Dissent is patriotic.
We here at the American Civil Liberties Union take that statement as an axiom. Indeed, the ACLU adopted it as a slogan years ago, and you’ll be seeing and hearing it more often as we navigate the currents of fear and hate roiling our nation.
Dissent is patriotic. Three simple words that go to the very heart of American values. It is a concept so crucial to our democracy that it is enshrined in the First Amendment. Dissent is patriotic is a bulwark against the totalitarian conceit that dissent is treason.
This bedrock principle — "the right to protest for right," as Martin Luther King, Jr. described it in his final speech 49 years ago — is the basis for the ACLU’s mission to protect and defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It underlies everything you'll read about in this annual report, and so much more.
Throughout our nation's history, the way forward has always begun with the powerful words, "I disagree" — uttered defiantly in the face of injustice to our neighbors, our media, our lawmakers, and, yes, even our president.
Today, those words inform our work to reform police practices, and to stand up for the dignity of the LGBTQ community. They give voice to the immigrants struggling to stand up to a growing wave of resentment. They stand firm against those who prefer privilege for a few over the rights of all.
With your continued support, the ACLU of Southern California will build on the efforts of the past year and prepare for the dangerous and uncharted waters ahead. As Edward Snowden said at our 2016 Bill of Rights Dinner, "Don't be afraid of what comes next — be ready."
Read the 2015-2016 ACLU SoCal Annual report
Date
Sunday, January 1, 2017 - 10:45am
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Mindful of the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty, which reads in part, "I lift my lamp beside the golden door," we seek to open the door of opportunity ever wider by linking civil liberties to social justice. Whether it be challenging the state's failure to adequately warn mothers receiving welfare benefits about the new "family cap" rule, going to court to prevent police from harassing activists providing free food to the homeless in downtown Los Angeles, ensuring adequate access to public transportation for disabled riders or organizing to defeat the anti-youth Proposition 21, the ACLU-SC is everywhere fighting for the rights of the historically disenfranchised.
Each year our annual report provides an opportunity to highlight some of the work the ACLU-SC has been able to accomplish with your help. With over seventy-five cases on our legal docket, dose to two hundred civil rights and civil liberties bills before the legislature, and several public education campaigns underway at any given moment, there is no way to capture the full scope of our endeavor. The following pages focus on some major battles we mounted this year - battles over free speech, educational opportunity and police practices - snapshots, as it were, from the front lines.
Thank you for your commitment to the great promise that lies at the heart of our organization's mission and our nation's Constitution - liberty and justice for all. The tremendous challenge of fulfilling this promise cannot be fully realized without the courage and generosity of the ACLU's community of supporters.
Date
Monday, November 1, 1999 - 1:00pm
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Since September 11, 2001, our government has embarked on a wholesale revision of our basic rights: discrimination against immigrants, detentions, domestic spying, and government secrecy have been carried out in the name of security. But the ACLU has fought at each step and continues to fight for a vision of American security that includes preserving our freedom, our democratic institutions, and our fundamental rights.
The ACLU is founded on principles: liberty, justice, equality. But our struggle to implement this vision is far from abstract, in both its sources and its results, as you’ll see in the lives we’ve highlighted in this report. Our efforts are grounded in, informed by, and seek to change the real life experience of ordinary people whose freedom is imperiled, who live with injustice, or whose lives and opportunities are shaped by inequality.
Even as we fight the government’s attempt to take back freedom, we seek to build our vision of freedom and greater equality in everything from education, where our landmark statewide class action suit presses for accountability in the provision of adequate educational opportunities for all California students, to foster care, to the rights of immigrant workers to organize. In our policy work and in our litigation, we actively seek opportunities to create an impact on the shape of our society. And in 2002, we acted on many of these opportunities including our successful intervention bid in the LAPD consent decree on behalf of communities affected by police abuse, our fight for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students to attend schools without being harassed, and our victory in reforming our system of voting.
Guided by principle, grounded in experience, our work has thousands of faces, and it is a few of these faces we’d like to show you, close-up, in this report. The face of a woman who served her country, only to be told that because she’s an immigrant she wouldn’t be able to continue her work, the face of a mother who’s looking at 25 years of separation from her son because of California’s draconian Three Strikes law, and the face of a young woman eager for an education her school is incapable of fully providing.
Your continued support helps us as we seek to rewrite the stories of hundreds of thousands of people just like those we’ve profiled in this report. Thank you for your collaboration in helping us build freedom and make history.
Date
Friday, November 1, 2002 - 1:00pm
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