In Brief: Losing a Battle, Winning the War

From May, 2010 eNews Vol. 7, No. 5

At Lambda Legal, we make the case for equality in the courts and in the court of public opinion. We are never satisfied when we lose a case, but sometimes a setback in court can lead to greater gains than anyone might have imagined.

Take the case of Janice Langbehn. A Miami hospital kept Janice from seeing her partner, Lisa Pond, for eight hours—even as Lisa slipped into a coma. Tragically, she died without regaining consciousness. Lambda Legal sued the hospital on Janice's behalf, but last September the court dismissed her case. The judge wrote in his decision that the treatment suffered by Janice and the couple's children lacked compassion and caused them needless distress during a time of vulnerability. But he found that no law required the hospital to allow Janice to see her partner as she lay dying.

Losing a case is always disappointing—and this case, heartbreaking—but we kept fighting. We organized national partners and local community activists and we worked with officials at Jackson Memorial Hospital to change its policies about visitation so that hospital personnel would respect the wishes of same-sex couples and their families.

We held events to keep the community informed, and we worked with the media to keep Janice and Lisa's story alive. The continuing community education and public visibility campaign that Janice and Lambda Legal pursued was so effective, it reached the President of the United States. President Obama said he was so moved by a newspaper account that on April 15 he called Janice personally from Air Force One to express his sympathies and outrage. He told her that he had ordered the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to issue rules requiring hospitals that receive Medicaid or Medicare (practically all hospitals in the country) to honor the wishes of patients about who may visit them, and also to address medical decision making and other health care issues that affect LGBT patients and their families.

We lost a court battle, but we won the war. The President's memo illustrates the fact that the fight for equality doesn't take place only in court. Lambda Legal's strategy of combining high impact litigation, education and policy work is powerful for making change.

Lambda Legal will work with HHS to make sure that the new regulations are strong, that they are issued as promptly as possible, and that they will be enforced. And we will continue to make the case for equality on all fronts—in the courts, at the White House, in Congress, in government offices and in the community.