American Civil Liberties Union

With so much recent news coverage on suicides of LGBT youth, those of us who work on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender safe schools issues have a lot on our plate. We're trying to figure out how best to respond to the needs of LGBT youth, as always. But we're also thinking about how to use the current media attention to these issues as a teachable moment to get the public to understand the importance of school anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies and laws that include gender identity and sexual orientation. Those topics and more were part of the discussion at last week's convening of the National Safe Schools Roundtable, a coalition of organizations that work to make schools safer for LGBT students, which I attended in Minneapolis on behalf of the ACLU LGBT Project.

At the ACLU, we've long believed that real people's stories about their lives are the key to changing the minds of the public when it comes to full equality for same-sex couples. And some stories we've been hearing from some of the plaintiffs in Donaldson and Guggenheim v. Montana, a case we recently filed in Montana, really bear that out. The plaintiffs in this case want the right to protect their families with the same kind of legal protections that opposite-sex couples are offered through marriage. Because Montana has a constitutional amendment barring marriage for same-sex couples, the couples in the lawsuit are asking for state-recognized domestic partnerships, similar to those in place in several other states.