The U.S. Supreme Court's 6-to-3 decision to strike down Colorado's Amendment 2 made a major homosexual rights victory out of a measure that conservative Christians once hailed as a model for overturning the "gay agenda."

The Court's May 20 decision said the amendment, supported by 53 percent of Colorado's voters in 1992 to become the nation's only statewide ban on homosexual rights laws, was a flagrant violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

"Amendment 2 classified homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the Court's majority. Though limited in its scope, the Court's decision, issued a decade after the Court supported states' rights to enforce laws against sodomy, seems to spell trouble for voter initiatives designed to thwart decades of legal activism for the rights of homosexuals in employment and housing.

And although silent on such issues as same-sex marriage or homosexuals in the military, the Court's decision has backers of Amendment 2 fearful that this may be the beginning of the end of individual citizens' rights to oppose homosexual activism or even express beliefs that homosexuality is immoral.

"This decision . . . represents a body blow against freedom of belief and freedom of association," says Will Perkins, the Colorado Springs auto dealer who ran Colorado for Family Values (CFV), the Springs-based grassroots group that wrote and promoted Amendment 2.

Perkins says the Court's decision will have far-reaching cultural consequences, hurting the nation's children, setting back the campaign to preserve traditional family values, and opening the door for a "flood of pro-homosexual ...