WESTCHESTER, N.Y. — This June marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in New York City, an event that helped turn the tide of LGBTQ+ rights in America.
Every city and town seems to be holding a Pride celebration and LEGOLAND in Westchester, New York, is bringing the biggest of the Pride celebrations into the world’s smallest ‘town’.
At LEGOLAND Discovery Center in Westchester, they lined their ‘Miniland Times Square’ streets with rainbow flags, ‘Pride’ and ‘Love is Love’ floats along with a ‘Stonewall 50’ billboard.
The uprising at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 started when a group of LGBTQ+ people stood up against NYPD harassment. NYPD apologized recently for the Stonewall raid.
It’s considered one of the benchmark events in LGTBQ+ history.
Connecticut was one of the first states to pass civil rights protections for gays and lesbians in 1991. Gender identity and expression were added in 2011. The legislature had passed a civil unions bill that allowed same-sex couples legal partnerships in 2005, and Governor Jodi Rell signed it into law.
A decision in a case three years later said same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry and determined that the state’s civil union statute violated the equal protection clause of the state Constitution, forcing the state to make same-sex marriage legal.
In November of 2008, Connecticut became the third state in the country to allow marriage between same-sex couples.
