News & Commentary

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.

Stand up and be counted. Join us April 5-7, in Sacramento for the ACLU of California’s annual Conference & Lobby Day.

Earlier this week, more than two dozen parent, student, policy, and legal advocacy organizations urged the California Board of Education to strengthen the rules that will govern the new Local Control Funding Formula to ensure that school districts spend the additional funding they will receive on the students it was intended to help.