 Good morning. My name is Adam Umhafer. I'm the Executive Director of the American Foundation for Equal Rights. In the past five years, since we started the American Foundation for Equal Rights, so much has changed. We overturned Proposition 8. We took the fight for full marriage equality to the United States Supreme Court and as Prop 8 and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act fell, we stood vindicated in the fight against injustice. Along the way, we transformed the national dialogue. We broke down partisan barriers and we changed the discussion from left to right to left to right versus wrong. We have the support of our president, elected leaders from both sides of the aisle, and now a solid majority of the country and a majority of Virginians believes that the marriage is a fundamental human right. Guaranteed to every American, no matter who he or she may love. Today, almost one in three Americans lives in a state that allows any committed couple to marry. So you may ask the question, after all our success, why did the American Foundation for Equal Rights get involved in another case? The answer is, how could we not? Because for all the change we've seen, so much still remains the same. Despite all our progress, there is still a teenager in Roanoke, growing up with stigma, waking up every day afraid to be who he is. Despite all our progress, gay families are still being denied the basic recognition that every family deserves. Despite all our progress, a woman in Richmond can still be kept from visiting her partner in a hospital after an accident. Loving parents in Charlottesville still need special permission to pick up their own children from school, and a widow in Norfolk can still be told by the state or by her deceased partner's family that her relationship meant nothing. That's why we're here today. We're here today because there is still work to be done. We are here today because the fight for full federal recognition of marriage equality in all 50 states goes on. Forty-three years ago, a Virginia couple, a white man and a black woman, wanted nothing more than to marry and raise their family, law that criminalized their love. Richard and Mildred Loving fought this injustice all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and the court spoke loudly and clearly. Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a unanimous court. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis is surely to deprive all of the state citizens of liberty without due process of law. Much has changed in 43 years, but much still remains the same. As we stand here today, there is still injustice, and the fundamental freedom to marry, the basic civil right of man is still being denied to gay and lesbian Virginians. Tim Bostick and Tony London and Carol Shaw and Mary Townley are no different from Richard and Mildred Loving. They are Virginians. They are Americans. They are committed to each other and to their families, and they want to be married in their home state. And that's why we keep fighting. Not just for them, but for the teenager in Roanoke, for the parents in Charlottesville, for the widow in Norfolk, and our message to them is a promise. Equality is coming to Virginia. Equality is coming to this country. And we will not rest until we've achieved the freedom to marry for every American. And now it's my great pleasure to introduce to you my colleagues here with me on stage, Ted Olson and David Boyce. Ted and David have been our champions since joining the case against Proposition 8 in 2009. Not only did they secure victories for marriage equality at every federal court level, culminating our victory at the Supreme Court this summer, but their partnership has truly embodied the bipartisan spirit of the momentum behind marriage equality. We are thrilled to continue this fight with Ted and David by our side. Without further ado, I welcome Ted Olson, and David Boyce. David and I started the effort to overturn Proposition 8 four-and-a-half years ago, almost five years ago. As Adam said, we took that through the federal courts in California, the Court of Appeals to the United States Supreme Court. We were successful. Proposition 8 is no longer the law in California. Hundreds of thousands of Americans and Californians are getting married and got married within two days of that decision. But civil rights battles are incremental struggles. You don't win everything all at one time. And there are 37 states that still in one way or another prohibit our citizens from marrying the person that they love. I'm a Virginian. I've lived in Virginia for 32 years. I've come to really love Virginia. It's natural beauty. It's the entrepreneurial spirit of its people. It's history. The state of Patrick Henry and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The state of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independent that all men are created equal. Of all places in the United States, Virginia should recognize the rights of equality of men and women in that state to have the same basic fundamental underlying freedoms that everyone in America does. As Adam pointed out, it was Virginia that was the test case in the United States Supreme Court in 1967 that struck down a law which made it a felony for a person to marry someone of another race. Now it's against the law in Virginia for a person to marry someone of the same sex, the person that they love. The couples that we're representing in this case have been together for a long long time together. They've had stable, solid relationships with the person that they love. All they want is to be treated equally with the same respect and the same decency as all of their citizens in the United States, including people in California and Virginia and elsewhere. David and I are not done with the battle. Even though we were successful in California, we don't feel and we will not feel that we've been successful until all Americans have the same right and the same privileges and the same respect that other Americans do. This provision in Virginia prohibits the recognition of a marriage between two people of the same sex or even people that were legally married in another state that come to Virginia to live. It even prohibits civil unions. It prohibits relationships that even seem like marriages. It fails to recognize the relationship between individuals. It is a draconian, distasteful, gratuitously insulting and mean statute to our citizens who are just as valuable and just as important as every other citizen in this country. So we're very proud to have been invited to participate in this case, the first one in Virginia to overturn this awful law and we are going to be successful and we're thrilled to be a part of it. I'm thrilled to be working with David yet again for whom I have such admiration and respect and we're not only going to be successful, but we're going to have a good time doing it. Thank you, Ted. It's a privilege to be here today with Ted and with everyone else that is standing up here to continue the fight for marriage equality that we began four years ago in California. This is a matter that is of critical importance to gay and lesbian citizens around this country. It is critical importance to the children that they're raising, but it's also of critical importance to every citizen of this country who cares about equality. A great Virginian who wrote the Declaration of Independence talked about how we believed that all people were created equal with an inalienable right given to us by our creator to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This case is about liberty. It's about the pursuit of happiness. It is about the inalienable right of every individual to marry the person that they love. When we started this, we said we would prove three things. We would prove that marriage was a fundamental right. Supreme Court has said that 14 times and again last June. We said we would prove that preventing gay and lesbian citizens from marrying the person that they loved seriously harmed them and seriously harmed the children that they were raising. We proved that not only from our witnesses, but from the mouths of the defendant's own witnesses who admitted that. And we said that we would prove that prohibiting people from marrying the person that they loved based on sex or sexual orientation did not help anyone. No one was made better off. And that, again, the courts ruled in the marriage equality case was the fact that there is no one harmed by allowing people to marry the person that they loved. Last June, when we had the Supreme Court decisions, was really the end of the beginning of our fight for marriage equality. What we're hoping is that the case in Virginia is the beginning of the end. Because when we establish, as we will, that the citizens of Virginia, no less than the citizens of California, are entitled to marry the person they love, I think we will send a message that this is not a Republican or Democratic issue. It's not a conservative or liberal issue. It's not a regional issue. It's a federal constitutional issue that every American citizen, no matter what their party, no matter what their race, no matter what state they live in, no matter what their economic conditions, are entitled to equality before the law. And particularly equality in this area that is of such critical importance to every one of us, which is the right to marry the person that we love. Thank you, Ted and David. Now it's my pleasure to introduce to you Tom Shuddleworth, a senior partner at Shuddleworth, Rulof, Swain, Haddad, and Morka. We've been following the Bostick case ever since Tom and his team filed the initial complaint challenging Virginia's marriage amendment. We thank the Shuddleworth team and particularly Tom for inviting us to join this case. We're proud to be working with you to make Virginia a better place for all. Tom. Thank you. When my partner Bob Rulof came to me and said that there were two fellas that wanted to be represented in helping to get married in the city of Virginia, Beach, or city of Norfolk, I never thought that I'd be standing up here on the shoulders of two giants like David Boyes and Ted Olson. And as glad as they are to have me, I'm triple glad to have them. I would like to put a little bit of a human touch on some of what we're talking about, because it's not complicated. It's really not. These four people, man and woman, two women and two men, want to get married to each other because they love each other. That's a right that they ought to have, and there ought not be a lot of legal squabbling about that. And let me tell you about just what indignities gay people have to suffer in our society and in Virginia. Let me tell them one. I know Mary and Carol had an in vitro child right here 15 years ago. And during the pregnancy there, you were challenged with a medical emergency. And her partner of then about five years, 10 years, came to the hospital and wasn't allowed in the room, was not allowed to talk to anybody, was not given any information whatsoever about her health and about her well-being. And would throughout the whole hospital stay and didn't know whether her partner was going to live or die because she wasn't married. Now a little more dramatic in my opinion, and thankfully not quite as serious but still serious, they flash forward to 15 years and they're trying to get a travel visa and an updated passport for their daughter because they want to go on a vacation to Europe. They go to the post office and now because of domestic relations problems and things with people at large, there's a requirement by the post office that both the husband and the wife, both the father and the mother have to be there to get the renewal of the passport. So in walks our couple and says we'd like to get a passport renewal for our daughter. And the person at the post office said to Carol, because she is she's the birth mother of the child, she says to her, you're nothing. You don't count for anything. And she ripped up her part of the application in front of their daughter. Now I don't want to live in a world that does that. I don't want to live in a country that does that. I want to have by the time I go on to my great reward and hopefully a lot sooner than that, that nobody like these people would ever have to put up with any humiliation and degradation that they were in both of those situations. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tom. And now I'd like to introduce our courageous plaintiffs, Tim Bostic and Tony London of Norfolk. Good morning. My name is Tim Bostic and I am one of the plaintiffs challenging Virginia's marriage amendment. I stand before you today as a Virginian whose family roots in the Commonwealth stretch back to the founding of our nation. I also stand before you as an individual who has and who continues to be discriminated against by my home state because of who I am and who I love. My partner Tony and I have been together for 24 years. In those 24 years we have done what seems typical for other couples. We've built a home together, developed a close circle of supportive friends and family and have been there for each other through life's ups and downs. Tony is my best friend. He's the person with whom I would have spent nearly half of my life and the person with whom I want to spend my remaining years. We filed this lawsuit because although we've been together for more than two decades, we want our relationship to be recognized just like everyone else's. We want to be married. Further it's important for us as Virginians that we get married in the state we love and the state we've called home for so long. Thank you. Thanks Tim and Tony. And now I'd like to introduce our plaintiffs Mary Townley and Carol Shaw and their daughter Emily from Richmond. Good morning everyone. My name is Mary Townley and this is my partner of nearly 30 years Carol and our daughter Emily, the light of our lives. Carol and I first met in Winchester in 1983 as teachers working with children with autism and we've been together ever since. Carol, Emily and I are like every other family. We own a home in the suburbs. We participate in bake sales, basketball games and PTA meetings. We have careers that we love and we have a circle of supportive friends as does Emily. We've built a life together. I can't imagine what my life would be like without them. The one thing that's different is that I cannot refer to Carol as my wife. Even though we were married in California in 2008, Virginia does not recognize our marriage nor can we get married in our home state. We aren't asking for special privileges or treatment. We just want to be the same as everyone else to be married. As parents we want the best for our daughter and know that it would mean a lot to her if our family was treated just like every other family. We want that for all Virginians no matter who they are and who they love. Thank you. Thank you Mary and Carol. Finally it's my pleasure to introduce a true visionary in the fight for equality for gay and lesbian Americans, a for founding board member and current president of the human rights campaign Chad Griffin. Thank you very much Adam and good morning everyone. You know Ted referenced this earlier as did David but the Commonwealth of Virginia gave this country its constitutional foundation. It gave us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But right now Virginia and 36 other states in this country are stuck behind a dark wall of discrimination. A wall that divides this country into two distinct Americas. In one America, an America that now includes California thanks to these incredible lawyers, this organization and the Perry case, full legal equality is nearly a reality. But in the other America like right across the Potomac River in Virginia, LGBT people lack even the most basic measures of equality. Despite decades spent caring for one another in good times and bad and in sickness and health, couples like the plaintiffs in this case are targeted and intentionally treated as second-class citizens by discriminatory state laws. That's an American. It's an injustice that cannot be tolerated in any corner of this country. And that's why after those historic Supreme Court rulings back in June, together we all set a new goal, a goal to bring marriage equality to all 50 states in this country within the next five years. We've come so far in that fight and thanks to the bipartisan legal dream team of Ted Olson and David Boyce, the partisan veil that used to divide the marriage debate has finally been lifted. According to a poll that HRC commissioned recently, a clear majority of Virginians support marriage equality and 71 percent of Virginians under the age of 30 support these plaintiffs right to marry. And at a moment when folks in Washington can't seem to agree on anything, especially today, it's time to acknowledge that this is one of the most bipartisan issues in America today. Americans are uniting behind equality because this fight isn't about politics. It's about people and ending the discrimination that they face every single day of their lives. That's why I'm proud to stand here today as co-founder and board member of AFER and to double down on the work that we all together began four years ago. And I'm grateful that longtime HRC members, Mary and Carol, will be joining Tim and Tony as the lead plaintiffs in this case. They and the Americans in the 36 other states without marriage shouldn't have to wait one more day for the equality that they're promised by this nation's founding documents. And that's why this fight continues in federal and state court, in state legislatures and at the ballot box, until these two Americas finally becomes one. Thank you very much.