Jul. 20, 2013

OC's Lavender Bar Association celebrates 3rd anniversary

Celebrating its third anniversary — and U.S. Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage — the Orange County Lavender Bar Association presented awards last week honoring an inspirational force behind the organization, the late M. Catherine Baird Darmer. Darmer, a criminal and constitutional law professor at Chapman University School of Law until her death last year, "was a tireless advocate against all forms of discrimination and a passionate advocate for LGBT equality," according to the group's website. At the crowded rooftop gathering July 10, Lavender Bar board member Julie E. Patterson of Bryan Cave LLP's Irvine office presented the group's new Outstanding Community Service Award named for Darmer to the national Family Equality Council and to Bryan Cave for the firm's work preparing a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court presenting comments from children of same-sex parents. "All that we on the Bryan Cave team had to do was write down what they had to say," the brief's lead author, Katherine A. Keating of San Francisco, told the gathering. "Working on this brief truly was the privilege of a lifetime." The bar association also gave its inaugural M. Katherine Baird Darmer Equality Scholarship to Jordan Aiken, who begins UC Irvine School of Law next month. Aiken, a 2009 UC Berkeley graduate, received the $5,000 scholarship for her work launching an organization for LGBTQ youth while working at a shelter in New Orleans. By creating the scholarship, said Francine J. Lipman, a law professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas formerly at Chapman, "what we wanted was more Katherine Darmers, because we miss her so much." — Don J. DeBenedictis