As anticipation builds for the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision this June, we felt lucky to be able to attend Marriage Equality USA’s annual awards celebration shortly after returning from the hearings in Washington, D.C. The event honored California State Senator Mark Leno, Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom, and the World Champion San Francisco Giants. These three honorees symbolize three key elements of the LGBT equality movement that have been instrumental in bringing us as far as we have come.
Senator Leno represents the highest level of legislative leadership. As an Assemblyperson, Leno introduced the first marriage equality bill in the nation—coincidentally, on February 12, 2004, the same day that then Mayor Gavin Newsom opened the doors to San Francisco City Hall for LGBT couples to marry. The California Assembly Judiciary Committee became the first state legislative body ever to vote in favor of marriage equality when it approved the bill in 2004. Two years later, Leno successfully led the full California Legislature to become the first state legislature to pass a marriage equality bill, although then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the legislation. Leno courageously stood up for our rights on the floor of the Assembly, even as another Assemblyman openly mocked him for being gay as he spoke. Today, states such as New York, Illinois, and Minnesota have all passed marriage equality legislatively. The movement that led to those legislative successes began 11 years ago with Leno and many other supporters and activists.
Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom (BALIF) represents the importance of legal advocacy for marriage equality. When the California Supreme Court in 2008 struck down the state’s then existing marriage ban, California became the first state to recognize that LGBT people, just like other citizens, have a fundamental right to marry the person they love and should be protected from governmental discrimination in all aspects of their lives. BALIF was the nation’s very first—and today remains the largest—association of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons in the field of law.
When it formed 35 years ago, it was considered unsafe to use the phrase “LGBT” in its title, and consequently, the organization chose to highlight the phrase “individual freedom.” In many ways, “individual freedom” lies at the heart of what the movement for marriage equality and full LGBT equality are all about. We seek every person’s freedom to marry the person they love regardless of who they are or whom they love. More broadly, our movement seeks the freedom for each person to be able to pursue their own vision of happiness in their life, free from discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or any other characteristic of whom a person is. For decades, BALIF has filed numerous powerful amicus or friend-of-the-court briefs advocating for these goals. We look to the U.S. Supreme Court to take a major step forward this June toward our achieving them.
The San Francisco Giants represent the importance of winning hearts and minds and of bold leadership for LGBT rights in the community at large. Professional sports had for so long presented itself as a bastion of male heterosexuality, where LGBT and women were unwelcome. The Giants have actively worked to break those barriers. In 1993, the Giants became the first major league baseball team to have a female public address announcer, and they have had a female announcer ever since. The Baseball Hall of Fame recognized the Giants’ current announcer, Renel Brooks-Moon, as the first female announcer of a championship game in any professional sport, when she was the announcer for the 2002 World Series.
The Giants in 1994 became the first-ever professional sports team to host a benefit game to end AIDS, with their annual “Until There’s A Cure Day.” In 2011, the Giants became
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