It takes a lot to get me to write about the opinions of The Wall Street Journal because they are so consistently ideological and out of touch. To find out what they say, I can usually skip a step and just read Karl Rove's daily talking points. But last Friday,...

California began going downhill when Howard Jarvis' Prop 13 passed in 1978. Thus began the end of funded public education, libraries, road repair, healthcare, senior services and the most respected higher education system in the world. It brought us Grover Norquist, the no-nothing Republican party of 2011, and a pledge...

This piece was co-authored by Joshua Pechthalt and Anthony Thigpenn

When we think of California, we imagine the state that allowed the three of us to be who we are, a state that gave us the California Dream. For years now, that dream has been quickly slipping away and now...

Speaker Boehner has a job, and that's to create more jobs. But when he's not keeping the House from voting on the American Jobs Act, he likes to go golfing and raise money. Unfortunately for him, we at the Courage Campaign aren't about to let that stand as an excuse...

Foes of marriage equality will make a ludicrous argument before the California Supreme Court on Tuesday, Sept. 6. They will assert that anyone who has the money to put an initiative on the ballot in California and then sufficient funds to advertise its way to passage, whether relying on facts...

Eighteen months ago, the gay and lesbian equality movement won the war. It happened in U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker's San Francisco courtroom. It was called Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which resulted in a ruling overturning Prop 8. The evidence in that trial made crystal clear...

A year ago today, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker overturned "Prop 8," ruling that it violated both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the United States Constitution.

I thought the war had finally been won. The forces of prejudice and...

I've been watching PBS for I don't know how many years. When I was a kid, I watched Sesame Street. When I got a little older, NOVA. When I turned an adult, Frontline and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. And I know millions of Americans like me, too. It's good...

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is halfway through its 20-state "One Man, One Woman" tour at which approximately one man and one woman seem to show up for them at each stop. But what NOM lacks in popular, grassroots support, it more than makes up for in...

By the time I graduated from Oak Ridge High School in East Tennessee 34 years ago, I knew a few things for sure:

1. I cared deeply about social justice.
2. I expected to become governor or a senator from Tennessee after college.
3. I was...

There was big news yesterday in California about "the trial of the century." Judge Vaughn Walker today issued a series of questions (see document below) for the parties to the federal Prop. 8 trial that began in January and was put on by Ted Olson and David Boies and colleagues...

Last night, I watched Lt. Dan Choi and Gen. Wesley Clark face off against Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis on Larry King Live.

The topic was "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT), but the subject at hand was how America deals with...

History is being made in California this month, as hundreds of thousands of lesbians and gay men, their friends, families and allies around the world crowd into what has become a virtual courtroom.

I have been sitting in the courtroom from the opening arguments, but I was...

Those who make careers of raising and banking money by denying equal rights to others -- Maggie Gallagher of National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and Frank Schubert -- want to maintain total control over the media on the eve of the most historic civil rights case in at least a...

John Perez is not a household name. Yet. In the coming days, Perez may well make history, becoming the first openly gay speaker of any state legislature in the United States. 

This, from the California that narrowly voted to undo same sex marriage.  This from the same California...

California's Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on 5 March on two questions about same-sex marriage:

1. Is Prop. 8, which passed by a slim majority in November, an amendment to the constitution or is it a revision? Our friends at Lambda Legal, ACLU and other...

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has finally crossed the line to complete delusion. He succeeds so fully in gaining bootlicking adoration from the national media that he now actually believes that he can solve the...

I never joined the first two parts of the gay movement, neither around Stonewall nor AIDS. I was too young for Stonewall and too closeted for AIDS. I watched friends and acquaintances organize, fight and often win, friends such as Howard Bragman (now a powerful publicist),

Harry Truman famously said, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

President-Prophet Thomas Monson, the leader of the Mormon Church, clearly does not read history. If he did, he'd know that he and his apostles could not stand behind the stone walls and parapets of...

Twenty years ago this autumn, I sat in the last Orthodox synagogue on Venice Beach here in LA, enrapt by Rabbi Daniel Lapin's sermon on the Torah portion for the week. It was Exodus 21, describing the obligatory freeing of slaves in Jubilee year:

"But if the...