Click here to see the video of the late Lieutenant Laurel Hester, which Garden State Equality made in January 2006, just weeks before she passed away from lung cancer. In this video, Lieutenant Hester begged the Ocean County freeholders to grant death benefits to her domestic partner Stacie Andree. For months, the freeholders had stubbornly refused to grant death benefits because the couple was gay and in the freeholders' view, "not moral." Garden State Equality, which led the public campaign to support Lieutenant Hester and Stacie, showed this video to the freeholders at their January meeting. The freeholders then reversed their decision. Today, Stacie is receiving the benefits and is able to live in the home she and the love of her life had built together.

Background:

Lieutenant Laurel Hester of Ocean County, New Jersey died in February 2006 as the best-known, most respected LGBTI New Jerseyan in the world. In the six months before lung cancer took her life, more than 100,000 stories about Lieutenant Hester appeared on the web, television and radio and in newspapers across the world.

When Lieutenant Hester heard about her cancer last fall, she sought health and pension benefits for her partner Stacie just as any dying person would seek for his or her surviving spouse. The reaction of her employer? Giving benefits to Stacie, Ocean County freeholder John Kelly maintained, would violate the sanctity of marriage. He declared Lieutenant Hester and Stacie "not moral."

Upon that basis, the five-member Ocean County Board of Freeholders denied pension and health benefits to Stacie even though Lieutenant Hester spent 24 years protecting the county -- including the freeholders. Apparently they found her moral enough to put her life on the line for them for a quarter-century. The freeholders' treatment enraged millions across New Jersey, where this became one of the best-known human-interest stories in years.

Garden State Equality organized one grassroots event after another to change the freeholders' minds. We took to the streets again and again. Motivated by the brutal unfairness to this loving couple, and mindful that they personified the discrimination endured by thousands of other same-sex couples in New Jersey denied the freedom to marry, we at Garden State Equality made this story our life's obession.

The freeholders would not budge. As progressive as New Jersey is -- it's one of the most socially progressive places in America, especially on LGBTI issues -- Ocean County happens to be among the very few conservative areas of the state. Leaders in New Jersey from across the political spectrum condemned the freeholders for their continued heartlessness.

At a public meeting of the Ocean County freeholders in November 2005, chief freeholder Joseph Vicari addressed the hundreds of people organized by Garden State Equality who packed the room to support Lieutenant Hester. Vicari told the crowd that the freeholders had no power to provide health and pension benefits to a domestic partner of a county employee. But New Jersey's domestic partnership law, passed in 2004, specifically gives counties that option. It's right in the law.

By January 2006, the pressure on the freeholders was too much to bear. The straw that broke their back was the Garden State Equality-produced video of Lieutenant Hester, shown at the freeholders' meeting and aired that night by nearly every television station in New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia. Newly elected Governor Jon Corzine then stepped in to ask the freeholders to change their minds.

Late on a Friday afternoon in January, they did.

Lieutenant Laurel Hester left an enduring legacy. Citing her courage, 10 New Jersey counties, comprising two-thirds of the state's population, have voted to provide domestic partnership benefits to the employees of county employees.

We at Garden State Equality will cherish our relationship with Lieutenant Hester always. In November 2005, Garden State Equality created an award for citizen courage, and presented it to Lieutenant Hester as the first-ever recipient. In February 2006, Garden State Equality renamed the award the Lieutenant Laurel Hester Prize for Citizen Courage.

In February, before an audience of more than 500 and just days before Lieutenant Hester died, Garden State Equality presented The Hester Prize to Lieutenant Hester's domestic partner Stacie Andree and to Dane Wells, Lieutenant Hester's colleague in the Ocean County Prosecutor's office. Dane fought valiantly for the Lieutenant Hester and Stacie Andree's right to receive domestic partner benefits.

Alas, the story isn't over. Had Lieutenant Hester and Stacie Andree been allowed to marry -- and if same-sex couples across New Jersey were allowed to marry -- government officials could never put same-sex couples through this kind of hell.

In February 2006, the very month Lieutenant Hester died, the New Jersey Supreme Court heard the marriage equality lawsuit that's been making its way through state courts for several years. If Lambda Legal and the plaintiff couples win, New Jersey will become the second state in the U.S. to give same-sex couples the freedom to marry.

The state, acting as defendant in the case, argued that the New Jersey domestic partnership law already provides same-sex couples "many" of the rights of marriage. That is preposterous. The state's domestic partnership law, even with its expansion at the start of 2006, provides same-sex couples only 10 of the 1,049 rights of marriage, or less than one percent. And in the few rights the law provides, loopholes allow officials like the Ocean County freeholders to do what they did.

With their intransigence, the Ocean County freeholders wound up proving the domestic partnership law's weaknesses and greatly helped the arguments for marriage equality -- a cause that no doubt repluses them. How sweet are the ironies of history.