List of US ballot initiatives to repeal LGBT anti-discrimination laws

Ballot initiatives to repeal LGBT anti-discrimination laws are anti-LGBT initiatives used to target and repeal LGBT anti-discrimination laws.

Jurisdictions in the United States began outlawing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in 1972, when East Lansing, Michigan passed an ordinance forbidding discrimination based on "affectional or sexual preference". In response, opponents began organizing campaigns to place measures on their local ballots to repeal these anti-discrimination laws. The repeal movement found a national spokesperson in Anita Bryant, who helped found—and served as president of—Save Our Children. Save Our Children organized in Florida in 1977 in response to the passage by the Dade County Commission of an anti-discrimination ordinance. Bryant's campaign was successful; the Miami-Dade ordinance was repealed by a greater than two-to-one margin. Repeal campaigns, building on this success, spread nationally and several other ordinances were repealed. In California in 1978, conservative state senator John Briggs sponsored Proposition 6, which would have barred gay and lesbian people from working in a public school. The defeat of this measure, and of an ordinance repeal measure in Seattle, Washington the same day, stalled the momentum of the repeal forces.

The mid-1980s and early 1990s saw a resurgence in ballot initiatives, culminating in proposed state constitutional amendments in Oregon and Colorado not only to repeal existing anti-discrimination ordinances but to proactively prohibit the state and any local unit of government within the state from ever passing such an ordinance. Oregon's Measure 9, sponsored by the Oregon Citizens Alliance, failed, but Colorado's Amendment 2 passed. Amendment 2 was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in its 1996 Romer v. Evans decision. Oregon and two other states, Idaho and Maine, had initiatives between the passage of Amendment 2 and the Court decision; all three were defeated but many municipalities within Oregon passed local measures.

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