Massachusetts Representative, Byron Rushing is a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement who took the campaign for same sex marriage into African American communities, confronting the hostility of many religious leaders and defining the right to same sex marriage as a civil rights issue on par with the campaigns of the 1960s. An unlikely Gay Rights hero in some respects, Rushing, a heterosexual man of strong faith, has spent a lifetime championing the causes of the underserved, overlooked and oppressed.