Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that anti-discrimination legislation for LGBT people is the next battle to fight after the Supreme Court effectively legalized same-sex marriage. “There are 32 states where you can be married in the morning and fired in the afternoon,” he told a crowd at a New York event hosted by the Freedom to Marry group. “This next door is gonna be a hell of a lot easier to open.” In addition, he called the total fight for LGBT equality “the civil-rights issue of our generation.” Biden told the story of his father seeing a gay couple and telling him “they love each other, it’s simple.” Evan Wolfson, the founder of Freedom to Marry, who interned for Biden in the 1980s, credited him with stopping Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, which gave way to Anthony Kennedy’s nomination. Kennedy was the deciding vote and author of the majority opinion in the same-sex decision last month.

— Jay Michaelson