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"Looks to me that Roberts took the side of people who overturned the will of the people in a"statewide referendum". Sexual orientation is not a protected class of people except by judicial fiat."

from the RomervEvans:
It imposes a broad disability upon those persons alone, forbidding them, but no others, to seek specific legal protection from injuries caused by discrimination in a wide range of public and private transactions. Pp. 4-9.

(b) In order to reconcile the Fourteenth Amendment's promise that no person shall be denied equal protection with the practical reality that most legislation classifies for one purpose or another, the Court has stated that it will uphold a law that neither burdens a fundamental right nor targets a suspect class so long as the legislative classification bears a rational relation to some independent and legitimate legislative end. See, e.g., Heller v. Doe, 509 U.S. 312, 319 -320. Amendment 2 fails, indeed defies, even this conventional inquiry. First, the amendment is at once too narrow and too broad, identifying persons by a single trait and then denying them the possibility of protection across the board. This disqualification of a class of persons from the right to obtain specific protection from the law is unprecedented and is itself a denial of equal protection in the most literal sense.

Seems our laws and courts should try to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority..I have mixed feelings on this issue ..the people voted on it but was the way the referendum written a wise one - may I even suggest it was set up to fail in court- as conservatives we must support private property rights but we must be smart also in not letting our opponents set us up with poorly designed referendums.??

If the referendum in question didn't deny the right of homosexuals to protection under the law as persons and as citizens (and I don't see how it could) than it only defined homosexuality as a distinction that wasn't accorded protection under the constitution of Colorado. This SCOTUS ruling placed homosesxuality in the same catagory of distinction as black and female.

Homosexuality is rightly viewed as a destructive behavior and the people of Colorado voted not to give this trait legal protection. Sometimes discrimination is a good thing.

I'm a Roberts supporter but this is a little worrisome. The court's ruling in this case was horrendous, and could set the precedent for overturning all the gay "marriage" bans that have been enacted by state voters recently.

Several years ago, Colorado voters approved a state constitutional amendment barring the enactment of so-called gay rights laws in their state. The reason for this was that politicians kept passing (or trying to pass) these laws despite public opposition to them. We're seeing a similar thing in California right now where some politicians are trying to engineer gay "marriage" in that state even though voters passed a law banning it.

But in Colorado the voters had not yet acted, so they did so. They approved the amendment banning gay rights laws on a state referendum. By a 6-3 majority, joined in by Justices Kennedy & O'Connor, the court ruled that the amendment was unconstitutional. The reasoning was spurious, and could be used to ban just about any law or amendment the liberals don't like. They argued that an amendment to the state constitution banning gay rights ordinances deprived gays of "equal protection" since they couldn't pass such laws without first repealing the aforementioned amendment. So the presence of the amendment constituted an additional barrier for gays to overcome that, for example, supporters of a law banning discrimination against the elderly wouldn't face.

But that's a ridiculous argument. By definition a constitutional amendment is a barrier. Opponents of free speech, for instance, would have to repeal the first amendment before they could pass their desired laws. The 15th amendment bans racial discrimination in voting. Gender discrimination in voting wasn't banned until many years later via the 19th amendment. But that doesn't mean that in the meantime the 15th amendment was unconstitutional since it placed a barrier on those who would deny blacks the vote while not placing such a barrier on those who would deny women the vote.

The irony of all this is that judicial fiats, which this ruling was, impose barriers on the democratic process just as constitutional amendments do, only WITHOUT public participation in the process. Opponents of abortion, as an example, are denied the ability to pass a ban on abortion because of Roe vs. Wade. The same would be true if there was a legitimately ratified constitutional amendment banning anti-abortion laws, but at least that would have been enacted via legitimate processes.

The Romer vs. Evans case essentially gives the court carte blanche to void any state constitutional amendment they don't like on the grounds that the very presence of the amendment imposes a barrier on those who want to enact laws violating it. It's worrisome if Roberts was involved in this. I hope there's a good explanation.