National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (U.S.)

Founded in 1973 as the National Gay Task Force, NGLTF is the nation's oldest lesbian and gay civil rights lobby. In 1993, it served 26,000 members. Affiliated components of the Task Force include the Gay Media Task Force, founded to lobby the major television networks to improve their coverage of lesbian and gay issues; the Privacy Project; the Military Freedom Project; the Anti-Violence Project; the Creating Change conference (started in 1988); the Lesbian and Gay Families Project; and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, founded in 1995 as a separate, non-profit organization to serve as a national information clearinghouse and resource center dedicated to lesbian and gay men's issues. The Policy Institute has published numerous studies and reports, including Paisley Currah and Shannon Minter's "Transgender equality : a handbook for activists and policymakers" in 2000. In 1997, NGLTF changed its mission statement to include bisexual and transgender people and launched the Federation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Statewide Political Organizations.

Historical Note

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) was founded in 1973 to build and coordinate organizational support for pro-GLBT legislation and legislators, and to oppose anti-GLBT political initiatives. The NGLTF has also engaged in policy analysis, monitoring representations of GLBT individuals in mass media and the social sciences, and supporting research conducive to the interests of the GLBT community.

History

The GLBT community has challenged the legal restriction of marriage to opposite-sex partners since at least 1970, when the Reverend Troy Perry, founder of the predominantly GLBT Metropolitan Community Church, presided over a ceremony between two women, issuing a church marriage certificate that would have exempted the couple from obtaining a marriage license had they been a man and a woman. Other efforts to circumvent the legal restriction were subsequently undertaken in Minnesota (1971), Kentucky (1973), Boulder, Colorado (1975), Washington, DC (1990), and Ithaca, New York (1995).

GLBT efforts to obtain legal recognition of same-sex marriage increased in the decade between 1995 and 2004. In 1996, the Supreme Court of Hawaii's consideration of a measure that would have legalized same-sex marriage in that state created considerable controversy. In response, anti-gay sentiment in the US Congress led to the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which gives states the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages enacted in other states and denies federal benefits to same-sex marital partners. The measure passed even though same-sex marriage had not yet been made legal anywhere in the US, and despite the fact that it appeared to pose a conflict with the Constitution's provision for full faith and credit.

Despite the passage of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, the GLBT community's efforts continued, meeting with increasing success:

Religious and social conservatives were alarmed by these developments, which they saw as a "capitulation" to the "homosexual agenda" and a threat to "order and morality". In response, they succeeded in having constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage placed on ballots in 13 states-Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah-in the general election year of 2004 (Louisiana and Missouri voted on the amendments in the spring; the remaining states voted on them on November 2). Despite the efforts of the GLBT community against the amendments, in particular in Oregon (where the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force contributed more than $900,000 in cash and kind, and the Human Rights Campaign spent another $514,000), the amendments passed easily in all 13 states. The issue of "family values" energized evangelical Christians and the political right, and many political analysts believe that these voters tilted the vote in hotly contested Ohio to George W. Bush, ensuring him a second term.