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Leaked footage of the Prop 8 trial sparked a legal tug of war this week, with anti-gay groups renewing efforts to keep their work out of public view. Delaware's on track to be the 8th state to offer marriage-ish protections, and activists gear up in New York.

This is our last episode of "This Week in Prop 8." Next week we're launching a brand new news show, with a more national focus and more headlines from around the country than ever before. It's going to be great.

And it's fitting that our final episode of this show starts where we began, with Proposition 8.

There was a lot of legal excitement this week over leaked footage of the Prop 8 trial. Or ... is it leaked? It's hard to know what exactly to call it.

Here's what happened: Last year, Judge Vaughn Walker wanted to televise the Prop 8 trial, anti-gay groups wanted to keep it secret, and the US Supreme Court ruled that the trial could be taped, but not broadcast.

So, until now, we've never seen the actual trial. Then Judge Walker retired. And a few weeks later, he gave a talk about cameras in the courtroom in which he showed a few short never-before-seen clips of the trial.

Now these were not particularly revealing clips. In fact, here's what they look like. Kind of hard to make anything out, not really a huge deal.

But for some reason, the Prop 8 proponents decided to make some noise about it.

To paraphrase, they told Vaughn Walker, "hey, you're not allowed to do that, and you have to get rid of that footage." To which Vaughn Walker said, "I think I am allowed to that, and I'm only going to get rid of it if someone makes me."

Then our side got involved and said, "not only is he allowed to do that, and not only are you not allowed to stop him, but the public should have access to ALL the footage, not just a few clips."

Then the city and county of San Francisco wrote a filing of its own, which boils down to, "the Prop 8 proponents can't show any harm from releasing these videos. And besides, they've been begging for attention outside of court."

San Francisco had good timing with that argument, because it came on the same day that various members of the anti-gay industry staged a hearing in Washington DC. And they had no problem publicly denouncing gay couples there. So obviously, they're only camera shy if they can't control the venue.

But that's the whole point of a trial -- when you're up on the stand, you don't get to control the court. And if you admit that you're wrong, you don't get to add, "but don't tell anyone."

Now it's up to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. They could recall the clips, or, now that the issue's come up, they could decide release everything.

So, ultimately, it's huge miscalculation by the Prop 8 proponents. It was just a few fuzzy minutes of video, and if they hadn't said anything, it would have flown under the radar. But because they complained, now the whole thing might finally be released.

We'll keep an eye on it and let you know what happens.

Meanwhile this week in Delaware the House overwhelmingly approved civil unions by a margin of 26 to 15. The bill was already passed 13 to 6 in the Senate, and now it heads to Governor Jack Markell, who has said that he'll sign it.

Of course, civil unions are nice, but what we really want is to get married.

That's why New York is the state to watch right now. Legislators in Albany are likely to consider a marriage bill at point point in the next few weeks. At this point, it's impossible to guess what's going to happen. On one hand, Governor Andrew Cuomo has said that he'll give his full attention to getting the bill passed. And a survey last week showed that we have the support of 58 percent of New York voters.

But Republicans control the Senate right now, and they've managed to kill marriage in the past. That's why it's crucial for New York residents to tell their legislators to support the marriage bill.

The good news is that FriendFactor.org has come up with a new tool to make it easier than ever to contact New York state Senators. The site lets you create a goal, for example, getting 25 of your friends to call their Senators. Then as your friends make those calls, your progress bar fills up like a fundraising thermometer.

For more on how it works, let's check in with founder Brian Elliot.

MATT: Hi Brian. Thanks so much for speaking with us. So, tell us about your new site.

BRIAN: Sure. Friendfactor is a new next generation web savvy gay rights organization. And this is a tool that we're using to mobilize a lot of grassroots support from what I would call new supporters, or people that generally support their gay friends, and their full and equal rights but don't really know what to do and when.

So what this does, and our pilot campaign is in New York, is making it very very easy for LGBT folks to reach out to their friends and say hey, would you do this for me, rather than for gay rights? And then enter some information on the screen immediately call their phone and patch them through right to their state senator, chances are they don't know who that person is because they've never called them before, and then tells them what to say.

The coolest part about all of this is that I'll find out which of my friends have actually supported me, so that I can be my own minority whip if you will to make sure my friends have rallied at the time when their voice and their vote matters the most.

MATT: So when does it launch?

BRIAN: So, we're aiming for a launch, a pre-launch at the end of April. We're going to be publicly debuting this at an event hosted by David Mixner, Ken Mehlman, and Chelsea Clinton on May 3rd here in New York.

But we have a need for some beta testers. So if anyone out there is actually pretty tech savvy and has Facebook and will log in with Facebook Connect, you can have early access to try to get this started and give us some feedback on what we should be optimizing before the full public launch.

MATT: So is this just for New Yorkers, or is there some way for people around the world to get involved.

BRIAN: Great question, yes. So right now New York is our pilot campaign. This is a groundbreaking tool and it is a really disruptive innovation in online advocacy. So we want to get it right in one place first. But it's my vision and my dream to really get this rolled out and scaled to any state and it could be used for federal issues. And not just for marriage. I can show you on the screen if you're interested later, there's a freedom index where we've catalogued all the rights in different states and assign them percentages and it makes in very start terms, it makes it clear to my straight friends that I don't have the same rights as them. And the goal is to let them know what they can do to help me get back to 100% parity.

MATT: Let's take a look at the site.

BRIAN: Absolutely, let's test drive a screen share here. Great, so the call to action really is to become what we're calling a friend-setter. And a friend-setter is a trend-setter, a leader among friends that's going to ask for personal support. Now this looks a lot like something that you've probably seen before, a marathon fundraising page, where I have a goal and my goal is ambitious, 500 calls, and I'm asking my friends if they'll help support me.

Over here on the left, you can see the freedom index that I talked about, and in New York you can see that I have 76% of the freedoms of a straight friend. And there they can learn more about what is the freedom to marry, the freedom to parent, freedom of gender, et cetera.

But the call to action here is to my friends to just fill out these five fields, so I see name, email, phone number, street address, and my zip code. And if somebody's not in New York, we'll route them through to another page where they can set up a friendsetter page and they can ask their friends in New York, because everyone knows someone in New York, right? To make calls on their behalf.

Now, it's super easy, it's actually just one click. You notice here that there's this button that says "call my phone now." I'm going to go ahead and click this and take you off of screen share, because I want you to see my phone ring. So right now you should see, it shows me who my state senator is, it give me a script, and then I don't know if you can hear this but my phone is now ringing. If I put this on speaker, it's going to give me instructions

PHONE: ...you're a great friend for helping your friends win the freedom to marry in New York. This is going to be easy. There's a short call script on the right side of your screen that will tell you exactly what to say.

BRIAN: All right, so you get the picture, but basically if I can go back on the screen share here, once I've completed my call, or my friends have completed the call for me, they can click right here and then they can set up a friendsetter page themselves. Now here's the cool thing. When the page gets refreshed, you'll notice up top, that my calls have now gone from 10 to 11 and if I scroll down I can see exactly which friends have called for me. So this is me calling for me here. And what people should know is that leaving a voice mail counts just as much as talking to a staffer or the Senator themselves. And you can call more than once.

MATT: Where do folks go to sign up?

BRIAN: So if folks want to sign up for this beta, and again the only caveat is that we need feedback. There's a little feedback tab on the right that we need people to let us know what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. But go to friendfactor.org, friendfactor.org, and there'll be a link soon that if it's not on it already when this airs, there'll be a link that basically asks you to support me, so you get to try it first, you can go on my friendsetter page and once you've made the call or been routed to another option based on what state you're in, you'll be asked if you want to set up a friendsetter page as well.

Just remember, though, for this beta period, you'll have to log in through facebook connect in order to set up a friendsetter page.

MATT: Great, well Brian Elliot, thank you so much for talking with us.

BRIAN: Thank you so much for having me.

So, visit Friendfactor.orgto sign up. I set up a Friendsetter page of my own at Friendfactor.org/mattbaume, so if you're in New York, you can go there to make calls on my behalf, and me meet my goal of getting 25 people to call.

For more on all these stories, visit us over at Stop8.org. Click here to subscribe, and click here to watch previous episodes. We'll see you next week on a brand new show.

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