Same-sex couples may wed in all 50 states. Yet, anyone reading the most foundational laws of our state — those in the Colorado Constitution — wouldn’t know it.

Just 18 years ago, more than 55% of Colorado voters enacted Colorado Amendment 43. The law defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

As The Gazette’s editorial board predicted, the Supreme Court of the United States negated that and similar laws in other states with its 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. The ruling says the right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Yet, Amendment 43 remains in the Colorado Constitution nearly 10 years after the court ruled it unconstitutional. Whether one supported or opposed Amendment 43, the court rendered it junk.

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

The Colorado Senate passed a resolution this week, intended to place a measure on the November ballot that would strike the defunct law from our books. It passed with half of the Senate’s 12 Republicans supporting it.

Obviously, we should remove from the state’s most important legal document a law that violates the law.

The Legislature and voters should not stop there. At least two other provisions remain in the Constitution in flagrant violation of federal civil rights protections. They are: 1. Article IX, § 7; and 2. Amendment 2.

Colorado’s article IX, § 7, forbids using public funds for any “church or sectarian society, or for any sectarian purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, academy, seminary, college, university or other literary or scientific institution, controlled by any church or sectarian denomination whatsoever.”

The Colorado Education Association used this now-defunct law, known as “Blaine,” to overturn a proposed Douglas County scholarship program that would use public funds to help children attend private schools, some of them sectarian.

Just as the Supreme Court negated Amendment 43, it destroyed Blaine laws across the country with four 21st-century equal protection rulings that say states cannot discriminate by denying funds based on an organization’s religious identity. Blaine laws were established on a basis of anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic bigotry and have no place in modern America.

Colorado’s Blaine Amendment is so blatantly discriminatory, and such a violation of the First Amendment, that Colorado’s Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights blasted it in a 2018 report.

The report blamed the law’s adoption on “bigotry” and said it was selectively enforced, providing dozens of examples of state money funding religious activities or organizations.

Colorado’s Amendment 2 provides the other glaring example of a “law” that breaks the law. More than 53% of voters enacted the amendment in 1992, preventing local governments from passing anti-discrimination laws to protect gay, lesbian or bisexual people. The Supreme Court negated the amendment with its 1996 ruling in Rover v. Evans. Yet, 28 years later it remains on the books.

Laws are essential to peace, prosperity and justice. They play a key role in defining our society. To uphold and respect the rule of law, we should dispense with defunct remnants of the past that affront civil rights.

Colorado Springs Gazette Editorial Board