During LGBTQ+ History Month, President Jones Reflects on 10 Years of Marriage Equality
Public discussion explores landmark moment in LGBTQ+ history
by MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson
It’s been 10 years since the U.S. Supreme Court recognized marriage equality as a Constitutional right in Obergefell v. Hodges, and 11 years since a federal district court in Pennsylvania struck down the state’s same-sex marriage ban, helping to pave the way for that national ruling.
The federal case, Whitewood v. Wolf, was decided by none other than President John E. Jones ’77, P’11. Jones’ public conversation, Landmark Progress: 10 Years of Marriage Equality in the United States, will be held Monday, Oct. 27, at 7 p.m. in Rubendall Recital Hall.
In 2014, as a federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush, Jones ruled that Pennsylvania’s 1996 law defining marriage as between one man and one woman—often referred to as the state’s Defense of Marriage Act—was unconstitutional. The decision added legal momentum and moral weight to the movement that culminated in the 2015 Supreme Court ruling. (Whitewood arrived just a few years after Jones' also high-profile "intelligent design" case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District [2005], and after Jones was named one of Time magazine’s 2006 “100 men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming our world.”)
Jones’ experiences presiding over Whitewood provide him a unique perspective on a landmark moment in LGBTQ+ history. During the Oct. 27 dialogue, he will discuss the legal dimensions of the marriage-equality decision, his own experiences regarding it and its reverberations today.
Tommy Walcott-Lee, director of Dickinson’s LGBTQ+ Center, will moderate the Oct. 27 discussion. “For me, at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are being increasingly questioned and politicized, this one-on-one discussion offers a timely and necessary moment of reflection and renewal,” says Lee, a married, gay man whose Ph.D. research focuses on LGBTQ health. “It’s an opportunity to understand how far we’ve come, and to recommit ourselves to the ongoing care and commitment that progress requires.”
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Published October 21, 2025