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Our Vision to Achieve True Public Safety
For decades, local, state and federal public officials from both political parties and powerful interest groups engineered the system of mass incarceration. They did this in part by constructing a narrative of fear fueled by racism through which they passed laws, spent billions of dollars, and separated millions of families. It was a disaster of epic proportions that unfolded in slow motion and for which we are still paying the price today as a nation.
T
By aclutn
Apr 25, 2017
Day 96: The "Constitution is for Everyone" — check out this campaign video
By Claire Gardner
Apr 25, 2017
Anti-LGBT Forces in Congress Are Giving Trump Very Bad Advice
Several dozen Republican members of the House of Representatives are urging President Trump to issue an unconstitutional executive order that would authorize wide-ranging, taxpayer-funded discrimination against LGBT people, women, and religious minorities.A draft of the EO that leaked earlier this year would allow federal employees, contractors, and grantees a “reasonable accommodation” to act pursuant to their beliefs that marriage is between a man and a woman; that gender identity is fixed at or before birth; and that human life begins at conception while on the job and interacting with the public or providing taxpayer-funded services. This means, for example, a doctor working for the Department of Veterans Affairs could refuse to prescribe hormones to a transitioning transgender veteran based on the doctor’s belief that a person’s gender identity cannot differ from the sex they were assigned at birth.
It’s telling that out of nearly 2
By aclutn
Apr 25, 2017
We All Need to Defend Speech We Hate
This piece originally appeared at Inside Sources.
Controversial, critical, confrontational, and challenging speech is an essential part of any successfu
By aclutn
Apr 24, 2017
In Its Rush to Kill, Arkansas May Have Executed an Innocent Man
Ledell Lee’s first hard-knock moment came even before he was born. His mom, 16 and on her third pregnancy by a man years older than she was, drank and smoked through his pregnancy. Because of her substance abuse, Ledell was born with a fetal alcohol syndrome disorder, a medical condition that left him with brain dysfunction and intellectual disability.
Twenty-eight years later in 1993, Ledell Lee was arrested for the murder of Debra Reese. And on Thursday n
By aclutn
Apr 21, 2017
In Time for the Reform Debate, New Documents Shed Light on the Government’s Surveillance of Americans
The ACLU today released more than a dozen new documents concerning the government’s warrantless surveillance of millions of Americans. They were obtained from several intelligence agencies in an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and relate to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that the government relies on to conduct its PRISM and Upstream spying programs.
Section 702 is a deeply controversial law that recently made
By aclutn
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