Gay rights decision

LGBTQ Rights

The ACLU has a long history of defending the LGBTQ community. We brought our first LGBTQ rights case in Founded in , the Jon L. Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović LGBTQ & HIV Plan brings more LGBTQ rights cases and advocacy initiatives than any other national organization does and has been counsel in seven of the nine LGBTQ rights cases that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided. With our grasp into the courts and legislatures of every state, there is no other organization that can match our register of making progress both in the courts of commandment and in the court of universal opinion.

The ACLU’s current priorities are to end discrimination, harassment and violence toward transgender people, to close gaps in our federal and state civil rights laws, to block protections against discrimination from being undermined by a license to discriminate, and to protect LGBTQ people in and from the criminal legal system.

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The Journey to Marriage Equality in the United States

The road to nationwide marriage equality was a long one, spanning decades of United States history and culminating in victory in June Throughout the long clash for marriage equality, HRC was at the forefront.

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From gathering supporters in small towns across the country to rallying in front of the Supreme Court of the United States, we gave our all to ensure every person, regardless of whom they love, is known equally under the law.

A Growing Call for Equality

Efforts to legalize same-sex marriage began to pop up across the country in the s, and with it challenges on the state and national levels. Civil unions for same-sex couples existed in many states but created a separate but equal standard. At the federal level, couples were denied access to more than 1, federal rights and responsibilities paired with the institution, as adequately as those denied by their given state. The Defense of Marriage Act was signed into law in and defined marriage by the federal government as between a man and

IntroductionTwo Supreme Court decisions involving gay rights, one decade apart, have left a lot of people wondering just where the regulation now stands with respect to the right to engage in homosexual conduct.

The Court first considered the matter in the case of Bowers v Hardwick, a challenge to a Georgia law authorizing criminal penalties for persons create guilty of sodomy. Although the Georgia law applied both to heterosexual and homosexual sodomy, the Supreme Court chose to regard only the constitutionality of applying the law to homosexual sodomy. (Michael Hardwick, who sought to enjoin enforcement of the Georgia law, had been charged with sodomy after a police officer discovered him in bed with another man. Charges were later dropped.) In Bowers, the Court ruled 5 to 4 that the Due Process Clause "right of privacy" recognized in cases such Griswold and Roe does not prevent the criminalization of homosexual behavior between consenting adults. One of the five members of the majority, Justice Powell, later described his vote in the case a

Gay rights decision

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The Journey to Marriage Equality in the United States

A Growing Call for Equality