Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund
From 1989 until 2001 Wolfson worked full-time at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay rights advocacy non-profit. He directed their Marriage Project and coordinated the National Freedom to Marry Coalition, the forerunner to Freedom to Marry. Wolfson co-wrote an amicus brief in Baehr v. Miike, in which the Supreme Court of Hawaii said prohibiting same-sex marriage in the state constituted discrimination, and worked on Baker v. Vermont, the Vermont Supreme Court case that led to the creation of civil unions in Vermont by the state legislature as a compromise between Wolfson's group and those objecting to same-sex marriage. Wolfson called the unions a "wonderful step forward," but not enough.
Wolfson appeared before the United States Supreme Court on April 26, 2000, to argue on behalf of Scoutmaster James Dale in the landmark case Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, in which the Court ruled that the Boy Scouts organization had the right to expel Dale for revealing that he was gay through their First Amendment rights. The justices questioned Wolfson "aggressively." The Court ruled 5-4 against Dale, but Wolfson, said, "Even before we change the policy, we are succeeding in getting people to rethink how they feel about gay people." Dale said of Wolfson: "Evan understood the importance of the organization to me, and the importance of an American institution like the Boy Scouts discriminating against somebody and how that could impact the public dialogue and conversation."
Read more about this topic: Evan Wolfson
Famous quotes containing the words legal, defense, education and/or fund:
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause,—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nation’s agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a family’s financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United States—as much education as he could absorb.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“School success is not predicted by a child’s fund of facts or a precocious ability to read as much as by emotional and social measures; being self-assured and interested: knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with other children.”
—Daniel Goleman (20th century)