Long saddled with the label of "swing vote," U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has a new moniker that will travel with him into history: the court's strongest champion of gay rights.
His passionate majority opinion in the June 26 landmark U.S. v. Windsor, coupled with his similarly heartfelt rulings in Romer v. Evans in 1996 and Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, means that Kennedy has taken the lead role in the trilogy of Supreme Court rulings that turned the tide after the crippling gay rights defeat in 1986 in Bowers v. Hardwick.
