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Mary L. Bonauto was elected to the Gill Foundation’s board of directors in August 2016. A longtime LGBT activist, Bonauto has served as the civil rights project director at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) since 1990. She has litigated in the state and federal courts of New England on discrimination issues, parental rights, free speech, religious liberty, and relationship recognition. In 2015, she successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in the historic case Obergefell v. Hodges, establishing the freedom to marry for same-sex couples nationwide.

Bonauto and two Vermont co-counsel won a 1999 ruling in Baker v. State of Vermont, which led to the nation’s first civil union law. She was lead counsel in the groundbreaking case Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which made Massachusetts the first state where same-sex couples could legally marry in 2004.