If same-sex couples are going to secure the freedom to marry, it won't be through a state-by-state strategy or a national campaign.

It will be with a "person-to-person" game plan, Shannon Minter, a national gay-rights advocate said Wednesday in an interview.

Minter, legal director for the San Francisco-based National Center for Lesbian Rights, kicked off a three-day University of Utah conference on the human rights of sexual minorities with a keynote speech Wednesday on same-sex marriage. He successfully argued the 2008 case that led the California Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage in the Golden State in May 2008. That decision was later overturned when voters approved Proposition 8.

The marriage debate, Minter said Wednesday night in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts auditorium, is often debated as democracy -- the majority rules -- versus individual rights.

"There is some value and truth to that dualistic framework," he said. But "it's not adequate. ... Democracy is more than majority rule and marriage is more than an individual right."

Excluding same-sex couples from marriage, Minter said, contributes to stigmatization of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT). Such prejudice can result in harms such as youth suicide.

But the discussion about whether LGBT people have the right to marry, from person-to-person, can help dispel negative views of sexual minorities and their families.

Minter shared his own parents' struggle to accept him: first as a lesbian daughter and later as a transgender son. Minter's parents asked him not to visit them in his small, Texas home town after he announced his plans to transition from female to male. For seven years, Minter stayed away, missing his grandmother's funeral, a cousin's wedding and the suicide of a gay cousin who felt the sting of a father's rejection.

But later, his parents softened as they reasoned through -- and overcame -- their objections to same-sex marriage. They attended the wedding of Minter's sister, a lesbian. Mom and dad served as witnesses, signing the Canadian license. Minter said his father, before he died in July, finally introduced Minter as a "son" to friends in Texas and also acknowledged Minter's wife as a daughter-in-law.

Attendee Roi Maufas said, as a straight man, he appreciated the speech's insights on a subject he hadn't given much thought to previously.

"It was really illuminating for me," Maufas, 41, said. "I don't think people in the straight community necessarily mean to wound people. But there's a lot of ignorance."

Although he hadn't taken a position before on gay marriage, Maufas added he's now, "definitely for it."