History is being made in California this month, as hundreds of thousands of lesbians and gay men, their friends, families and allies around the world crowd into what has become a virtual courtroom.

I have been sitting in the courtroom from the opening arguments, but I was expecting to simply observe, absorb and comment. Instead, I am in the overflow room at the Courthouse — watching what would have been seen on YouTube by millions — and recording one of the key moments in gay civil rights history on the Courage Campaign Institute’s “Prop 8 Trial Tracker” web site that is providing wall-to-wall coverage of the trial.

While our Constitution guarantees access to a fair and open trial, the modern definition of access is being rapidly expanded as a federal court in San Francisco hears a challenge to Proposition 8, the California initiative that stripped equal marriage rights from the state’s lesbian and gay families in 2008.

Read the rest of Rick Jacobs’s Huffington Post article here.