News & Commentary

As the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin (ACLU-WI), and a gay man, I spend a lot of time defending or promoting the civil liberties and rights of other people, regardless of their sexual orientation.  The freedom to marry is an exception.  Thirty-four years ago, when my partner Bob and I got together, very few people or groups talked about marriage equality for gay couples.  Whether or not we wanted to marry wasn’t even a topic for discussion.  Thirty-four years ago the conversation around LGBT rights was much more likely to be about police harassment, unpunished hate crime violence, and job discrimination. 

The American Civil Liberties Union's primary work is litigation, but this month it's moonlighting as a wedding planner as part of its role in the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide.

Salud Garcia and Pam Kleiss

Written by Wisconsin Gazette Wednesday, 26 March 2014 06:21

The following is an opinion piece reprinted with permission from the author.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin filed a federal lawsuit on Monday against the state’s same-sex marriage...

Lawyers filed suit in federal court Monday seeking to overturn Wisconsin’s ban on same-sex marriages and to block a state statute that makes it a crime to travel elsewhere for such a marriage.

Wisconsin is a state of political contradictions—we Wisconsinites have a proud progressive history, but we also produced one of the biggest opponents of welfare in the nation, a man who almost became the vice presidential nominee. We produced the first openly gay U.S. senator, but our state has held a ban on gay marriage for the past eight years.

Four same-sex couples on Monday asked a federal judge in Wisconsin to overturn the state's constitutional ban on gay marriage, the latest in a series of court challenges aimed at making same-sex marriage legal around the United States.