The Nation's Pulse / The Hate State
Shiflett, Dave
Denver W hen the Colorado Rockies opened their first homestand at Mile High Stadium on April 9 (Good Friday, as was pointed out with varying degrees of horror and glee), President Bill Clinton was...
...Other more traditional members ofthe community had a difficult time keeping up: "horses," which are very popular here, were mentioned in 672 articles, while the popular "trout" were found in 423...
...After all, it is very hard to gauge any ill effects from A2, as the amendment was blocked by a court injunction on January 22—before it could even go into effect...
...But we really can't justify spending a dime on filming exteriors, titles, or location scenes in your state...
...N o one saw this drama coming, and Colorado's story may be instructive for the nation at large, especially those states preparing to float similar amendments (at this writing such measures are being drawn up in California, Idaho, Washington, Michigan, Florida, and Maine...
...Extortion...
...But if there has been noise, there have also been many, many tourists—perhaps more than ever before...
...Amendment 2," however, was mentioned in 653 stories, while the word "homosexual" appeared in 876...
...in the spirit of the day it is explained that the boycott, like the Rapture, is expected by many but has yet to arrive...
...A new plan of attack may be in order...
...This sounds like the discreet sort of warfare Bill might volunteer for...
...The winter snows were falling on the high country slopes even as the votes were counted, but economic doom was rolling our way...
...Heterosexuals" limped in with 145 mentions, outdoing "prairie dogs," but not by a lot...
...The ski season saw a 5-percent increase in lift-ticket sales over last year (9.87 million, up from 9.40 million)—the biggest year yet...
...Martina Navratilova, the famous lesbian tennis player, Aspen resident, and woman of a hard, biker sort of beauty, threatened to move...
...Nonetheless, the anti-2 campaign was quickly taken up by the living and the Dead (the Grateful Dead, that is) and was even extended to make-believe land, as explained by David Lee, who had planned to set a spinoff from the "Cheers" television show in Denver...
...Police officials pointed out that all of the gays who had been murdered in 1992 may have been killed by other gays, but that information didn't seem to matter...
...Robin has a point...
...The bowels of outrage immediately broke loose...
...Many had hoped that Bill, known in baseball circles as "Nookie Dog," would throw out the historic first pitch—picture him on the mound, scanning the stands for any sets of uncrossed legs before letting go a fastball—but according to Rocky Mountain News society columnist Bill Husted, the president may have backed out in order to keep solidarity with gay activists, who called for a tourist and business boycott of Colorado after state voters approved Amendment 2 last November, which bans laws giving protected status to homosexuals...
...The front page of the post-election morning paper carried a picture of Gov...
...Convention cancellations through 1999 are running at about $35 million, but tourism officials believe most, if not all, will be made up in new bookings (the state's annual tourist business brings in $6 billion a year...
...espite these troubling facts, in D May the boycott was deemed an "unqualified success" by national gay leaders, and a few days later a group of activists gathered in New York to chant "We're queer, we're here, we won't drink Coors beer...
...In the same spirit, the ad hoc New York Boycott Colorado demanded that the president of Celestial Seasonings, the Boulder-based tea company, hand over $100,000 to fight for repeal of the amendment: otherwise NYBC promised to picket stores carrying the tea until it was removed from the menu...
...Most definitely...
...The most significant instrument of repeal, of course, was to be a national boycott of Colorado, which would cause natives to reconsider their votes and also drive home the point that such initiatives would be ruinous to any state stupid enough to follow suit...
...A search of the Rocky Mountain News's electronic library for 1992-93 reflects the level of obsession...
...Ten percent of the population is homosexual, we were reminded: "your brothers, your sisters, your mailman," etc., etc...
...Anti-sodomy laws were repealed in the early 1970s and 70 percent of residents recently polled said homosexual relations between adults are not wrong...
...It's not known if Barbra or Whoopi are aware of that, but they may be interested in one more piece of information...
...With the Rockies now playing in Mile High Stadium and the Pope due in August for World Youth Day, the summer season may also break records...
...A suicide was blamed on the amendment's passage while activists reported an upsurge in anti-gay violence, which was duly noted in the New York Times's call for a boycott...
...In short, there was much, much noise: Colorado even suffered the indignity of having People for the American Way open a Boulder office this spring, so concerned is Norman Lear about the powerof the "religious right" to pass such an amendment (the Rocky Mountain West has the lowest incidence of churchgoing in the United States...
...A couple of months after the vote, as the boycott raged, Coloradans were asked if they would vote the same way...
...On election night gay activists took over the Democratic Party's victory celebration in downtown Denver, putting a damper on the party's first presidential win in Colorado since LBJ...
...ut hate was the preferred explanaB tion, and suddenly Coloradans found themselves in the same class as the dread Afrikaners, despite the fact that most people in the state are tolerant of everything short of sex with pigs (and only underage pigs at that...
...Various ACLU chapters have also taken the no-hate pledge, along with several convention groups, including the big-spending National Organization for Women...
...There is a price to pay for such legislation, though many probably won't consider it prohibitive...
...Prominent Coloradans were accosted during visits.to faraway places: Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, whose stepson is gay, was set upon during a trip to New York by an organization called the Lesbian Avengers...
...Or so we were told...
...It is hard to tell, but ski industry officials say the number of people boarding planes at area resorts rose 4.4 percent...
...Roy Romer at a hastily called anti–Amendment 2 rally at the state capitol: Roy held a protest sign...
...if so, he joins other prominent Americans who have sworn not to set foot in the Hate State (as Colorado is now known in some circles) until the initiative is repealed...
...The newspapers, meanwhile, have been full of A2-related stories, very few of them favorable...
...That's a lot of high-profile support, and boycott organizers promised at the outset that they had a lot more friends out there who could, and would, do maximum damage to the state's economy...
...But things haven't turned out that way...
...Denver W hen the Colorado Rockies opened their first homestand at Mile High Stadium on April 9 (Good Friday, as was pointed out with varying degrees of horror and glee), President Bill Clinton was absent...
...Pat Schroeder, who represents Denver, published a letter in the Denver Post promising to overcome the vote at the federal level...
...In postelection surveys, many amendment supporters stated not an aversion to homosexuality but a revulsion to the creation of another politically favored group...
...A campaign to demonize A2 supporters was launched: a yes vote could be attributed, in most cases, to hate, though another explanation was that some who supported the amendment had been confused as to what it really meant...
...A visitor from the East looks around and asks how the protest is going...
...A dramatic scene, but perhaps not entirely justified...
...Maybe it has something to do with those reports, very common since the November vote, about the homosexual population being closer to one percent than to ten...
...Among them: James Taylor, Whoopi Goldberg, Barbra Streisand, the Kennedy family (who skied in Utah over Christmas to show their willingness to sacrifice), and the city governments of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta (where homosexual and heterosexual sodomy can still get you jailed...
...The summer season is ahead, to be sure, but few expect a drop in the usual 9 million or so tourist visits...
...A speakinginvitation to Connie Chung was withdrawn after a local network rep said he could not, in good conscience, ask this most influential of personages to appear in Colorado and thus seem to take sides in the debate...
...Many Coloradans await word on how former Colorado resident Roseanne Barr will react, but she is still at lunch and hasn't had time to respond...
...They said yes by 51 to 43 percent—a larger spread than the original vote...
...Colorado's political and media elite had been nearly uniform in opposing A2, and pre-election polls showed that most voters would vote against it as well...
...But as of now, no charges have been filed...
...The Denver Post reported that columnist Anna Quindlen is also avoiding the state, though her column continues to be distributed in Colorado copies of the New York Times, which editorially endorsed the boycott...
...Easter afternoon at Vail's Two Elks restaurant: Though we are more than two miles above sea level and it is snowing outside, people are everywhere—planeloads of rich Mexicans, a few Europeans, and the usual horde of Americans...
...We know there are many people in Colorado who are equally opposed to this canonized bigotry," he announced...
...The words "deficit reduction," for instance, were found in 208' stories, while "health care reform" appeared in 237...
...Nonetheless, the release of the cancellation figure led to a bit of crowing by the organizers: "A purpose of the boycott is to, in fact, show that there will be no business as usual in a state that actively discriminates against gay and lesbian people," Robin Kane of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force told the AP...
...Not even close...
...But once inside the polling booth, voters made sure no one was peeking through the curtain and then voted yes by 53-47 percent...
...How many of those skiers went in-state...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
