Chad Hunter Griffin[1] (born July 16, 1973)[2][3][4] is an American political strategist best known for his work advocating for LGBT rights in the United States.

Griffin got his start in politics volunteering for the Bill Clinton presidential campaign, which led to a position in the White House Press Office at the age of 19.

Following the 2008 passage of California's highly publicized Proposition 8, which barred the recognition of same-sex marriage, Griffin founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER) to overturn the law.

AFER is a nonprofit organization formed to challenge the federal constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, which limited legal marriage in the state to opposite-sex couples.

After leaving the White House, Griffin entered the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, from which he graduated in 1997.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights opposed a federal lawsuit, seeing it as a "reckless" action, as they were worried that a loss at the Supreme Court could be "devastating" to the cause.

[8][10] In May 2009 AFER filed their lawsuit, now styled Hollingsworth v. Perry, which argued that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional on equal protection and due process grounds.

[8][11][12] In 2012, Griffin was selected to succeed Joe Solmonese as president of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT advocacy and political lobbying organization in the United States.

His appointment was well received by many in the LGBT community, including Cleve Jones, R. Clarke Cooper, and Transgender Law Center executive director Masen Davis.

In May 2012, Griffin asked a question which, in part, led Vice President Joe Biden to publicly share his support for same-sex marriage.

[15] Griffin was one of several executive producers of the 2009 documentary Outrage, which investigated allegations of homosexuality among a series of political figures who had worked against LGBT rights.

In 2004, Griffin was campaign director for California Proposition 71, which authorized the sale of three billion dollars in general obligation bonds to fund stem cell research.

Two years later, Griffin led the unsuccessful campaign for passage of California Proposition 87, which would have established a tax on oil extraction in the state.

Prior to these initiatives, in 2003, Griffin ran the Rally to Save Ahmanson Ranch, which successfully advocated for wilderness protection of what became the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve.