In the U.S., same-sex marriage a milestone, not the finish line

She just wanted to have a soda and watch the Belmont Stakes.

So when Briana Sandy, a pre-op transgender woman, found a sports bar in Tempe, Ariz., she walked in, wearing a knee-length blue sundress and blue suede sandals, and waited to order. The 56-year-old was stunned by the response.

"We don't serve your kind here," she says the bartender told her.

Barely a minute after walking through the door, Sandy left without protest. When she took her story to the media, the manager apologized for refusing her service, contending that an employee mistook her for a cross-dressing prostitute.

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In Sandy's mind, it was clear what she had just encountered as a trans woman: "Simple discrimination," she alleges of the June 6, 2015, incident.

Just a few weeks later marriage equality became the law of the land in the United States. That day — June 26 — was a moment of national exuberance for LGBT Americans.

But a year after the Supreme Court made it legal for same-sex couples to wed, the LGBT community is still fighting discrimination.

'Like I had stepped back in time 60 years'

Statewide legal protections remain out of reach. That includes protections from workplace discrimination, access to gender-neutral restrooms in public spaces and protection from housing discrimination. As Sandy alleges in her case, there is also the right not to have a business deny you service.

"I felt like I had stepped back in time 60 years," she says of her experience in Tempe. "Like I was a black man in an all-white, Southern restaurant."

Sandy has no confidence a similar incident couldn't happen elsewhere in her home state of Arizona.

Despite the year-old achievement of nationwide marriage equality, Arizona remains a jurisdiction where — depending on the municipality — a couple can celebrate their openly gay marriage on a Friday, then lose their jobs for the same reason on Monday, without legal recourse.

The Grand Canyon State is among 32 still lacking explicit statewide protections against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender identity.

Florida is another.

Across county lines

Michael Farmer and his husband, Boyd Lindsley, live in a bungalow in Greater Orlando, which is in Seminole County. Neighbouring Orange County is just a two-minute drive away, but it may as well be a different world when it comes to legal protections. 

"We're just across the border. Once you drive into Orange County, we can't be denied service at a restaurant or a hotel just because we're gay. We can't be fired because we're gay," says Farmer, a spokesperson for the gay-rights group Equality Florida. "But we drive home — literally just our little street is in Seminole County — and our legal rights are completely changed. There are none."

That kind of inconsistency isn't just bad for civil rights, Florida state representative Holly Raschein maintains — it's also bad economic policy.

"You can now get married as an LGBT person, but you can still be fired, or kicked out of your housing," says Raschein, the first Republican in Florida's legislature to support a Competitive Workforce Act, which is aimed at eliminating statewide LGBT discrimination.

"Times are changing. If we're recruiting the best and the brightest, our next generation of workers are looking for not only companies that have these protections in place, but states that have them in place."

'Determined now more than ever'

The LGBT civil-rights advocacy group Human Rights Campaign is pushing for a federal Equality Act to extend the legal protections enjoyed by straight Americans to all.

The Orlando massacre on June 12, in which 49 people at the gay nightclub Pulse were shot dead in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, only strengthened the group's resolve to see the act pass.

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"We're determined now, more than ever, to come together to defeat the hate and bigotry that motivated the attack, and others like it," says Stephen Peters, a spokesperson for HRC. "And we're determined now more than ever to fight for full LGBTQ equality."

The Orlando tragedy also served to highlight the importance of the marriage-equality ruling, as CNN anchor Anderson Cooper noted in an interview with Republican Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.

A clip of their exchange went viral when Anderson, who is openly gay, pressed Bondi on whether she was being "hypocritical" for "championing" gay rights in the wake of the tragedy, when she herself had originally been a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage.

"Had there been no gay marriage, no same-sex marriage, you do realize that … there would be no spouses," he said. "Boyfriends and girlfriends of the dead would not be able to get information, and would not be able to visit in the hospital here. Isn't there a sick irony in that?"

Bondi responded that she was simply defending the constitution.

Celebration, then new fights

Two of the original plaintiffs in the Supreme Court same-sex marriage case, Randy Johnson and Paul Campion, remember their feelings of elation following the decision. The couple, who have been together for 25 years and have four children, wed years before the ruling in California. Even so, it wasn't until last June that their marriage was recognized legally in Kentucky, where they live.

And it wasn't long before the afterglow of June 26 started fading.

"We still live in Kentucky," Campion says. "In most counties in Kentucky, we don't have legal protections for housing or employment."

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While their district, Jefferson County, has a fairness ordinance to safeguard employees from work discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, not every county enjoys the same protections.

This August, the couple will also finalize "second-parent" adoptions so both parents become full legal guardians of their children — the oldest of whom are 21-year-old boys adopted at birth. Before last June, Kentucky would not have recognized Johnson and Campion as a married couple, meaning they could not both legally be considered parents.

The Supreme Court ruling made that possible.

"Those were the kinds of challenges we've encountered for 25 years," Johnson says. "But while we celebrate and look at the Supreme Court decisions as monumental," Campion adds, "we clearly still have a lot more to do."