Эван Вольфсон: Борец за права ЛГБТ и триумф однополых браков.

American attorney

Evan Wolfson (born February 4, 1957) is an attorney and gay rights advocate. He is the founder of Freedom to Marry, a group favoring same sex marriage in the United States, serving as president until its 2015 victory and subsequent wind down. Wolfson authored the book Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry, which Time Out New York magazine called, "Perhaps the most important gay marriage primer ever written". He was listed as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. He has taught as an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, Rutgers Law School, and Whittier Law School and argued before the Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. He now teaches law and social change at Georgetown Law School and at Yale University; serves as a senior counsel at Dentons, the world's largest law firm; and primarily provides advice and assistance to other organizations and causes, in the United States and globally, that are seeking to adapt the lessons on "how to win" from the same sex marriage movement.

Wolfson was born in to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Pittsburgh. He graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School in 1974 and Yale College in 1978. At Yale, he was a resident of Silliman College, a history major, and speaker of the Yale Political Union. After graduation he served in the Peace Corps in Togo, in western Africa. He returned and entered Harvard Law School, where he earned his Juris Doctor in 1983. Wolfson wrote his 1983 Harvard Law thesis on same sex marriage, long before the question gained national prominence. On October 6, 2010, he returned to the Yale Political Union to debate same sex marriage against opponent Maggie Gallagher, chairman of the National Organization for Marriage.

While in law school, Wolfson was a teaching fellow in political philosophy at Harvard College before he returned to his birthplace as Kings County (Brooklyn) assistant district attorney, prosecuting sex crimes and homicides, as well as serving in the Appeals Bureau. There, he wrote a Supreme Court amicus brief that helped win a nationwide ban on race discrimination in jury selection (Batson v. Kentucky). Wolfson also wrote a brief to New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, that helped win the elimination of the marital rape exemption (People v. Liberta). Following the District Attorney's Office, Wolfson served as associate counsel to Lawrence Walsh in the Office of Independent Counsel (Iran/Contra). In 1992, he served on the New York State Task Force on Sexual Harassment. Wolfson also worked on Baker v. Vermont, the Vermont Supreme Court case that led to the creation of civil unions in Vermont by the state legislature as a "compromise" between same sex marriage advocates and those objecting to same sex marriage. Wolfson called the unions a "wonderful step forward", but not enough. Wolfson appeared before the United States Supreme Court on April 26, 2000, to argue on behalf of Scoutmaster James Dale in the landmark case Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, in which the court ruled that the Boy Scouts organization had the right to expel Dale for revealing that he was gay through their First Amendment rights. The justices questioned Wolfson "aggressively". The court ruled 5–4 against Dale, but Wolfson, said, "Even before we change the [Boy Scout] policy, we are succeeding in getting people to rethink how they feel about gay people." Dale said of Wolfson: "Evan understood the importance of the organization to me, and the importance of an American institution like the Boy Scouts discriminating against somebody and how that could impact the public dialogue and conversation." In his book Why Marriage Matters, Wolfson calls marriage "a relationship of emotional and financial interdependence between two people who make a public commitment." In 2004 Time included Wolfson on its list of the "100 most influential people in the world". The concept paper, which became known as the "10 10 10 20" or "2020 Vision", paper (referencing the group's aim to win marriage by 2020), was signed by every major LGBT group. Victories and losses followed over the next few years, with Wolfson advising and weighing in on nearly all of the efforts to secure marriage for same sex couples, serving as a national expert on and consistently optimistic champion of, same sex marriage. After the passage of Proposition 8 in California, Wolfson worked with funders and movement partners to increase capacity for Freedom to Marry as the central campaign to drive the national strategy and create the climate in which litigation could succeed, bringing on National Campaign Director Marc Solomon, messaging expert Thalia Zepatos, digital experts like Michael Crawford, Cameron Tolle, and Adam Polaski, and opening a federal office in Washington, D. C. Between 2010 and 2014, Wolfson's newly expanded Freedom to Marry team – which dramatically increased its budget to more than $13 million and grew to a roster of more than 30 – led marriage work in almost every state, working with partners across legislative, ballot, and litigation efforts. Wolfson also urged President Barack Obama to publicly support same sex marriage, which he did in 2012. The Freedom to Marry team's efforts also led to the Democratic Party adding support for same sex marriage to its official party platform in 2012. In the 2012 election, four states voted in favor of same sex marriage at the ballot, the first ever electoral victories for supporters of same sex marriage. Molly Ball wrote in a post election piece in The Atlantic, "When it came to the ballot box, just as gay marriage opponents were convinced they couldn't lose, some proponents had become convinced they were jinxed. Evan Wolfson refused to believe that. Against all evidence to the contrary, he thought his side could win." In 2013 the U. S. Supreme Court ruled against the Defense of Marriage Act, and in the months that followed many federal judges ruled against state constitutional amendments prohibiting same sex marriage. Several of these cases reached the U. S. Supreme Court, which ruled on June 26, 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges that same sex couples nationwide have the right to marry. Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times after the victory, "Nothing about [the marriage fight] feels quick if you consider that Evan Wolfson, a chief architect of the political quest for same sex marriage, wrote a thesis on the topic at Harvard Law School in 1983." Some critics such as BeyondMarriage. org assert Wolfson and others' work is too narrowly focused on a limited marriage agenda. Richard Kim, signatory and founding board member of Queers for Economic Justice, disputes Wolfson's assertion that the same sex movement is not pushing for a traditional, heterosexual model for all gays and lesbians and creating a political schism, and as such, gravely misrepresent the consequences of their own work for the past 20 years." Wolfson replied "I think if Terrence McNally, Steinem and the others were actually shown some of Richard Kim's articles as opposed to the broad, conciliatory and coalition building goals found in that statement, they would not endorse his articles nor his views." In a New York Times review of Why Marriage Matters, author William Saletan states what he sees as flaws in Wolfson's reasoning. After the closure of the organization, Wolfson devoted his time to advising and assisting other movements and social causes in the United States and around the world, sharing the model and lessons learned from the Freedom to Marry campaign. In 2016 Wolfson was named Distinguished Visitor from Practice at Georgetown Law Center and Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy at Yale, teaching law and social change, and he also serves as senior counsel at Dentons. In 2016, he delivered the commencement address at Northeastern Illinois University and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. He has given speeches at places such as Judson Memorial Church.

Wolfson and his husband Cheng He, a change management consultant with a Ph. D. in molecular biology, reside in New York City. They married in New York on October 15, 2011.