SCOTUS Gay Marriage Decision: Reality Check

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage, attorney Lisa Linsky sees how much more there is to do, specially in light of what went on before.

“The conversation about marriage equality is not over notwithstanding it’s the law of the land,” she said.

Linsky, a Sleepy Hollow resident, was part of the historic event. A partner at McDermott Will And Emery, she was one of the lead writers of an amicus brief in Obergefell v. Hodges, a consolidation of cases in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee that pitted states’ rights against individuals’ right to marry, and religious conservatives’ view of marriage against more modern iterations of the union.

A criminal and civil trial attorney, Linsky is also a public speaker, a frequent guest on television and radio and writer of the Out and About: LGBT Legal blog on the Huffington Post.

And she is one of the people behind a Yahoo Documentary called “Uniquely Nasty: The US Government’s War on Gays.” Linsky and her team filmed it with Mike Isikoff and the documentary has gone viral.

It‘s about a project she leads with a client, Charles Frances, President of the Mattachine Society of DC. The MSDC is engaged in archive activism. With long buried and forgotten government documents—state and federal—the team shows decades of deliberate, targeted animus and discrimination against LGBT Americans.

“ It is a fascinating story of government coverup, blackmail and betrayal that very few are aware of,” she said.

The state bans on gay marriage pushed by the Bush re-election campaign in 2004 were part of a larger historic problem, Linsky and her team argued before the Supreme Court. “Those marriage bans did not arise in a vacuum,” she said, describing a culture of persecution that started in the 1940s and continued through the 1980s with the AIDs crisis.

And marriage equality will again be an issue in the upcoming campaign, Linsky predicted, noting how Republican presidential candidates have denounced the court’s decision. “These are politicians.”

Linsky expected the resistance that started cropping up last week, particularly in the states that had marriage bans still in place.

“Certain states and state officials are looking for loopholes, they’re looking for ways out,” she said. ”This will in time die down as well. It’s more about making a public statement and delaying. There are very seasoned civil rights lawyers like Lamba Legal as well as private attorneys who do pro bono work like myself who are going to work to make sure there’s compliance.”

However, she cautioned, even if same-sex couples aren’t facing hurdles to getting a license and getting married, they face other obstacles.

“Other hurdles include respecting the marriage,“ she said. “Those who oppose will be looking for ways to discriminate.“

For example, she said, conversion or “reparative” therapy has become a big issue again. New York recently failed to pass a law outlawing gay conversion therapy.

Also, in 29 states gay people can be fired from their jobs just for being gay—in 34 states, for being transgender.

Access to health care is another issue for same-sex married couples.

“In the realm of workplace equality and fairness, we have seen the devastation to gay and transgender people,” she said. “Plus the extent to which we’re going to see housing and other public-accommodation cases against same-sex married couples remains to be seen.”

Another area is school bullying—violence against LGTB students and the humiliation that has been meted out to the children of same-sex couples.

“Notions of dignity were so clear in Justice Kennedy’s decision,” she said. “We need education in the schools to teach acceptance and tolerance.”

Linsky recalled an LGBT workplace awareness program at McDermott that was broadcast to the firm’s offices around the world. It included a showing of the film Codebreaker, a documentary about Alan Turing, the father of computer science who led the British team of cryptanalysts that broke the German war code. Turing was persecuted by the British government for his homosexuality and committed suicide at 41.

“Can you imagine how far along our society would be if Alan Turing had lived?”

PHOTO: Lisa Linsky/contributed