More than 10 years ago, we made good on our investment in making change in the South by opening a Southern Regional Office in Atlanta and soon after, a South Central Regional Office in Dallas — and that investment continues to pay off.

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.

In letters this week to the new President and the leadership of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lambda legal stressed the need for fair and impartial nominees to the federal bench who will address issues facing the gay community without bias.

“In the coming years, a number of key issues that significantly impact the gay community are likely to arise in the federal courts,” said Lambda Legal Executive Director Kevin Cathcart, “The foremost consideration in nominating federal judges should be their commitment to rendering decisions impartially.”

During his two terms, President Bush appointed 326 judges to the federal bench.

“It is no secret that the Bush Administration’s goal was to pack the federal courts at all levels with arch-conservative judges who would be unfriendly to the vigorous protection of civil rights — not only for gay people, but for everyone,” said Cathcart.

The letters are a follow-up to a memo Lambda Legal provided to the Obama Transition Team. It urged President-Elect Obama to nominate federal justices who adhere to precedents established in cases of importance to the gay community- including the right to privacy, protection against laws based on antigay bias, the right to sue in state courts under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and protections against HIV discrimination, among others.

The letters also seek to promote judicial integrity through the nomination of jurists who represent the nation’s diversity including people who identify as LGBT, people of color, women, and those with public defender and public interest legal backgrounds.

But this is not over: the very next day, we began fighting back.

We don’t think this is the way democracy is supposed to work in California, and we are going to court to stop Prop 8 from taking effect. Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and the ACLU are representing Equality California and six same-sex couples.

The heart of our legal argument boils down to this: A fundamental liberty of a minority group is being stripped away by a simple majority vote. This makes the equal protection clause of the constitution meaningless.

Can you do that in California with one vote? We don’t think so. 

California’s constitution requires a different process. In order to make a fundamental revision to the constitution that would change the way state government works in California, the revision must first, at a minimum, be approved by a two-thirds vote of each chamber of the legislature, and it then must be sent to the people for a vote.

Why is there a more difficult process required to make the change intended by Prop 8?

We all learned about it in grade school: The framers of both the federal and the California constitutions understood that a primary function of the courts and constitutions is to protect minority groups from the will of the majority when it comes to fundamental rights. Can 51 percent of the people vote to take away the free speech rights of women, but not of men? We don’t think so. Can 51 percent of the people vote to say that Christians are free to worship as they choose, but people of other faiths may not? Not a chance.

If Prop 8 were implemented, it would fundamentally change the meaning of the constitution and the role of the courts in protecting fundamental rights. Prop 8 passed through only the initiative process without a two-thirds vote of the legislature. That’s why it’s invalid.

After this incredible and emotional election, we take both the long and short view. The long view shows that both public opinion and history are moving steadily in the right direction.

The election of Barack Obama as president proves that change is possible and that prejudice can be overcome. Fifty years ago, black Americans still lived in segregated communities and were blocked both from voting and equal opportunities for employment. Only 40 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Loving v.Virginia, striking down the remaining laws banning interracial marriages, and now we have elected a president who is the child of an interracial marriage.

And only eight years ago, the original Prop 22 (the Knight Initiative) that banned marriage for same-sex couples in California passed by a nearly two-to-one margin (61 to 38 percent), while this year Prop 8 barely passed by two percentage points.

The long view gives us hope and a vision of the future.

In the short view, we are confronting bitter losses not only in California but also in Florida, Arizona and Arkansas, and we’re fighting back because our relationships and families deserve dignity and respect. We are preparing for oral arguments before the Iowa Supreme Court to defend our marriage-equality victory there, and we are seeking justice for Janice Langbehn, who was not allowed to see her dying partner in a hospital in Miami.

In fighting back against the injustice of Prop 8 and the other ballot measures that targeted LGBT people, we stand together with other groups that have faced discrimination, not against them.

People of color and people of all faiths have fought for freedom and are part of our LGBT communities across the country. Divide and conquer is the oldest political strategy in the world. If we fall victim to it, the extreme right will have won a lot more than this year’s ballot measures. 
As we anticipate the inauguration of the 44th American president, we are not simply waiting for change to come to us, we are working for it — through community education, by preparing for the political struggles ahead, and by doing what Lambda Legal does best — making the case for equality in our courts.

This is what democracy looks like.

Kevin Cathcart is the executive director of Lambda Legal.

Two weeks ago, Tim and Sean McQuillan celebrated their first wedding anniversary in Iowa. They were the only same-sex couple able to get married in the hours between our trial court victory for marriage equality in Iowa and the temporary hold the court put on that decision while it is under appeal.

In the past six months, thousands of same-sex couples have celebrated joyous weddings in California, and many have traveled to Massachusetts to marry since the discriminatory barrier to out-of state couples was repealed. And in New York, the Governor and the courts ordered state agencies to recognize the marriages of same-sex couples legally married elsewhere.

For years, antigay forces have been using fear tactics and prejudice to persuade voters to pass constitutional amendments to deny marriage equality. I think their time is over.

In California, we are fighting against Prop 8, a pernicious ballot measure that, if passed, would change the California constitution and take away the freedom to marry we just won. There are also anti-marriage-equality constitutional amendments on the ballot in Florida and Arizona.  Wherever we live, we have to help defeat these measures on November 4.

We have been here before. Over half the states have now passed constitutional bans on marriages for same-sex couples, and far more have passed statutes to emphasize their ongoing exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage.

But our world looks different today than it did before – in large part because of the hard work of legal and advocacy organizations, members of LGBT communities and our allies.  We have made the world different  – by winning legal battles, by coming out, by inviting our families and friends to our marriage and commitment ceremonies and by standing up for equality every day at work and in school.

Now we face a moment where we have to fight with everything we have. The antigay industry is pouring millions of dollars into these efforts to turn history back.

Here’s what you can do: Wherever you live, give money as generously as you can to the organizations working to defeat Prop 8 in California and the proposed amendments in Florida and Arizona.  If you live in those states, be sure to register and vote no on Election Day, and talk to as many other voters as you can between now and then. If you can, volunteer your time to canvassing and phone bank efforts to inform others going to the polls of what’s at stake.  And if you live anywhere else, after you make a donation, call anyone you know in California, Florida and Arizona and tell them why equality is so important to you and why you want them to vote against the ballot initiatives.

We have turned a corner and we will not be turned back. Fairness and opportunity are American values. We have to defend them on Election Day.