Mark Levine (Virginia politician)

Mark H. Levine (born May 7, 1966) is an American politician and attorney who served as the Delegate from the 45th District of the Virginia House of Delegates from 2016 to 2022.

A member of the Democratic Party, he simultaneously ran for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia in the 2021 election and for reelection as a Delegate on June 8, 2021, but lost in the Democratic primaries to Hala Ayala and Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, respectively.

Levine is a constitutional lawyer who was an early advocate for same-sex marriage in the United States.

He has hosted a nationally syndicated progressive public policy radio program and has worked as a television pundit.

Levine was the third openly gay person and third openly LGBT person elected to the Virginia House of Delegates and the Virginia General Assembly (after Adam Ebbin and Mark Sickles).

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Levine earned an economics degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard University and was a Fulbright scholar in Switzerland.

He later earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.

Levine worked as a Nazi hunter, Jewish historian, and inner-city schoolteacher before becoming a trial attorney at Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP in Los Angeles.

In 1994, Levine helped organize a march on Hollywood and met personally with high-ranking studio executives to demand they depict gay and lesbian characters in a positive light.

In 1996, Levine's sister Janet Levine March was murdered by her husband Perry; her body has never been found and it took a decade to amass enough other evidence to convict him.

In response, Levine drafted a Tennessee law to protect victims of domestic violence and their children.

The law passed unanimously.

Four years later, Levine and his parents traveled to Ajijic, Mexico, where March was living with his children by Janet, to see them under a 39-day visitation period ordered by a court in Illinois, where March had last resided in the U.S. Accompanied by a Mexican judge, who had given local effect to the Illinois court order, and armed police, they took the children to the airport and back to Tennessee, an action beyond that authorized in either court order.

Mexican arrest warrants were issued for Levine and his parents afterwards.

The warrants were later nullified by a Mexican court on the grounds that the removal of the children from Mexico "was carried out legally and by competent authority".

A federal court in Nashville ordered the children returned to March in Mexico on the grounds that his in-laws had violated the federal laws that give effect to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction; the order was sustained on appeal.

Levine later testified in court against Perry, who was eventually sentenced to 56 years in prison for murdering Janet and, later, conspiring to attempt to have Levine's parents killed.

According to The Washington Post, the murder investigation spawned "Levine's interest in lawmaking."

In 1999, Levine was one of the four original founders of Marriage Equality California.

He "barnstormed across California to oppose Proposition 22 and then arranged America's first public "mass-marriage" protest for gay and lesbian couples. This modest attempt on February 14, 2000 to marry at a Beverly Hills courthouse became the first of the "Valentine's Day Marriage Protests" that would later sweep the country. Levine writes he:

"promised the police and court officials that we would not be violent in any way. And court officials, in turn, graciously agreed to waive the marriage license fee, since we all knew they would reject our attempts to get married. I remember it was a beautiful day, and a joyful one: We all smiled ear-to-ear knowing we were attempting something that was then impossible but which every one of us thought would eventually become possible."

Later that year, Levine drafted the first law introduced in the United States to give lesbian and gay couples equal rights to straight couples at both the state and federal levels.

In December 2000, Levine was hired by the Congressional Black Caucus to appeal the United States Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore to the United States Congress.

At the joint session of Congress, when it came time to count Florida's electoral votes, the Congressional Black Caucus presented the legal challenge Levine had drafted.

If the action had succeeded, it would have prevented George W. Bush from becoming President of the United States.

The legal appeal was rejected, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus and several other House Members walked out in protest.

Levine's law, introduced in California in February 2001 as AB 1338 by Assemblyman Paul Koretz, went further than Vermont's civil unions law which only protected same-sex couples at the state level.

Levine says local and nationwide gay and lesbian organizations opposed Levine's marriage equality law at the time as too "radical" and "politically impossible" and forced Koretz to withdraw it.

At the time Levine's bill was introduced, no same-sex couples could get married anywhere in the world.

Although Levine's first legislation to help same-sex couples did not become law, his second attempt was a success.

In 2001, Levine called President Bush's selection by the Supreme Court to be President "illegitimate" and argued: "If we can't have the right to vote then how can we start thinking about anything else?"

Michael Moore has called Levine's explanation of the Bush v. Gore opinion a "Simple Q&A that Every American Should Read" and "the best thing he's seen" on the issue.

In January 2001, Levine moved from California to Alexandria, Virginia to serve three years as chief legislative counsel to Barney Frank, a high-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary, Homeland Security, and Financial Services Committees.

In that capacity Levine says he learned how Washington really works: from the way bills become law to political negotiations, spin, administration secrets, and dangerous lapses in American security.

While working for Frank, Levine used bipartisan back channels to ensure that LGBT 9/11 survivors were treated equally in distributions from the victims compensation fund.

He also personally persuaded Hillary Clinton to withdraw her endorsement from President Bush's faith-based initiative, which would have allowed the federal government to discriminate on the basis of religion.

Levine credits his one-on-one conversation with Clinton as what "killed" the initiative.

In 2003, Levine began hosting the radio show Mark Levine's Inside Scoop on Washington on WAGE in Leesburg, Virginia and began in 2005 his local Fairfax County, Virginia television show The Inside Scoop.

In 2009, Levine worked with Councilman Phil Mendelson to draft the District of Columbia's marriage equality law which passed 11-2 and then represented the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club pro bono in court to defeat the opponents of the new law who wanted to put it up for a referendum vote.

Levine successfully argued in court that such a referendum would be a violation of D.C.'s Human Rights Act."