Voice for Equality: Eva Paterson

For more than 30 years, Paterson has campaigned for civil rights. Paterson is the former Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, former vice-president of the ACLU, and co-founder/former chairwoman of the California Coalition for Human Rights.

She is the founder and president of the Equal Justice Society (EJS), a "national organization dedicated to changing the law through progressive legal theory, public policy and practice."

In 2008, Paterson and the Equal Justice Society joined other civil rights groups to petition the California Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8. She said, "We would be making a grave mistake to view Proposition 8 as just affecting the LGBT community. If the Supreme Court allows Proposition 8 to take effect, it would represent a threat to... all minorities."

Paterson wrote of her own inter-racial marriage in the San Francisco Chronicle in June 2008, "What gay men and lesbians are experiencing now as they seek to marry feels very familiar to me. The state has no right to tell anyone who they can and cannot love or marry. That is why this ballot initiative [Proposition 8] is misguided and cruel."

Thanks, Ben, for this nomination for Voices for Equality!


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