A steady stream of victories for the LGBT community, including the right to obtain marriage licenses in many states including Colorado, has been a boost to those who favor civil rights for all.
Boulder County has been at the heart of this struggle for decades, now. From County Clerk Clela Rorex in the 1970s to today’s Clerk Hillary Hall, Boulder County clerks have been Colorado trail blazers in issuing gay marriage licenses here. Today, that hard-won fought means Coloradans all over the state have marriage equality.
Research commissioned by The Community Foundation’s TRENDS report shows that 74 percent of those surveyed think the county is open and accepting to the LGBT community members. (That compares with just a 40 percent who believe we are open to immigrants and racial minorities.)
Despite these strides, challenges remain.
Last week, in March 2015, a pair of bills were floated at the statehouse. The bills were aimed at granting permission to secular businesses to use their owners’ religious views to deny services to LGBT customers. The would-be laws would allow a baker to bake wedding cakes, but refuse service to gays and lesbians, even though the state has ruled that they can legally wed. Thankfully, the bills died in committee. But similar legislation keeps surfacing — and will continue to surface — in Colorado and beyond.
“They frame this as a freedom of religion issue….” said David Ensign, a Boulder resident who is a board member of the Boulder County AIDS project and previously board president of OUT Boulder. “But once a society decides that a group of people may not be discriminated against, churches can’t engage in that discriminatory behavior in the public sphere even if their religion tells them they must.
“In fact, a baker may refuse to bake a cake with an offensive message on it if that message does not meet their standards. But they must apply that policy fairly, and not target populations that ‘we the people’ have decided that you may no longer target.”
Considering that an anti-discrimination law designed to protect gays and lesbians from unfair treatment was passed in the City of Boulder in 1973, the fact that these ideas keep being promoted by some lawmakers may be surprising. That bill was controversial at the time, and caused a political upheaval. But the fact that advocates are still fighting against pro-discriminatory legislation more than 40 years later proves that the road to civil rights for all is not an easy one.
The Community Foundation’s Open Door Fund supports the LGBT community through grant-making, collaboration and support. Its signature event, The 18th Annual Open Door Fund Gala, is scheduled for April 11, 2015, at the St. Julien in Boulder. The speaker this year is renowned public figure Ash Beckham. For more information, go to: http://opendoorfund.org/dinner.html
Beckham will also be joining OUT Boulder’s Mardi Moore and TRENDS Director Erika Stutzman to talk about issues facing LGBT residents, including area youth. That discussion will be at 8:30 a.m. Monday, March 23, 2015, on “A Public Affair” on KGNU.
