This article argues that civil rights generally and gay rights in particular have increas ingly become the locus for a politics of changing state sovereignty in the USA, one which calls upon the state to empower itself by doing less. The engine behind this 'downsizing' of the state is a conservative discourse of political economy through which rights claims are understood as excessive and deleterious to limited public budgets, to private property and to efficient use of the 'police powers' over health and safety. Two case studies illuminate these claims: Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2, and Hawai'i's impending legalization of same-sex marriage.
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