LGBT people and people with HIV are everywhere, as are Lambda Legal’s attorneys, often making the case for equality in states where laws and public opinion are stacked against us.

We recently won two court victories in Louisiana and one in Virginia, and we are representing plaintiffs in cases in Florida, Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia.

Our three most recent victories have strengthened legal recognition of same-sex relationships and families, even where there are no domestic partnership or other laws available. At the Virginia Supreme Court, we and our co-counsel protected the court-ordered visitation that gave Janet Jenkins the right to see her daughter after Janet’s former partner tried to deny her that parenting right.

In Louisiana, we defeated the efforts of the antigay Alliance Defense Fund to eliminate domestic partner benefits for city employees in New Orleans, and won a ruling from a federal court that state officials must list the names of both fathers on the birth certificate of the Louisiana-born child whom they adopted in New York.

We are there to back LGBT people who stand up for fairness in hostile communities, as in Johnson City, Tennessee, where we’re challenging the biased conduct of the local police department. The department took unprecedented steps to harm and embarrass men they arrested in a public sex sting by holding a press conference to announce their arrest and publishing their photographs in the local paper. 

 The police are not allowed to give additional punishment to people they don’t like, nor are they allowed to ignore the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” by punishing people in advance. Kenneth Giles lost his job because of the police misconduct, and we’re fighting with him for justice.

The LGBT community is speaking up in Birmingham, Alabama, too. Central Alabama Pride has held a gay pride parade through the streets of Birmingham every year since 1987, and had its Pride banners displayed just like any other group.

However, last year, the mayor announced that he would neither sign a proclamation nor allow city employees to hang their parade banners based on his religious beliefs that do not “condone that lifestyle choice.” We’re standing with Central Alabama Pride and suing the mayor for infringing their free speech rights and treating them unequally. 

In Georgia, we’re representing Vandy Beth Glenn, a transgender woman who was fired from her job as an editor at the state legislature because state officials disapproved of her gender transition.

We also filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a case before the Georgia Supreme Court to challenge a discriminatory requirement that a gay father not be allowed to see his children whenever other LGBT people were present. 

In Florida, the Social Security Administration told a gay disabled father named Gary Day that it could not approve benefits for his children because it claimed they were not his children “for the purposes of child insurance benefits…;” a fertility clinic in Orlando denied medical services to a gay man named Dennis Barros; and a hospital employee told Janice Langbehn that she was in an antigay hospital in an antigay state. Janice was not allowed to be with her lesbian partner as she lay dying in Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital.

Gary, Dennis and Janice are standing up for equality in Florida, and we are representing each of them.

The attorneys and community education team in our Southern Regional Office and South Central Regional Office have been busy, working with clients and within their communities to make changes that count.

As a national organization, Lambda Legal is taking the fight wherever we need to go, and wherever LGBT people and people with HIV need the power of legal advocacy to protect and defend their civil rights.