Washington Blade - America's Leading Gay News Source » Chad Griffin

Griffin says LGBT youth will motivate him at HRC

Chris Johnson — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 02:13:34 +0000

Chad Griffin has an image in mind as he prepares for his role to become the new president of the Human Rights Campaign: young LGBT Americans who lie awake in bed at night worrying about their future.

Griffin, a Los Angeles-based activist who has a long career in progressive advocacy and roots on both the East and West Coast, said growing up in a small town in Arkansas he identified as that young person who couldn’t acknowledge or be open about who he was.

“Some people know me as a guy who lives in L.A. and used to live in Washington, but my entire childhood was in Arkansas, and it’s where my entire family lives today,” Griffin said.

Griffin said his motivation over the next few years at HRC will be to impact the lives of “that young kid, the young student, who lives in Fresno or Bakersfield or Arkansas, or Washington, D.C., for that matter.”

“The fact that every single night, where we all have very lucky lives and live in places where we’re accepted, there are thousands, if not millions, of kids who go to bed every night staring at the ceiling — something that so many of us all did — not being able to go to sleep out of fear of waking up the next day and facing that next day,” Griffin said.

Griffin spoke with the Washington Blade over the phone from Dulles Airport as he awaited his flight back to Los Angeles. He was on his way to attend on Saturday Dustin Lance Black’s play ‘8,’ which is about the enactment of Proposition 8 in California.

The new HRC president, who’s set to take on his role in June, comes to the organization after having started and served as board president for the American Foundation for Equal Rights. The group, founded in 2009, is responsible for the ongoing litigation against California’s marriage ban.

During the interview, Griffin was hesitant to talk about specific policies he’d like to pursue, noting Joe Solmonese is still running HRC, but said he wants to continue the positive change the LGBT community has seen over the past few years.

“It means changes in the workplaces, changes at the state and local level, and, obviously, it means significant policy changes at the federal level,” Griffin said. “So much has been accomplished over the past several years, but we’re not finished. And that kid is still waking up staring at the ceiling because he or she lives in a country where their government directly and intentionally discriminates against them.”

Griffin said his sense of urgency will be his top challenge at the helm of HRC, saying, “If in fact patience is a virtue, it’s a virtue I do not possess. I voice frustration consistently at the pace at which we make progress.”

“If you were to talk to anyone who knows me, I think that they would describe first and foremost my lack of patience and how self-critical I am when I can’t achieve what we need to achieve,” Griffin said.

When he comes to HRC in June, the race for the White House will be well underway, as well as the race for control of Congress. The LGBT community will see measures on marriage in Minnesota and Maine, and possibly Washington State and Maryland. (The anti-gay ballot measure in North Carolina is set for a vote in May prior to when Griffin will take over HRC.)

Griffin said he has a background as a political strategist and is used to working behind-the-scenes, developing campaign plans and executing them.

“If you’re going to win the war, you’ve got to fight the battle on every single front,” Griffin said. “So that’s at the federal level. It’s on the state and local level. With any campaign, with limited resources, you have to be smart about your investments and about your plan, but I am not one who believes we should forego any avenues of victory.”

The incoming HRC president also comes into the role as many critics contend HRC has been too cozy with the Obama administration and too afraid to criticize Democratic lawmakers.

Griffin said observers should look to his previous work to discover that he’s “not one who’s shy about disagreeing with friends and colleagues” when he believes they’re wrong.

“I have a long record in that and think that’s the best way to judge how I will act,” Griffin said. “I’m not one who is thought to be shy or easily intimidated, and you typically will always know what I’m thinking and how I feel.”

Asked about criticism that HRC caters too much to more affluent members of the LGBT community by hosting black-tie dinners while others in the community feel left behind, Griffin said the organization’s outreach will be inclusive.

“LGBT people comes in all ages, all religions, all political affiliations, all colors,” Griffin said. “They are all part of the inclusion strategy and they are my motivation.”

Griffin said he’s on board with two major asks for President Obama from the LGBT community: an endorsement of same-sex marriage and an executive order requiring federal contractors to have LGBT-inclusive non-discrimination policies.

“I fundamentally believe that not only the president but our members of Congress and all of our leaders should support marriage equality, and we should do everything in our power to get them to that position,” Griffin said.

Griffin called the proposed directive for federal contractors “something that should happen, and should happen as quickly as possible,” but said it’s only the first step and passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act is necessary.

“It’s so frustrating that we’re in a country where we still don’t have an inclusive ENDA,” Griffin said. “That is something that has to remain a priority, but I would think that the executive order that has been discussed and proposed and pushed forward is a good step and should happen.”

As Griffin takes on his new role, he said the work at AFER against Proposition 8 will continue. The only change, he said, will be that he’s stepping down as board president, although he’ll continue to serve on the board. Griffin said there are no plans to absorb AFER into HRC.

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Chad Griffin named HRC president

Chris Johnson — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 15:41:54 +0000

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Chad Griffin at an AFER event. (Photo courtesy Matt Baume)

The founder and president of a high-profile California-based LGBT rights group has been named as the new president of the Human Rights Campaign.

HRC announced Friday that Chad Griffin, board president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, will succeed Joe Solmonese as president after his contract expires.

According to the organization, Griffin’s appointment followed a six-month search by board members, who considered more than one hundred candidates. Griffin is set take on his new role on June 11, 2012 and Solmonese will continue to lead the group until that time.

In a statement provided by HRC, Griffin said he was honored to take on the role as head of the nation’s largest LGBT organization, which has an annual budget of $40 million a year.

“All over this country in big cities and small towns, there are families and young people who long to be accepted for who they are, and who want be treated with the same dignity and respect as everyone else,” said Griffin. “I’m honored by the board’s confidence in my ability to lead HRC. While there’s no doubt that we’ve made tremendous progress on the road to equality, we must not forget that millions of LGBT Americans still lack basic legal protections and suffer the consequences of discrimination every day.”

Griffin gained notoriety after he founded AFER in 2009 and secured Ted Olson and David Boies as attorneys in litigation against Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage. Last month, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the ban was unconstitutional as a result of this lawsuit.

But Griffin has had an extensive career fighting for progressive causes. According to his bio on AFER’s website, Griffin is founding partner of political and communications strategy firm Griffin-Schake, and taken on the tobacco and oil industry while pushing forward with issues such as equal rights, clean energy, universal health care, stem cell research and early childhood education.

His bio states he was responsible for spearheading Proposition 87, California’s Clean Alternative Energy Initiative; Proposition 10, which provides $600 million each year to early childhood education; and Proposition 71, which enables billions of dollars to flow to stem cell research.

HRC co-chair Tim Downing and HRC Foundation co-chair Sandra Hartness issued a joint statement on behalf of their colleagues on the Board of Directors regarding the selection of Griffin.

“We’re ecstatic to have someone of Chad’s caliber as our next president,” the co-chair said. “His superior credentials and achievements, both as a visionary and strategist, make him uniquely qualified to lead this organization forward. Chad has a proven track record of consistently delivering results during his career. That’s something that our community rightly expects and deserves.”

The Los Angeles-based activist has roots both in Hollywood and Washington. During the Clinton administration, Griffin became the youngest staffer ever to serve in the White House. He was also an executive producer of the 2009 film “Outrage,” which discusses the hypocrisy of closeted individuals in power who promote anti-gay policies.

Hilary Rosen, a D.C.-based Democratic activist and former interim head of HRC, said she’s “thrilled” with the selection of Griffin because he’s “entrepreneurial and visionary.”

“He anticipated how not just that Prop 8 needed to be overturned, but the right way to do it,” Rosen said. “That was both be smart legally as well as galvanize the best cross-section of allies. He built an organization to do that.”

Rosen said Griffin’s top challenges over the next couple years will be determining the best way to “maintain the momentum in all the above strategy that is our struggle for equality.”

“There are ballot measures, there’s legislation federally, there’s legislations statewide,” Rosen said. “How you weave that together in the national conversation and where you choose to devote resources and bring out new allies, I think, that’s the challenge.”

Rosen added Griffin has “all the right instincts and all of the right experience” to take on these challenges.

“I think that this job is a perfect job for him, and he’s perfect for the community,” Rosen said. “And that’s a nice combo.”

R. Clarke Cooper, executive director of the National Log Cabin Republicans, said Griffin’s selection of Olson, a U.S. solicitor general under former President George W. Bush, and Boies for his legal team shows he’s willing to work on a bipartisan basis. The two attorney represented opposite sides in the case of Bush v. Gore.

“The campaign for equality is not a partisan matter, it is about doing what is right for all LGBT Americans,” Cooper said. “By selecting Chad Griffin as their new President, the Human Rights Campaign has selected a leader who knows achieving victory will require advocacy and champions on both sides of the aisle.”

Mark Glaze, a principal of the Raben Group, which works on LGBT issues, said Griffin is “a great choice” for the role.

“He’s smart, he’s strategic, he has the kind of sizzle that you’d want in a movement,” Glaze said. “His work on AFER has been a model of effective advocacy, which isn’t easy given the crowded field of groups doing LGBT work.”

Congratulations for Griffin also came from the White House. Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Obama, issued a statement after his appointment was announced.

“The president appreciates the work that the Human Rights Campaign has done with us and we congratulate Chad on his new position as President of HRC,” Jarrett said. “We look forward to working with him.”

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Calif. Supreme Court to hear Prop 8 case

Lou Chibbaro Jr. — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:29:56 +0000

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The California Supreme Court voted unanimously on Wednesday to decide the question of whether supporters of Proposition 8, the ballot measure that repealed California’s same-sex marriage law, have legal standing to appeal a federal court decision last year invalidating the ballot measure.

In a statement released late Wednesday, a court spokesperson said the state Supreme Court would expedite the process for receiving legal briefs and planned to schedule oral arguments for the case in September.

Its decision, expected later in the year, would determine whether same-sex marriage opponents can proceed with their appeal of a U.S. District Court decision last year invalidating Proposition 8 on grounds that it violates the U.S. Constitution by denying same-sex couples the right to marry.

The legal standing issue surfaced in 2009 when former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and then-Attorney General Jerry Brown, now the governor, refused to defend Prop 8 against a lawsuit filed by two same-sex couples.

The private citizens who organized Prop 8 were allowed to intervene on its behalf during the district court proceedings, including a civil trial. But gay rights attorneys challenging the ballot measure on appeal argued that only the state could defend the measure because it was a state law.

On Jan. 4, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals sidestepped a ruling on whether the district court was correct in declaring Prop 8 unconstitutional and sent the lawsuit filed by the gay couples to the state’s Supreme Court for an advisory ruling on the standing question.

If the California Supreme Court rules Prop 8 supporters lack legal standing, the district court ruling would take effect, allowing same-sex couples to marry as they had during the short period of time before voters approved Prop 8 in the November 2008 election.

However, most legal observers believe the Prop 8 backers would respond immediately by asking the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a stay to prevent same-sex marriages from resuming until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether it would take the case on its merits.

Most legal observers believe the case will ultimately wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, if the California Supreme Court rules in favor of granting legal standing to Prop 8 backers, the case would go back to the Ninth Circuit appeals court, which would then hear the case on the merits of whether Prop 8 violates the U.S. Constitution, as gay rights attorneys and the same-sex couples who brought the lawsuit claim it does.

In its statement released today, the California Supreme Court gave a legal explanation of the question it says it will answer after deliberating over the case:

“Whether under Article II, Section 8 of the California Constitution, or otherwise under California law, the official proponents of an initiative measure possess either a particularized interest in the initiative’s validity or the authority to assert the state’s interest in the initiative’s validity, which would enable them to defend the constitutionality of the initiative upon its adoption or appeal a judgment invalidating the initiative, when the public officials charged with that duty refuse to do so.”

The court’s statement says Prop 8 supporters’ attorneys must file their opening brief for the case by March 14, and attorneys representing the same-sex couples seeking to invalidate Prop 8 must file their response by April 4.

“The California Supreme Court shortened the normal briefing schedule to expedite consideration and resolution of the issues in the matter and to accommodate oral argument as early as September 2011,” the statement says.

Jennifer Pizer, an attorney for Lambda Legal, an LGBT legal advocacy group that’s monitoring the Prop 8 case, called on the California Supreme Court to confirm that Prop 8 backers don’t have legal standing to appeal the case.

Prop 8 supporters “are not law enforcers and have the same limited rights as everyone else to litigate only when their own rights are at stake, not merely to assert their opinions about others’ rights,” Pizer said in a statement.

“Initiative proponents also cannot step into the shoes of the attorney general, the governor or other state officials,” she said. “The reason for this is basic: the governor and attorney general are elected by the people to represent all the people, not just one point of view on one issue, out of countless, competing concerns.”

A spokesperson for Prop 8 supporters, including the National Organization for Marriage, which campaigns against same-sex marriage rights, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Chad Griffin, president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which is financing the same-sex couples’ lawsuit seeking to overturn Prop 8, said his group is hopeful that they will prevail and same-sex marriage will be declared a constitutional right.

“AFER is challenging Prop 8 not only for our plaintiffs, two loving couples who want to marry, and not only for the thousands of loving couples like them, but for the simple reason that our laws should treat everyone equally,” he said.

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Prop 8 trial spotlights clash of cultures

Karen Ocamb — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:47:29 +0000

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Everyone packed into U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker’s courtroom in San Francisco on Jan. 11 knew they were watching history.

On one side of the court sat lawyers Ted Olson and David Boies, partisan foes in Bush v. Gore. Now the straight pair pledged to prove that same-sex couples deserved the fundamental right to marry. For them, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution is at stake.

On the other side sat Republican attorney Charles Cooper and a handful of supporting lawyers. It was what some might consider a strange sight. After the passage of Proposition 8 in California, the loss of same-sex marriage in Maine, New York and New Jersey and the gloating by ProtectMarriage affiliates such as the National Organization for Marriage, the anti-gay forces looked weak. In fact, throughout the trial, they portrayed themselves as David fighting Goliath.

Retired philosophy professor Linda Hirshman, reporting for The Daily Beast web site, pronounced the matchup a modern day Scopes trial.

“In the confrontation between an irrefutable religious standard and a worldly empirical survey, the challenge to California’s prohibition on gay marriage reveals a fissure that runs throughout American history: Are we modern or are we medieval?” Hirshman wrote. “Do Americans live together in a social contract for our material well-being, or are we following ancient traditions of how to live, because tradition is a better teacher than reason? This issue does not surface often in the United States, but it did most powerfully almost 90 years ago in Scopes vs. the State of Tennessee, the ‘monkey trial.’ And it did so again this week.”

The Scopes trial pitted the teaching of secular science and intellectual freedom against traditional Bible-based Christian fundamentalism. It’s a clash as old as St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologiae” and as fresh as the 2005 debate over whether creationism should be taught alongside the theory of evolution in the Kansas public school system.

For Prop 8 supporters, the trial is now posited as if freedom of religion itself is at stake. In a Jan. 26 column, “Putting Religion on Trial?”, NOM president Maggie Gallagher wrote that Olson and Boies are trying to invalidate the religious beliefs of millions of voters who hold that homosexuality is a sin and marriage is a sacrament between one man and one woman.

“The stakes are high. And the argument they will be asking the Supreme Court to endorse is this: Only bigotry, hatred and unreason explains why anyone cares about the idea that to make a marriage you need a husband and a wife — religious views of marriage are just anti-gay bigotry,” Gallagher wrote.

Anti-bigotry is one of the central elements to proving the case that lesbians and gays have historically been subjected to discrimination and deserve equal protection and due process under the U.S. Constitution. Walker, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court will decide if the plaintiffs proved that gays are a “discrete” minority, possess an “immutable” characteristic and are powerless to protect themselves in the political process.

“We said on the first day of [the] trial we would prove three things,” Boies said at a news conference after the evidentiary trial testimony ended Jan. 26. “Marriage is a fundamental right; that depriving gays and lesbians the right to marry hurts them and hurts their children; and there was no reason, no societal benefit, in not allowing them to get married.”

Evan Wolfson, founder of Freedom to Marry, said the arguments were compelling.

“Our side powerfully showed that California’s selective stripping away of the fundamental freedom to marry from a vulnerable minority lacked any legitimate reason, and harms families while helping no one,” he said. “Fourteen years and tens of millions of dollars after our Hawaii case, the anti-gay opponents had literally nothing new to put forward to defend the discriminatory denial of marriage.”

Olson and Boies entered reams of documents into evidence and put 17 witnesses on the stand. The plaintiffs spoke movingly about their loved ones and a slew of expert witnesses contributed a wealth of knowledge to the evidentiary record.

In some cases, the testimony was almost ironic. For instance, in his opening statement, Cooper said “the purpose of the institution of marriage, the central purpose, is to promote procreation and to channel narrowly procreative sexual activity between men and women into stable enduring unions. … [Marriage] is a pro-child societal institution.”

But Harvard University professor Nancy Cott noted that, “There has never been a requirement that a couple produce children in order to have a valid marriage. … And known sterility or barrenness in a woman has never been a reason not to allow a marriage. In fact, it’s a surprise to many people to learn that George Washington, who is often called the father of our country, was sterile.”

ProtectMarriage only called two of their five witnesses to the stand. So Olson and Boies introduced the depositions of the dropped witnesses into evidence, which appeared to bolster the plaintiffs’ case.

New Yorker contributor Margaret Talbot wrote that Boies’ cross-examination technique “was a little like watching your cat play with his food before he eats it.”

Indeed, Boies seemed to make mincemeat of official Prop 8 proponent Hak-Shing William Tam, who was called as a hostile witness. Tam stood by claims that gays were 12 times more likely to molest children, “based on the different literature that I have read.”

ProtectMarriage called California’s Claremont McKenna College political science professor Kenneth Miller, whose credibility as an expert on gay political power was mightily challenged by Boies on cross examination. Boies also read from a book Miller co-authored that ballot initiatives or “direct democracy can actually be less democratic than representative democracy.”

ProtectMarriage’s second witness, David Blankenhorn, was so combative, the judge reprimanded his demeanor. Boies had Blankenhorn, author of “The Future of Marriage,” go down a list of “possible positive consequences” of same-sex marriage and mark the statements with which he personally agreed.

Among the many positive statement with which Blankenhorn agreed were, “gay marriage would extend a wide range of the natural and practical benefits of marriage to many lesbian and gay couples and their children,” and “same-sex marriage would likely contribute to more stability and to longer-lasting relationships for committed same-sex couples.”

Chad Griffin, chair of the board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, said he was thrilled that the trial put “those who attempt to provide justification for discrimination” under oath for the first time.

“I think they found in a court of law, it’s quite different from on a political campaign where you can say anything and get away with it,” Griffin said. “In a court of law, you’re under oath and you actually have to tell the truth — and you have to answer to those truths under oath. And I think that proved difficult for the defendant-interveners in this case.”

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