Northern Virginia State Sen. Adam Ebbin, Virginia’s first openly-gay state senator, today issued a statement hailing the decision by the legal tandem that argued successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court this year to through their weight behind an effort to overthrow the anti-gay marriage Marshall-Newman amendment in Virginia.

“Today I thank and commend attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies for joining the lawsuit in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia seeking marriage equality,” Sen. Ebbin stated. “Mr. Olson and Mr. Boies are among America’s finest legal minds and I am delighted that they are putting their talents to use in seeking to strike down of the Commonwealth’s draconian Marshall-Newman amendment. Their skills were recently proven when they successfully argued for the US Supreme Court to strike down California’s Proposition 8.

I also applaud the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal for their filing of a motion for summary judgment today asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia for a swift resolution to their previously filed suit.

I have great hope that these suits will ultimately lead to national marriage equality, as Loving v. Virginia led to the end of multiple states’ miscegenation laws in 1967.

This legal effort keeps with the tradition of advocacy for civil liberties by fair-minded Virginians initiated hundreds of years ago with James Madison’s and George Mason’s fight for the Bill of Rights.

It is not a question of whether marriage equality will come to Virginia; it is a question of when. This is the time for Virginia to wake up from history–as Jefferson said, ‘laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.'”