Bodiford joins honorees at SAVE’s “Champions of Equality” Gala

 LGBT attorneys nationwide worked together to bring lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which defined marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman. In 2007, Ellis Rubin, a publicity hungry Miami attorney, filed suit in Broward County, which had just rendered an adverse verdict upholding Florida's ban on gay adoption: wrong time, wrong venue. He refused to take the advice of LGBT attorneys and drop the suit. This news story shows how he was forced in the court of public opinion to drop the lawsuit he was bound to lose. (In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court consolidated four same-sex marriage cases which had ruled for the plaintiffs, and found DOMA unconstitutional legalizing same sex marriage in all fifty states.)    

 In 1994, Broward County, Florida, like the rest of Florida and most of  the United States, had no protections against sexual orientation  discrimination.  A small group of gay men and lesbians banded together  as Americans for Equality, and organized the community while lobbying  their commissioners to pass an amendment to the county Human Rights  Ordinance to include sexual orientation as a protected class. This video was created by Lightship Media and funded by Stonewall  National Museum & Archives as part of the Graves Fund Oral  Histories. 

 Robin Bodiford, South Florida LGBT estate planning attorney on CNN's  Good Morning America in the first internationally televised debate on  Gay Marriage 1996; and WPBT televised debate on Gays in the Boy Scouts  Part 1. In the year 2000, the U.S. was awash in controversy about the  Boy Scouts use of public facilities after their right to exclude gay  scouts and leaders was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

 This video is the second part of a televised debate on Gays in the Boy  Scouts on WPBT in 2000, when a nation wide controversy had erupted about  Scouts meeting in public facilities due to the Boy Scouts excluding gay  members and courts subsequently upholding their right, as a private  institution, to exclude gay boys from the Scouts.