Late yesterday, the California State Senate approved Seth’s Law (AB 9) in a 24-14 vote. Seth's Law is designed to address the pervasive problem of school bullying by providing California schools with tools to create a safe school environment for all students. The bill is authored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) and co-sponsored by a coalition of organizations advancing LGBT equality, including Equality California, the ACLU of California, National Center for Lesbian Rights, Gay-Straight Alliance Network, and The Trevor Project. The bill is named in memory of Seth Walsh, a 13-year-old gay student from Tehachapi, CA, who took his life in September 2010, after facing years of relentless anti-gay harassment at school.

"I want to thank my colleagues in the Senate for taking this important step forward to ensuring that schools have the necessary tools to prevent any young person from being bullied, harassed or worse because of their sexual orientation, gender identity and expression. As a former teacher, I know how important it is for our students to feel safe at school. We have a moral duty to our youth to prevent bullying and Seth’s Law will help schools protect students, and prevent and respond to bullying before a tragedy occurs.” said Assemblymember Tom Ammiano.

“Public schools have tremendous power and responsibility to protect students from bullying and harassment," said James Gilliam with the ACLU of California, and director of the Seth Walsh Students’ Rights Project at the ACLU of Southern California. "Better school procedures and policies to prevent and address bullying will make a safer environment for students who are suffering."

“All students deserve to receive an education without fearing for their safety because of who they are,” said Roland Palencia, Executive Director of Equality California. “Seth’s law is an important step forward in ensuring schools have the knowledge and tools they need to prevent bullying. We thank Assemblymember Ammiano, Assembly Speaker Pérez, the LGBT Caucus and allied lawmakers for championing this critical piece of legislation.”

"All students should be able to learn in an environment that is safe and free from bullying and harassment, but that is not the reality for many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students," said Carolyn Laub, Executive Director of Gay-Straight Alliance Network. "Seth's Law will help our schools recognize and address the serious and often devastating consequences of bullying in California's schools."

Over the past several months, “Seth’s Law” has raised an important discussion about the need to help schools protect LGBT students and other vulnerable youth from bullying. While California already prohibits school harassment, schools often do not have the tools or knowledge to adequately protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students and others from bullying, which remains a serious issue across the state and the rest of the nation. Students, parents, and school employees often don’t know what the rules are or what to do if bullying occurs.

In a recent national survey, nine out of 10 LGBT students reported being harassed at school. The problem persists in California as well, with LGBT students reporting significant harassment. The California Safe Schools Coalition reported in 2010 that 42% of California students who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual and 62% who identify as transgender said they had been harassed at least once based on gender non-conformity.

According to the California Healthy Kids Survey, 27% of students who reported harassment based on actual or perceived sexual orientation said they missed school at least one day during the past 30 because they felt unsafe. Increased truancy rates lead to a lack of funding for schools.

Besides truancy, the consequences of bullying and harassment can include falling grades, depression, and risk of suicide. Students who reported harassment based on actual or perceived sexual orientation were four times more likely than their heterosexual peers to attempt suicide.

 

This week’s Time magazine cover shows five young American veterans: one is a published author, another is a Rhodes scholar.  Notably absent from the cover is any one of the 8,000 American homeless veterans living on the streets of Los Angeles today.

Southern California’s homeless veteran crisis is not simply a matter of scarce resources in tough times: Since 1888, the Veterans Administration (VA) has owned and operated a 387-acre campus in Brentwood intended to provide shelter and services to disabled veterans.
And for more than a decade, the VA has been exploiting that land.
Instead of housing veterans, the VA has been leasing the land to more than twenty private commercial enterprises.  While veterans spend their nights on the streets of Skid Row or in parks near the Brentwood campus, the former site of the Pacific Branch Soldier’s Home now houses car rental companies, hotels, oil companies, and private schools.
In June, the ACLU of Southern California filed a lawsuit against the VA to ensure that the land donated for the benefit of disabled veterans isn’t misused for private commercial gain.
The LA Times reported this morning that the VA adjusted the lease agreements of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Tumbleweed Charter Buses, Inc., and food services company Sodexo Inc., instructing them to move to different parts of the campus and cutting their contracts short.
The VA’s actions are an admission that these leases are an inappropriate use of the campus, but they do nothing to provide a single unit of housing to the thousands of homeless veterans in Los Angeles.  And they do nothing to answer any of the public’s questions about the misuse of land.
How is much the land is being leased for? We don’t know.
How were the deals were negotiated? We don’t know.
The biggest question is whether any of that money goes to the stated purpose of the VA campus: sheltering and rehabilitating America’s veterans? We don’t know, but we intend to find out.
 David Sapp is a staff attorney at the ACLU/SC. 

 

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sitting in Seattle, Washington today that Congress acted in an unconstitutional fashion when it passed legislation granting sweeping immunity to telecoms that collaborated in illegal spying.   The argument is the latest development in more than thirty cases consolidated in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that challenged the phone companies’ sharing of millions of personal phone records and communications with the federal government.

The ACLU lawsuits filed on behalf of dozens of plaintiffs – including renowned Chicago journalist Studs Terkel, former California Congressman Tom Campbell, journalist Robert Scheer and actor Richard Belzer – challenge the unlawful collaboration of major telecommunications companies – including AT&T – with the government’s warrantless dragnet surveillance of electronic communications and records.  

At the core of the plaintiffs’ presentation today is the contention that the Congress acted unconstitutionally in extending authority to the Attorney General to file a certification with the court that granted immunity to the telecoms for their actions.   As the ACLU and EFF make clear,” the Attorney General has functionally repealed, in part, the federal statutes governing the plaintiffs’ lawsuits.” 

 The ACLU’s argument also focuses in particular on the fact that Congress has eliminated all claims against the telecoms not only for violations of federal statutes, like Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, that Congress enacted, but also for violations of the constitutional rights of its customers.  While the telecoms argue that a lawsuit against the government is still available, ACLU and EFF assert that a court injunction binding the telecoms is necessary.  The ACLU and EFF brief notes that telecoms are highly regulated with numerous incentives to comply with invasive government requests.  This assertion is borne out by the history of these companies providing assistance to federal intelligence gathering efforts, including the behavior in question in these lawsuits.  Here, the telecoms, along with the National Security Agency, violated the constitutional and associational rights of millions of people.  

The ACLU asserts that Congress’ grant of immunity denies their clients (and all the clients in these combined cases) any judicial remedy whatsoever for their federal constitutional claims against the telecoms.   In short, the ACLU argues, the telecoms violated our clients’ constitutional rights and Congress has blocked, unconstitutionally, those claims from being heard in a court. 

“There is good reason to believe that the telecoms violated both the privacy and the trust of millions of Americans.  This Court should not permit a fundamentally flawed statute to block our clients from establishing in court whether the telecoms did in fact violate the law,” said Peter Eliasberg, Legal Director for the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.

“Under our constitutional system, Congress cannot bar all claims for enforcing federal constitutional rights,” said Harvey Grossman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and co-lead counsel for the combined cases challenging the actions of the telecoms.   “The courts – not the Congress and the Executive branch – must determine if constitutional rights have been violated.  The grant of immunity issued by Congress has blocked our clients’ access to the courts to consider these constitutional claims.”  

The ACLU also notes that the bill permitting the Attorney General to block these lawsuits empowers action “for his own policy reasons” and contains very few standards.  

"Congress ducked its responsibility by giving the Attorney General complete discretion to decide whether the telecoms are immune from our ongoing lawsuits and significantly limited judicial review over that executive decision," said Julia Harumi Mass, staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California.  "Our constitutional system of checks and balances is designed to limit concentrations of power in one branch.  Allowing this law to stand would encourage big companies to seek similar immunity--under a cloak of secrecy--for conduct that violates consumers' rights or environmental protections in the future."

 The hearing today centers on the results flowing from passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008 which mandates that courts dismiss any cases against AT&T or other telecommunications companies if the Attorney General chooses to file a secret certification attesting that the executive branch told the phone companies that the surveillance was lawful.

Under the immunity provisions, the federal court does not determine whether the spying was in fact legal, but only that the representation of legality was made by the executive branch.  Then Attorney General Michael Mukasey filed a certification in these cases.  This certification, according to the ACLU and EFF, was not surprising, since the Attorney General argued for immunizing the telecoms in public statements and in testimony before the law was passed in public statements and in testimony before Congress.  

 “A fundamental tenet of the rule of law is that plaintiffs must have a right to raise claims when their fundamental rights are violated,” said David Blair-Loy, legal director of the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties.   “We hope the Court will act to open the courthouse doors once again to our clients whose privacy and constitutional rights were violated by these companies.” 

The cases heard today in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit include: Terkel, et. al. v. AT&T, Riordan v. Verizon, Campbell v. AT&T and Hepting v. AT&T. 

 The argument for the plaintiffs was shared between Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Harvey Grossman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.