An online petition in 2003 pushed the Human Rights Campaign into the world of online fund- and friendraising. And the organization never looked back.

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

In 2004, when President Bush was preparing for a press conference to address the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would define marriage solely as a union between a man and a woman and take the power to allow or disallow gay and lesbian marriages out of the hands of the states, the Human Rights Campaign was on his tail.