News & Commentary

This Mother’s Day, I want to honor mothers of all ages—the young and old—including myself. As a seventeen year old mother, I know all too well both the joys and struggles of motherhood. When I became pregnant at 14, I knew my life would change dramatically but because of the way teen mothers are stigmatized, I never imagined I could be this happy.

Exciting news. The White House Big Data Report, Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values, was released today. While it does not address all of the ACLU’s concerns, the report recognizes the importance of moving forward on several legal and policy areas that have been a focus of our work here in California for several years.

If you’ve been reading the news at all this week, you’ve been inundated with some pretty gruesome news in the death penalty arena. News that has caused outrage and should give every person in this country pause.

Last May Day, hundreds of Fresno residents took to the streets to ask for a path to citizenship for the 11 million people forced to live in the shadows by our broken immigration system. There was momentum in Congress for comprehensive immigration and the Senate later managed to approve a comprehensive immigration reform bill. We were all so hopeful.

California has long been a leader in ensuring social safety net programs for poor families but the Maximum Family Grant (MFG) rule is hurting our reputation. The MFG rule says that if a parent or guardian has been receiving aid from CalWORKS for ten months consecutively, any child conceived within that timeframe is blocked for life from receiving the same assistance granted to their siblings.

Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is widely misunderstood as being a case about affirmative action. It is not. In fact, it leaves in place Supreme Court law recognizing diversity as a compelling governmental interest and permitting carefully constructed affirmative action programs. Today's decision has no effect on states that want to adopt or maintain affirmative action plans.

At the ACLU, we frequently see historic civil liberties battles recurring in new guises. The cases on contraceptive coverage in employee health plans argued before the Supreme Court last week present a familiar scenario: in times of rapid social progress, those resisting equality claim a religious right to discriminate.

Today the ACLU of Northern California announced plans to file a federal class-action lawsuit against the City of Berkeley for its ban on roosters within city limits. The ACLU pointed to a series of constitutional concerns that threaten us all.

It is no secret: California continues to waste enormous amounts of taxpayer money locking up far too many people for far too long who don’t need to be behind bars to keep the public safe.