From: WAND_M@gold.colorado.edu
Subject: Amendment repeal unprecedented
Followup-To: amend2-discuss@cs.colorado.edu
Originator: doherty@ucsu.Colorado.EDU
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Distribution: usa
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 05:54:50 GMT

By Fred Brown, an associate editor and political editor
of The Denver Post
December 9, 1992

State Rep. Sam Williams says he'll try to persuade the 1993 Colorado 
Legislature to give voters another shot at the state's troublesome 
anti-gay-rights Amendment 2.

It will be hard enough getting the legislature to approve an "Oops! Sorry!" 
ballot issue.  It takes a two-thirds vote, and legislators have been cowed by 
the intensity of this year's electoral discontent.

But even if lawmakers do put the question on the ballot, history argues 
against repeal.  Fat chance, says history.

Since Colorado started having citizen-initiated constitutional amendments 80 
years ago, there have been only two successful repeals.  Neither of them was at 
all controversial.

There were two other attempted repeals--involving emotional "family values" 
issues--and both failed miserably.

Of 29 successful citizen-initiated constitutional amendments between 1912 and 
1990--the three that passed this year don't count yet--the only two 
subsequently repealed by voters were a $45-a-month old-age pension and an 
obsolete provision banning state funds for the 1976 Winter Olympics.

The pension law was more of a fix-up job--the sort of thing legislators might 
eventually try with this year's other politically incorrect Amendment, No. 1.  
The legislature at some future election may well offer voters a comprehensive 
tax package that defangs the most restrictive parts of Amendment 1.  Its 
creator, Douglas Bruce, won't stand for even one comma being changed, but 
voters might, so long as the basic vote-on-taxes, limit-spending philosophy is 
retained.

Pension repair took 20 years, from 1936 to 1956, and at least three failed 
ballot issues.  The Olympics provision was on the books 18 years, until it was 
removed by a 1990 tidy-up amendment.

The two more recent attempted repeals are more illustrative, because they 
involved the same kind of left-vs.-right anger that Amendment 2 has stirred up.

Liberals first.  Colorado, in 1972, was one of the first states to adopt an 
Equal Rights Amendment for its own state constitution.  The legislature 
referred the women's rights amendment to the voters and it passed easily, with 
a 28 percent margin.  Conservatives tried four years later to repeal the state 
ERA, but their attempt failed by a 20 percent margin.

A similar thing happened with a conservative-backed 1984 provision that banned 
using public funds for abortions.  Its winning margin was microscopic, less 
than eight-tenths of a percentage point.  Liberals took heart from that, but 
their attempt to repeal the provision at the next presidential election, in 
1988, lost by more than 20 percentage points.

It seems that once Coloradans make up their minds, they don't appreciate anyone 
telling them they made a mistake.

That's not to say that acute embarrassment over Amendment 2--plus lost 
convention dollars--won't make a difference.  Colorado has an inferiority 
complex as it is, and all the ire over Amendment 2 only adds to this sense of 
civic insecurity.

Arizona had a similar problem for five years because it wouldn't recognize the 
birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. as a holiday.  The problem was spawned by a 
1987 executive order rescinding the holiday, but petition-initiated attempts to 
reinstate it failed at the polls in 1990.

The state was boycotted.  Conventions--even the 1993 Super Bowl--went 
elsewhere.  This year Arizonans finally set aside a day to commemorate King.

But if a King holiday had become a ballot issue elsewhere, it's unlikely many 
states would be observing an MLK day today.  Voters don't always do the 
politically correct thing, and therein may lie Colorado's earliest chance for a 
reprieve from its bad national press.

Conservatives want to get Amendment 2 clones on the ballots in 20 other states 
in two years.  Some of them may well adopt their own PR problems in 1994, 
deflecting the tirade against Colorado.

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