News & Commentary

By Elizabeth Gill, ACLU of Northern California Staff Attorney Today the LGBT rights world was a flurry of activity, with Facebook feeds full of red for marriage equality and people the country over intently focused on what was happening inside the U.S. Supreme Court. Sometimes the oral arguments in a case are like tea leaves that make it relatively easy to predict an outcome. But today’s Supreme Court argument in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the constitutional challenge to California’s Proposition 8, provided few such clues. What’s clear is that the Justices are all deeply engaged in both the questions on the jurisdiction and the merits that the case presents – and that’s a good thing.

A survey of 110 National LGBT Equality and Support experts ranked the American Civil Liberties Union as the #2 outstanding nonprofit doing significant LGBT equality work.

By Jason Howe The passport control agent almost seemed apologetic. “Sir, he has to fill out a separate family entry card,” he told me, “he” meaning my husband, Adrián. And then, he mumbled “DOMA.”

NEW YORK – A federal appeals court ruled today that the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” (DOMA) unconstitutionally discriminates against married same-sex couples. In striking down DOMA, the court held that government discrimination against lesbians and gay men now is assumed to be unconstitutional and that DOMA’s defenders could not offer any good reason for treating married same-sex couples differently from all other married couples.

By Joey Hernández, LGBTQ Student Rights Advocate

By Jason Howe, Director of Communications Did you hear on the news about the mass exodus of a half-million troops from the U.S. military?

By Phyllida Burlingame, ACLU of Northern California California state law mandates that sexual health education in public schools be comprehensive, medically accurate, science-based, and bias-free. So why are Clovis Unified High Schools teaching teens from a book that makes no mention of condoms, even in chapters about HIV/AIDS and on preventing STDs and unintended pregnancy?

“Hey ACLU, I’m a gay 9th grader.  My teachers don’t treat me differently because of my gender expression. I have both gay and straight friends. I get to live my life without being discriminated against. I’ve never been bullied. And I feel safe at school every day.” We’ve never gotten that call here at the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU/SC) LGBTQ Student Rights Project.  

Deliberate indifference. It’s a lawyerly way of saying that somebody knows about — but doesn’t do anything to fix — a problem. Different people have different reasons for resorting to a state of deliberate indifference, and we can only hope we don’t see it from a fire fighter en route to a disaster.