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Ahead of the first Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig is seeking help from the LGBT community to get on stage.

The singular issue of his campaign, which is a long shot that has gained some attention in political media, is reform through passage of the Citizens Equality Act. The measure would enact major changes in the governmental, campaign finance and voting systems in the United States in an effort to make them more equally representative and responsive to the people.

“The basic corruption that’s evolved inside of our government makes it impossible for it to address any significant issue in a sizable way,” Lessig said. “So, if corruption is the disease, my view is equality is the cure. By that I mean a robust recognition of the equality of citizens in a representative democracy.”

Lessig, whose immediate goal is to boost his poll numbers to qualify to make his case on stage at the debates, made his pitch to the LGBT community in an interview on Tuesday with the Washington Blade at the Mayflower Hotel in D.C.

A campaign that “celebrates and rallies around the importance of equality,” Lessig predicted, would have a positive effect for those who are pushing in a particular area of equality rights, such as LGBT people.

“Obviously, the community has earned an extraordinary victory over the course of the last 20 years,” Lessig said. “It’s the most successful equality movement in the history of equality movements in just the sense of the speed with which attitudes were reversed and the law brought about to recognize the importance of granting equal status as a constitutional matter. And now, the fight is going to be as a statutory matter, to secure the same kind of equality protections that other groups such as women and people discriminated on the basis of race have.”

The Citizens Equality Act has three major components that seek citizen-funded elections, the equal right to vote and equal representation in Congress. It’s this last component, which would end political gerrymandering and create multi-member districts, that Lessig acknowledges may have a direct impact on advancing LGBT rights.

Under the current system, members of the U.S. House are elected on a winner-take-all system, which means legislators only reflect the biggest or strongest group that voted for them while leaving others behind. This system and lack of accountability, Lessig contends, results in partisan gridlock and a lack of representation for minority groups.

This kind of gridlock was felt by the LGBT community last year. The Senate passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act on a bipartisan basis, but the Republican-controlled House never took up the legislation even though supporters of ENDA said it would pass if votes were present on the House floor. No bill became law even though a super-majority of Americans support a federal prohibition on LGBT discrimination.

The Citizens Equality Act seeks to incorporate the Ranked Choice Voting Act, which would change the system so that instead of voting for one candidate, voters would rank their choice for multi-member districts to ensure all voices and elected leaders are more accountable to the people.

“If you got a substantial portion of the public behind, if you have five representatives in the district and you’ve got ranked choice voting, you need 20 percent to be able to get the place that you’re confident you’re going to be able to win one of those representatives,” Lessig said. “The impact of communities in directing policy in that context is obviously much greater and you’ve got an opportunity for a greater diversity of Republicans and Democrats.”

Lessig also predicted the Citizens Equality Act would increase LGBT representation in Congress, which is considered underrepresented. An estimated 3 percent of the population identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, but only 6 of the 435 House members identifies as LGB — slightly more than 1 percent of the U.S. House. No openly transgender person has ever been elected to Congress.

“I think it would dilute the effect of targeted bigotry here,” Lessig said. “You have as many districts where targeted bigotry is enough to guarantee somebody can’t get in. So it dilutes the effect of bigotry while it’s reinforcing the proportionality.”

The singular mandate of his presidency to pass the Citizens Equality Act, Lessig maintains, would enable him to push the legislation through Congress unlike a different candidate who’s made multiple campaign pledges upon his election to the White House. Once the bill has become law under his administration, Lessig said he would resign and turn over the presidency to his vice president, who would then serve as a typical president.

Even though he’s running a campaign with a singular focus, Lessig said he’s in favor of LGBT rights as much as he “could possibly be.” Much like Hillary Clinton or Vice President Joseph Biden, Lessig said he “absolutely” supports the Equality Act, openly transgender service in the U.S. military and cutting off federal funds for adoption agencies that discriminate against LGBT parents.

Asked what should be done about the rash of anti-trans violence in this country that has left 20 transgender people dead this year alone, Lessig said, “I think it makes sense to have the hate crime law focus on transgender as a category of hate that could trigger higher penalties.”

Lessig said the issue of transgender rights hits close to home because he has a transgender person in his family: His wife’s cousin is married to a transgender man.

“This is something that’s very present in our life as they raise their own family and have to live in a world which doesn’t quite understand them,” Lessig said. “I think we should be as aggressively supportive of achieving social recognition of the equality of all humans regardless of these characteristics.”

Lessig said his wife’s female cousin was in a same-sex relationship with a woman before he knew her family, but was around for this family decision to transition.

“He was not yet a he when it began,” Lessig said. “They were two women. And then he went through the process of surgeries and it got complicated because then they decided they wanted to have a child and he was going to carry the child though this process. That all probably happened 10 years ago.”

Lessig said he has been a long-time supporter of the LGBT community. One instance he recalled took place in 1989 when he was graduating from Yale Law School. Lessig said he participated in activism organized by a gay man in his graduating class in which individuals wore pink triangles in solidarity with LGBT people.

“I was cornered by one of my friends quote-unquote who told me I was ruining my career by wearing a pink triangle like it would destroy my chances in the law,” Lessig said. “You imagine going from a time when a liberal, sane person would advise me of that to the place we are right now and what is that? Thirty years? That’s extraordinary progress. I think it’s going to be as unrecognizable in 30 years as this world would have been unrecognizable 30 years ago.”

Because his campaign officially launched just a month ago, Lessig said he hasn’t talked to any groups — LGBT or otherwise — about his candidacy when asked if he’s spoken to LGBT groups like the Human Rights Campaign.

“We’re basically three weeks old as a campaign, so we’re fighting to be allowed on the stage for the debates,” Lessig said. “But the assumption is that if I got on stage at the debate and establish a credible campaign, we can staff up to the place where we can reach out and develop policies that reinforce the conception of what this transformation would make possible.”

JoDee Winterhof, the Human Rights Campaign’s vice president for policy and political affairs, spoke generally about the importance of electing candidates who support LGBT rights when asked if her organization would be open to backing Lessig.

“It’s critical that we elect a pro-equality president in the next election to continue the work of the last few years toward equality, and we are encouraged that there are an unprecedented number of pro-LGBT candidates running for president who support full federal equality,” Winterhof said.

It remains to be seen whether Lessig will qualify for the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas next Tuesday. Under Democratic Party rules, for candidates to appear on stage they must earn at least 1 percent in three national polls in the six weeks before the debate, which Lessig has decried as unfair. The latest CNN could announce who would be on stage is Friday, Lessig said.

In the event he qualifies for the debate, Lessig envisions his performance in one sense to look like a “normal debate performance,” but he would also seek to promote the idea of reform.

“I will have the opportunity to wrap the answer in a way that makes clear the right answer is rendered impossible because the way in which this inequality manifests itself, but some questions don’t have an easy inequality political answer to it,” Lessig said.

Lessig said some questions, like those relating to Republican views on immigration, may not be adequate ones in which to talk about the needs of reform “because there wouldn’t be an obvious way to wrap it in money,” but others, such as those related to U.S. operations against the Islamic State of Iraq & Syria may present an opportunity to talk about “what has our foreign policy and our willingness to get involved in these kinds of wars by the incredible influence of money and the size of our defense budget.”

He admits his candidacy is a long shot, but if he’s successful, he thinks it could “restore the centrality of equality” to government that would aid communities like LGBT people.

“I hope it changes the discourse in a way that ‘Occupy’ changed the discourse,” Lessig said. “At a minimum it does that, so that we once again have an ability to say and to fight for the idea of equality as central.”