Mary Bonauto is responsible for leading the first strategic challenges to section three of the Defense of Marriage Act.
12 Facts About Mary Bonauto
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Mary Bonauto was born in 1961 and grew up in Newburgh, New York in a Roman Catholic family.
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Mary Bonauto graduated from Hamilton College and Northeastern University School of Law.
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Mary Bonauto lives in Portland with her spouse Jennifer Wriggins, who is a professor at the University of Maine School of Law.
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Mary Bonauto has litigated widely in areas such as job and public accommodations discrimination, securing domestic partner benefits and relationship protections, establishing second parent rights and de facto parent status, vindicating First Amendment protections, and challenging anti-gay harassment and violence.
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Mary Bonauto has worked on public policy in all six New England states, and occasionally writes for legal publications.
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Mary Bonauto filed her first marriage case in Vermont in July 1997.
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In 2011, Mary Bonauto was named one of the 50 most-powerful women in Boston by Boston Magazine.
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GLAD led by Mary Bonauto filed suit in Massachusetts on behalf of seven gay and lesbian couples denied the freedom to marry in 2001.
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On May 14,2007 GLAD attorney Bennett Klein, joined by Mary Bonauto, argued for the couples in the Connecticut Supreme Court.
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Mary Bonauto was instrumental in the campaign to enact the law, and was the architect of an unprecedentedly large public hearing on April 22,2009, where proponents and opponents presented their arguments.
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In March 2015, lawyers preparing to argue a consolidation of the Supreme Court cases titled Obergefell v Hodges selected Bonauto to argue on behalf of the Michigan case DeBoer v Snyder and the Kentucky case Love v Beshear.