News & Commentary

Ron Wallen Testifies at Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Defense of Marriage Act This blog post is third in a series written by our summer LGBT Project legal interns. The other posts are "LGBT Human Rights Gone Global", "The Roots of Homophobia" and "Changing the Culture of Bullying".When my partner came out to her ninety-two-year old grandmother and announced her plan to marry me, the reaction wasn't great. Not because of a fire-and-brimstone lecture about immorality and the evils of lesbianism. She was worried that, on top of the gender wage gap, we'd be facing an uphill battle just to get the same legal and economic protections under the law as opposite-sex married couples. (If only every grandmother were as awesome as she!)

In a letter sent today, the ACLU of Southern California is calling on Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley to stop the criminal prosecution of a Los Angeles County jail inmate whom two sheriff’s deputies brutally attacked in the Twin Towers Correctional Facility on January 24, 2011.

This blog post is second in a series written by our summer LGBT Project legal interns. The other posts are "LGBT Human Rights Gone Global" "Calling It 'Marriage' Isn’t the End of the Story", and "Changing the Culture of Bullying".As James Gilliam blogged last month, Tehachapi middle schooler Seth Walsh was the subject of severe bullying from the time he came out as gay in the sixth grade until his suicide two years later. The Departments of Justice and Education launched an investigation into the circumstances that led to Seth’s suicide, and part of my work as a summer law clerk at the ACLU/SC has been to analyze the results of that investigation.

The ACLU of California supports the striking prisoners’ demands to end cruel and inhumane conditions in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison. These conditions include prolonged, solitary confinement in small, windowless concrete boxes with little to no human interaction and other severe physical deprivations.

This blog post is first in a series written by our summer LGBT Project legal interns.  The other posts are "The Roots of Homophobia", "Calling It 'Marriage' Isn’t the End of the Story", and "Changing the Culture of Bullying".Although I had traveled 6,000 miles to attend the conference, I was informed of the conference venue’s address just three days before it started. The organizers of “Justice In The Balkans: Equality For Sexual Minorities (.pdf)” were so concerned with the safety of those attending that they kept the conference location secret until the last minute. The disconnect between public and private was reinforced even in our conference swag. We were provided with two different canvas bags: The bag meant for use in public had conference sponsors printed discreetly in black. The other bag, emblazoned in purple with “Equality For Sexual Minorities”, was to be used only within the confines of the conference space.

The ACLU of California is strongly urging the state agency that regulates mental health counselors to immediately remove the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) from its list of approved organizations from which California counselors can obtain continuing education credits (CEUs). The agency, the California Board of Behavioral Sciences (CBBS), requires licensed educational psychologists, marriage and family therapists and licensed clinical social workers to take CEUs in order to renew their licenses.