Evan Wolfson

Evan Wolfson (born February 4, 1957) is an attorney and gay rights advocate.

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.

From 1989 until 2001 Wolfson worked full-time at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay rights advocacy non-profit, handling cases on a range of matters, from partnership and custody, to military discrimination, to HIV/AIDS, to employment discrimination, to challenges to so-called "sodomy" laws.

Wolfson directed their Marriage Project and coordinated the National Freedom to Marry Coalition, a forerunner to Freedom to Marry.

Wolfson served as co-counsel alongside Hawaii attorney Dan Foley and co-wrote an amicus brief in Baehr v. Miike, in which the Supreme Court of Hawaii said prohibiting same-sex marriage in the state constituted discrimination.

In 1992, he served on the New York State Task Force on Sexual Harassment.

Wolfson and Foley then conducted a trial before Hawaii judge Kevin Chang, which on December 3, 1996, resulted in the world's first-ever ruling in favor of the freedom to marry.

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."

On April 30, 2001, Wolfson left Lambda to form Freedom to Marry, having secured a "very generous" grant from the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund.

Wolfson described the breadth of his vision for the new organization: "I'm not in this just to change the law. It's about changing society. I want gay kids to grow up believing that they can get married, that they can join the Scouts, that they can choose the life they want to live."

Lambda executive director Kevin Cathcart said that over twelve years Wolfson had "personified Lambda's passion and vision for equality."

Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said of her experience with Wolfson at Lambda: "What I can now say is that, in the intervening years, what has been made unmistakably clear to me by the lesbians and gay men that we work with and represent, is that the denial of our right to marry exacerbates our marginalization; winning that right is the cornerstone of full justice."

In 2003 Time magazine described him as symbolic of the gay rights movement.

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".

In 2004, the first year of Same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, opponents placed constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage on the ballot in 13 states, and all of them passed.

Following the losses, Wolfson helped organize more than a dozen LGBTQ leaders to recommit to the fight, rearticulate the strategy, and renew the call for an expanded national campaign.

The outcome of many discussions was a concept paper, drafted chiefly by the ACLU's Matt Coles together with Wolfson, "Winning Marriage: What We Need to Do".

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).

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.

He summed it up, "We may have lost the case, but we are winning the cause"; the disagreement with the policy and awakened activism by Scout members and supporters led the Boy Scouts to change their policy in 2013.

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."

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.