June is Pride Month, an annual celebration of LGBT culture and history.  Pride Month is a useful opportunity to reflect on 1) how far we’ve come and 2) how much more work remains.

LGBT liberty has evolved at a rapid clip in the past 20 years. Gays are getting married and serving honorably in our Armed Forces. And there’s a growing understanding in America now what it means to be transgender or non-binary.

But that progress happened despite a sizable list of (mostly male) lawmakers who denied and/or deferred LGBT liberty in the Garden State.

In other words, look at how far we’ve come despite these guys!

Ronald Rice, Sr.

The Senator from Newark, NJ voted against gay marriage (at least) 4 times, each time loudly rejecting parallels between Black liberation and LGBT rights.  His denunciations were mean and hurtful which may have been the point.

An elder statesman in Trenton who delights in the role of contrarian, Senator Rice zealously and repeatedly voted down harm-reduction policies like needle exchange, making it harder for Newark to flatten the curve on HIV transmissions.

If that’s part of Rice’s legacy let’s also acknowledge his son Ron Rice Junior, a Newark Councilman from 2006-2014, took the opposite tack on gay rights. For all his anti-gay rants and stances over the years, Senator Ron Rice Sr raised a son whose commitment to queer equality never wavered.

Chris Christie

Former NJ Gov Chris Christie probably didn’t hate LGBTs as much as his record suggests. But he wanted to be president and so he used NJ’s LGBT community as a whipping post to prove his conservative bona fides to voters in faraway places like Iowa and South Carolina.

Chris Christie burned a lot of capital and good will fighting progress on gay marriage including multiple vetoes of bipartisan marriage equality legislation.

Christie’s frantic behind-the-scenes efforts to repel a veto override are the stuff of legend.

Was Christie really as bad as memory suggests?

InsiderNJ spoke to a former GOP staffer who, off the record, described Christie’s treatment of a moderate republican who was flirting with an override on marriage equality.

“Word got back to Christie and he sent none other than (deputy chief of staff) Bridget Kelly down to the caucus room to retrieve (lawmaker) and escort her to his office, where he berated her and ripped her a new one. She came back in tears. She ended up leaving the building before the vote. Others also skipped out on the session, rather than vote in favor and risk the wrath of Christie.”

Chris Christie left office with the lowest poll numbers of any governor in NJ history. So all those anti-gay votes for a vanity run for the White House?

All for naught.

Steve Sweeney

NJ could have been among the first states in the nation to legalize gay marriage legislatively way back in 2010. But with NJ Senator Steve Sweeney leading the charge, the South Jersey democratic delegation abstained en masse, dooming marriage equality legislation in the waning days of Governor Jon Corzine’s administration.

His LGBT record overall is fairly decent, but NJ Senate President Steve Sweeney makes this list because his infraction had years of negative, real-world consequences for same-sex couples in NJ.

Chris Smith

NJ’s longest sitting Congress member Rep Chris Smith has a big fat Zero rating from the Human Rights Campaign on LGBT rights. Congressman Smith once opened a Congressional Committee investigation into terrorism in Nigeria with a rant about gay marriage.

“I am a strong believer in traditional marriage and do not construe homosexual rights as human rights,” Congressman Smith famously quipped to a Congressional committee he chaired.

Jay Webber

My friend Elizabeth Juviler was being mildly facetious when she described Assemblyman Jay Webber as the guy who “voted against marriage equality about 1000 times and sponsored legislation defining marriage as between Adam and Eve.”

When Jay Webber ran for Congress in 2018, he pushed the same anti-LGBT policies he espoused when he first arrived in Trenton back in the aughts including so-called conversion therapy for LGBT kids. That’s a long time to not evolve.

Trying to force LGBT kids to be straight is cruel and abusive. You can’t pray the gay away. So LGBTs cheered lustily when Mikie Sherrill, durable LGBT ally, trounced Webber to take a seat in Congress.

Jack Kelly

Imagine that there’s an Oscar-winning documentary that chronicles your raging homophobia. Imagine too the full-length Hollywood feature film devoted to the same topic. If you’re Ocean County Freeholder Jack Kelly, you don’t have to imagine because it’s your life.

That’s what happens when you’re the most notorious anti-gay bigot in modern NJ history. It’s a crown Jack Kelly has worn since he led the effort to deny benefits to the partner of a dying Ocean Co. police detective named Laurel Hester.

I’ll always remind anyone who’ll listen about Laurel Hester, a woman whose passing changed hearts and minds and laws in New Jersey. I’m grateful for another opportunity to tell the world how rotten-hearted Jack Kelly was until Laurel’s last breath.

Jay Lassiter is an award-winning writer, podcaster, and videographer based in Cherry Hill NJ.