21:39
SPEAKER_12: And you know, Xandra, I think it's worth reiterating that, like Phil said, these groups met in churches sometimes.
21:47
SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
21:47
SPEAKER_06: I mean, Phil mentioned a couple times in our interview that there were a handful of supportive churches in Denver at that time who were very welcoming to the gay community.
21:57
SPEAKER_12: Which was not at all the norm in the Colorado.
22:00
SPEAKER_12: Springs churches, or even at the national level at that time.
22:03
SPEAKER_06: Aaron Powell Yeah, that's right.
22:04
SPEAKER_06: Zooming out from Colorado to the whole country.
22:07
SPEAKER_06: You've got things like the Save Our Children campaign led by Anita Bryant, taking down Florida's ordinance that protected gay people from discrimination in 1977.
22:17
SPEAKER_06: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
22:18
SPEAKER_03: Homosexuals cannot reproduce biologically, but they have to reproduce by recruiting our children.
22:26
SPEAKER_06: And there are religious figures like Jerry Falwell forming the Moral Majority, a political organization for the Christian right with a particular penchant for anti-gay rhetoric during an especially brutal time.
23:01
SPEAKER_10: And it was because Jerry Falwell and his ilk said that AIDS is retribution, is God's retribution for homosexuals disobeying his laws.
23:14
SPEAKER_12: The AIDS crisis ravaged gay communities across the country throughout the 80s.
23:19
SPEAKER_12: It was all over the news, which made gay people vulnerable targets for hate.
23:24
SPEAKER_06: And that target was on the back of Colorado's gay population, too, especially with figures like David Noble in Colorado Springs espousing the same beliefs as the national figures.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: When the gay rights movement becomes, you know, much more public in the 60s and 70s, Noble very easily slots this into his worldview.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: He says, ah, this is just one more manifestation of this godless communism, humanism, whatever you might want to call it.
23:55
SPEAKER_06: And a lot of this hate that we see in the late 70s and 80s starts coming out of a relatively new brand of Christianity called neo-evangelicalism.
24:07
SPEAKER_06: Here's Will Schultz explaining.
24:09
SPEAKER_01: The neo-evangelicals essentially believe the same things as the fundamentalists.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: But they say the fundamentalists had an image problem.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: They were seen as too mean, too intolerant, out of step with modern times.
24:28
SPEAKER_01: We will do things differently.
24:31
SPEAKER_01: We want to make a religion that is in tune with modern culture.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: But a really important part of the neo-evangelical message is that America is a Christian nation.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: It's ordained by God to have a special role in the world.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: And it needs to be brought back to Christianity.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: The aim then is one individual conversions, but you also want the federal government and the broader culture to do things that recognize the dominance of Christianity.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: Even if you can't make everybody Christian, you can get the United States to signal that America is a Christian nation.
25:27
SPEAKER_06: Most of the Christian organizations that migrate to Colorado Springs in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s are this brand or flavor of neo-evangelicalism, including David Noble's summit ministries.
25:41
SPEAKER_06: And that idea that America is a Christian nation should sound familiar.
25:47
SPEAKER_12: I mean, yeah, you can find that premise all over conservative political campaigns today.
25:52
SPEAKER_08: We have always been and still are a nation of prayer.
25:55
SPEAKER_08: This country was founded on biblical principles.
26:00
SPEAKER_08: Period.
26:01
SPEAKER_08: End of story.
26:03
SPEAKER_06: But the split of the two Colorados started coming to a head when a local ordinance in 1977 made these neo-evangelical organizations start to fume.
26:15
SPEAKER_12: Aspen's Local Ordinance 60 was a non-discrimination law to protect people on the basis of sexual orientation.
26:22
SPEAKER_12: It became Colorado's first law protecting gay rights.
26:26
SPEAKER_12: Over the years, Boulder followed suit, and the national attitude towards gay people started shifting.
26:32
SPEAKER_12: And now it's the early 90s.
26:37
SPEAKER_12: Madonna has already co-opted voguing from New York City's ballroom scene and injected it into the mainstream.
26:43
SPEAKER_12: The Golden Girls are debating gay marriage on television.
26:47
SPEAKER_04: Oh, look, I can accept the fact that he's gay, but why does he have to slip a ring on this guy's finger so the whole world will know?
26:55
SPEAKER_06: And you've got lots of movies coming out in the early 90s featuring gay characters, either canonically or implied.
27:03
SPEAKER_06: I'm looking at you, Fried Green Tomatoes.
27:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just a beach armor.
27:09
SPEAKER_06: So with this national tide turning, it makes sense that Denver was eyeing its own comprehensive human rights ordinance.
27:17
SPEAKER_06: And Phil Nash had a front row seat to all the action.
27:21
SPEAKER_10: In the 1980s, a very surprising political thing happened with the election of our first Hispanic mayor, uh Federico Peña.
27:31
SPEAKER_10: He hired gay and lesbian folks in his administration, and later in his administration, I became one of them.
27:38
SPEAKER_10: That enabled a number of activists to uh start working with the Denver City Council to overturn a zoning ordinance.
27:47
SPEAKER_10: It was families-only zoning.
27:49
SPEAKER_10: It was the best neighborhoods in the city.
27:51
SPEAKER_10: So if you were two unmarried people living in the same house, you could be reported by your neighbors as violating the zoning code because you had to be married to live with someone in a house.
28:08
SPEAKER_10: So the group started working with city council to turn over that zoning ordinance, and they were successful.
28:14
SPEAKER_10: That led them to say, okay, now let's use this, these relationships we have with City Council to get Denver a gay rights ordinance, an ordinance protecting on the basis of sexual orientation.
28:28
SPEAKER_12: Denver City Council adopts this ordinance in 1990.
28:31
SPEAKER_12: It's a big win, a sign of a truly changing climate.
28:35
SPEAKER_12: And it seemed like the momentum for progress would head right down the highway to Colorado Springs.
28:40
SPEAKER_06: I want to just pause for a second and note that there is and always have been queer people living in Colorado Springs.
28:48
SPEAKER_06: Like they didn't just magically show up one day when this movement for progress started heading down the highway in the 80s and 90s.
28:54
SPEAKER_06: Actually, dating as far back as 1979, they even had their own local chapter connected to the Gay Community Center in Denver called the Pikes Peak Gay and Lesbian Community Center.
29:06
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, in the 90s, those activists in Colorado Springs decide to follow Denver's lead and enact their own local ordinance protecting gay people from discrimination.
29:15
SPEAKER_12: But this proposed ordinance in the Springs, of course, starts to immediately ring alarm bells in the evangelical churches.
29:22
SPEAKER_06: Yep, especially for David Noble.
29:25
SPEAKER_06: Remember him, Mr.
29:26
SPEAKER_06: Culture Warrior who hates the Beatles and communism?
29:30
SPEAKER_12: And fun.
29:31
SPEAKER_01: David Noble says, All right, well, you know, I warned you, the problem has finally come home.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: It's not just a San Francisco thing.
29:41
SPEAKER_01: It's not just a New York thing.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: It's not even just a Denver Boulder thing.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: The danger is here.
29:48
SPEAKER_12: So David Noble, along with a bunch of evangelical leaders and businessmen around town, create an organization called Colorado for Family Values, or CFV for short.
30:00
SPEAKER_12: They would go on to have a long-lasting impact on the lives of queer people in our state and eventually the country.
30:07
SPEAKER_12: But when they start out, they only have a couple of items on the agenda.
30:11
SPEAKER_12: The first is to campaign hard against the proposed anti-discrimination ordinance in Colorado Springs, which they do defeat.
30:20
SPEAKER_12: The second is to challenge Denver's new anti-discrimination ordinance.
30:25
SPEAKER_06: But increasingly progressive Denver voters saw this challenge from CFV and basically told them to get lost.
30:32
SPEAKER_06: And that's when CFV decides that the only option left is to take this culture fight statewide through an amendment to the state constitution, barring local municipalities from passing these laws like in Aspen and in Denver that protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation.
30:53
SPEAKER_12: That's right.
30:55
SPEAKER_12: This is when CFV drafts Amendment 2, the one we read to you at the start of the show.
31:01
SPEAKER_12: If they get enough signatures to get it on Colorado's 1992 ballot and it passes, then Aspen, Boulder, and Denver all lose their local protections for gay people.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: Tony Marco, an evangelical copywriter, is the person who does most of the work in drafting it.
31:21
SPEAKER_01: And he doesn't do it on his own.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: He works with people from the National Legal Foundation, which is a Virginia-based organization linked to Pat Robertson and the Christian coalition.
31:36
SPEAKER_01: So CFV is homegrown, but they have support from outside Colorado Springs and outside Colorado.
31:45
SPEAKER_01: And in his discussions with this person from the National Legal Foundation, Marco is originally thinking about making the amendment a prohibition on same-sex marriage.
32:00
SPEAKER_01: But the lawyer from the NLF says, no, that's going to make gay people too sympathetic.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: Because they'll be able to say, oh, we just want what everyone else already has.
32:10
SPEAKER_01: We want the right to marry who we love.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: So instead, they grab hold of this vague but really powerful slogan, no special rights, which is just coming into its own in the early 90s.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: Various conservative groups around the country are starting to experiment with this kind of language and attacking gay rights.
32:36
SPEAKER_01: And the claim is that queer people aren't demanding equality.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: They're demanding special rights.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: They want, you know, quotas.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: They want money from the government.
32:52
SPEAKER_01: They want stuff that you, normal straight America, are not getting.
33:02
SPEAKER_12: While the phrase special rights never appears in the actual amendment itself, it's memorable.
33:08
SPEAKER_12: The campaign uses it as a slogan in advertising materials, and canvassers use it when they gather signatures, and it sure feels reminiscent of the way we talk about these issues today.
33:20
SPEAKER_06: But let's go back to Phil Nash, who's working as a speechwriter for a wealthy philanthropist in 1991.
33:26
SPEAKER_06: And he starts hearing more and more buzz about this amendment to campaign and its claims that the gay community, Phil's community, don't just want equal rights, they want special rights.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: It's worth noting how at the same time amendment two is going on in Colorado, there's a similar measure in Oregon called Measure 9, which is a lot more clear and a lot more obviously bigoted.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: Measure nine in Oregon says, oh, you know, queer people are like comparable to pedophiles, you know, they're they're deviants, they have to be stopped.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: That's easy for people to understand and mobilize against.
34:38
SPEAKER_01: And Amendment 2, because it's so vague, and because it has this powerful but kind of ambiguous language of no special rights, it's harder for people to figure out what it even says.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: What does it mean to vote for or against it?
34:54
SPEAKER_06: To combat this intentional ambiguity, Phil takes it upon himself to start writing editorials in the Denver Post about Amendment 2.
35:03
SPEAKER_10: In honor of coming out day, here's my own arbitrary list of the top 10 reasons to vote no on to.
35:10
SPEAKER_10: Amendment two would make Colorado look bad.
35:13
SPEAKER_10: Imagine Colorado in the national limelight as the first state to sanction this question is not, do you like gay people and what they do?
35:21
SPEAKER_10: Rather, it's shall I take away the rights of others who may be different.
35:25
SPEAKER_10: Amendment two guarantees bigots the special right to discriminate.
35:28
SPEAKER_10: What's special about the right not to be fired from a job?
35:32
SPEAKER_10: The right not to be run out of an apartment or neighborhood, the right not to be a few years ago.
35:36
SPEAKER_10: Pro Amendment Two campaign is especially nasty because it turns human lives into political muck.
35:43
SPEAKER_10: Number one, Amendment 2 will hurt people, perhaps someone you love.
35:52
SPEAKER_12: Phil is part of the larger effort by Denver's gay community, which organized their own counter-campaign through a group called Epoch, the Equal Protection Ordinance of Colorado.
36:01
SPEAKER_12: It comprises a lot of the same folks that worked on getting Denver's anti-discrimination ordinance on the books in the first place.
36:08
SPEAKER_06: But the other side spares no expense in their promotion of Amendment 2 and leans on a powerful ally with a Christian media empire at his disposal.
36:19
SPEAKER_06: James Dobson with Focus on the Family.
36:22
SPEAKER_06: Here's Will Schultz again.
36:24
SPEAKER_01: He would take his half-hour Focus on the Family program and say, all right, folks, we're canceling our usual programming because this is an emergency.
36:32
SPEAKER_01: These folks from Colorado for Family Values are going to talk to you about Amendment Two.
36:39
SPEAKER_01: One of their leading purveyors of facts and figures is a social scientist named Paul Cameron who makes a living going from state to state, peddling these really distorted statistics about gay people, purporting to show that gay people, you know, are filthy, disease-ridden, uh, prone to crime.
37:06
SPEAKER_01: He even cites a figure about how lesbians are less likely to wear seatbelts while driving as an indication, you know, that gay people have a death urge.
37:18
SPEAKER_06: CFV also has an army of volunteers through these evangelical organizations willing to go door to door, first canvassing for signatures, like Ann mentioned, to get it on the ballot, and then later to tell people to vote yes on election night.
37:34
SPEAKER_12: Which brings us back to November 3, 1992.
37:38
SPEAKER_12: Bill Clinton is running against incumbent George Bush for president.
37:41
SPEAKER_12: Colorado voters have a whopping 13 statewide measures on their ballot.
37:47
SPEAKER_12: And Phil Nash is ready to watch Amendment 2 go down in flames at the watch party at Mammoth Gardens.
37:55
SPEAKER_10: They had this big board up showing, you know, the returns coming in.
38:00
SPEAKER_10: And Amendment 2 was losing when we first got there.
38:04
SPEAKER_10: So we were like, oh yeah, wow, it looks really looking good.
38:10
SPEAKER_12: I just want to mention real quick that one of the 13 statewide measures that Coloradans were voting on that night included another major piece of Colorado history, the taxpayers' Bill of Rights, or Tabor, as it's often called here.
38:25
SPEAKER_12: We're not going to get into all the details of Tabor on this show, but basically, it was another amendment that changed Colorado's tax system forever.
38:33
SPEAKER_12: Because going forward, it required the state government to get voter approval on any tax increase.
38:39
SPEAKER_12: So it was a huge deal in 1992.
38:42
SPEAKER_12: Along with the Clinton versus Bush presidential run, Tabor took up basically all the oxygen in the room when it came to election coverage that year.
38:51
SPEAKER_12: And that meant that the polling for Amendment 2 went under-reported.
38:56
SPEAKER_10: And then the numbers started to change.
38:59
SPEAKER_10: It got down to like it was even.
39:02
SPEAKER_10: And then as returns came from, you know, further out in the rural parts of Colorado, it flipped from what it was.
39:11
SPEAKER_10: I just remember feeling this ghastly icy feeling going down my spine, like this is horrible.
39:20
SPEAKER_10: We are now in a new world.
39:23
SPEAKER_12: Amendment two passes on election night with a 53% majority.
39:31
SPEAKER_10: People were angry, and people marched spontaneously out of that event center to the downtown hotel where the Democrats were celebrating the victory of Bill Clinton.
39:46
SPEAKER_10: And we stood outside.
39:48
SPEAKER_10: There was a huge rally, uh, spontaneous, and it was volatile.
39:53
SPEAKER_10: I mean, it could have turned violent.
39:55
SPEAKER_10: And finally, both uh Governor Rohmer and Denver Mayor Wellington Webb came out and really tried to console the crowd, you know, calm people down, try to keep people from really becoming violent.
40:10
SPEAKER_10: And the people were so angry, so hurt, it was just totally devastating.
40:19
SPEAKER_06: The crowd eventually dispersed peacefully on election night.
40:23
SPEAKER_06: The next day, a huge rally is held in front of the state capitol where thousands of people show up to protest Amendment 2 carrying signs that read, We will never surrender.
40:34
SPEAKER_06: Colorado's governor Roy Roomer shows up in support, but this one rally isn't going to heal the deep, deep wounds this community is reeling from.
40:44
SPEAKER_10: Not only was it just a you know crushing defeat for the whole community, there was a lot of anger and retribution at the people who led the campaign because they lost.
40:56
SPEAKER_10: We turned on ourselves.
40:58
SPEAKER_10: It was ugly.
40:59
SPEAKER_10: It was really, really ugly.
41:01
SPEAKER_10: And some people felt attacked afterwards for losing.
41:05
SPEAKER_10: It was like maybe the worst thing that ever had happened to them in their lives.
41:09
SPEAKER_10: It was just awful.
41:11
SPEAKER_12: The victory emboldened CFV, leading them to believe that they're on the crest of a moral transformation of the country, and they have the playbook to make it happen.
41:38
SPEAKER_01: There is, for instance, a campaign in Cincinnati the year after Amendment 2.
41:45
SPEAKER_01: Colorado for Family Values provides the majority of the funding for the anti-gay rights movement in Cincinnati.
41:53
SPEAKER_01: And that anti-gay rights movement also uses a slogan of no special rights.
41:59
SPEAKER_01: And in that case, they are successful.
42:02
SPEAKER_06: While CFV is reaching out to other states offering to consult on their own anti-gay campaigns, things continue to decline in Colorado.
42:12
SPEAKER_06: There are a handful of hate crimes that happen in the wake of Amendment 2's passage.
42:17
SPEAKER_06: The most upsetting case that's covered in the news is the case of Ruth Williams.
42:21
SPEAKER_06: She was a psychotherapist in Colorado Springs, and a couple months after the 92 election, she's assaulted in her office by an intruder who tear gasses her, cuts crosses into her hands, and spray paints seek God, stop evil on her walls.
42:37
SPEAKER_06: Some activist groups at the time say hate crimes go up 200% after Amendment 2 passes, but it's unclear if that number was ever confirmed by an official agency.
42:46
SPEAKER_10: AIDS just rolled over us completely.
42:49
SPEAKER_10: And while we were down, we were getting kicked in the teeth.
42:53
SPEAKER_10: That's exactly how it felt.
42:55
SPEAKER_10: There was just a feeling of desperation, and you know, it it was personal for people.
43:03
SPEAKER_10: I know people in my family voted for this.
43:05
SPEAKER_10: I know people I worked with voted for this.
43:08
SPEAKER_10: I know people that live next door to me that voted for this.
43:13
SPEAKER_10: And they didn't know what they were doing, and they don't know how much it hurts me.
43:19
SPEAKER_10: So it wasn't just a political defeat.
43:23
SPEAKER_10: It felt personal to everyone.
43:25
SPEAKER_10: There were suicides afterwards.
43:28
SPEAKER_10: There were people who felt like the right wing and religious arguments against homosexuality actually were right.
43:38
SPEAKER_10: That, you know, that I am not a good person and I don't deserve to live.
44:00
SPEAKER_13: Boycott the hate safe!
44:02
SPEAKER_05: If that law were passed against Jews or people of color, the whole country would be outraged, and nobody would question a boycott of that state.
44:11
SPEAKER_12: Celebrities get involved.
44:12
SPEAKER_12: A national mayor's convention that was supposed to be hosted in Denver gets pulled.
44:17
SPEAKER_12: The miniseries for Stephen King's The Stand was set to film in Boulder, but after Amendment 2 passes, the production moves to film in Utah instead.
44:27
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people in Colorado realize having an image as the hate state is bad for business.
44:35
SPEAKER_06: Which is kind of the ultimate irony here, because the whole point in courting these Christian organizations to Colorado was to boost business.
44:44
SPEAKER_12: It took one election for Colorado to become the hate state.
44:48
SPEAKER_12: It's taken much longer to undo that damage.
44:52
SPEAKER_06: And listen, as a gay person who grew up there, I didn't know this hate state history until I was out of college and working as a journalist.
45:00
SPEAKER_06: So obviously Colorado doesn't stay the hate state forever.
45:04
SPEAKER_06: Clearly, there's some major political shift that's about to take off.
45:08
SPEAKER_12: And that moment actually begins about six months prior to the 1992 election.
45:13
SPEAKER_12: What CFV didn't know, what almost nobody knew, was that while they were out there gathering signatures and rallying their base, someone was already quietly preparing to fight back.
45:26
SPEAKER_06: Her name is Mary Celeste, and on a Sunday morning in 1992, she was having breakfast.
45:42
SPEAKER_11: She said, Well, you have to do something about it.
45:44
SPEAKER_11: I said, What do you mean I have to do something about it?
45:46
SPEAKER_11: And you know, as a lowly general practice attorney, what am I gonna do about it?
45:52
SPEAKER_06: Mary Celeste might not have known it at that breakfast with her partner, but she's about to become a key figure in the case against Amendment 2 that goes all the way up to the U.S.
46:02
SPEAKER_06: Supreme Court.
46:03
SPEAKER_11: We were gonna stop it dead in its tracks with an injunction.
46:10
SPEAKER_12: Next time on Hate State, Amendment 2 is headed to court for a legal battle that spans four years and shapes the next couple of decades of LGBTQ court cases across the country, leaving a legacy we're still feeling today.
46:32
SPEAKER_06: Hate State is a production of Oddbird Sound and Word and Lookout News.
46:36
SPEAKER_12: Our editors and executive producers are Carolina Muriel and Isis Madrid of Pizza Shark.
46:42
SPEAKER_06: This episode was written and produced by me, Alexander McMahon, Ann Maria Wadd, and Chris Fazari.
46:48
SPEAKER_06: Our theme music was composed by Addison Ryder with additional tracks from Epidemic Sound.
46:53
SPEAKER_12: Our engineer is Tyler Hill.
46:55
SPEAKER_12: Subscribe to this podcast to hear the next episode of Hate State.
46:59
SPEAKER_12: Leave us a review or a rating wherever you get your podcasts, and find us on Lookoutnews.org.