Civil Liberties

By Marc Solomon
Equality California
Crossposted from The Advocate

The last few weeks in the California marriage battles have been at once hopeful and painful. First we rode an ecstatic wave upward: Judge Vaughn Walker issued a powerful opinion striking down Proposition 8, and we celebrated as couples made plans to get married across the state.

Then we rode downward when a three-judge panel of the U.S. court of appeals for the ninth circuit granted an indefinite stay of the decision — without explanation. Committed couples and their families, some of whom had begun making wedding plans, once again felt the pain of being denied not only a fundamental right but also the respect for and recognition of their love and commitment that only marriage offers.

By Jorge Amaro
Equality California

Mexican actress Karyme Lozano was crowned Queen of the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade in 2008. So I was shocked to hear that she has joined the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles in a new initiative benefiting radically conservative Carly Fiorina, who is running for pro-LGBT Senator Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat. At a press conference this week hosted at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, the Washington-DC-based conservative Latino group announced the $1 million-dollar “Tus valores” (“Your Values”) campaign to bring their toxic agenda to California by helping elect anti-equality candidates like Fiorina.

By Valeria Fernandez

A week before Arizona’s controversial new immigration law is slated to go into effect, its immediate future rests in the hands of one federal judge. If the judge does not grant an injunction, halting the implementation of the law, then as of next Thursday, July 29, it will be a state crime to be undocumented in Arizona.

In two separate hearings in a Phoenix courtroom on Thursday, attorneys representing a broad coalition of civil rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice argued that portions of SB 1070 need to be enjoined because they usurp the federal government’s authority to regulate immigration law.

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Fox News, and the gaggle of rightside bloggers, and assorted tea party activists were delirous when they dug up an old tape of Shirley Sherrod. The Agriculture Department’s director of rural development in Georgia was supposedly getting caught with her racism hanging down.

The tape was of a speech Sherrod made at a local NAACP banquet on March 27. Her alleged racist sin was that she admitted that she did less to help a needy white farmer than she could—it happened twenty years earlier.

By Valeria Fernández

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- Does Arizona’s new immigration law mirror federal law or does it go too far, violating the U.S. Constitution? That question was at the heart of the arguments presented Thursday morning in a packed federal courtroom in Phoenix.

The two-hour hearing was the first in a series of six cases being brought against Arizona’s controversial new law. The next hearings are set for July 22, when arguments will be heard in two lawsuits against SB 1070, one brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, and one by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other organizations. If the judge does not approve the federal government’s injunction, the law will go into effect one week later, on July 29.

By Anuja Seith
New America Media

Even as the Obama administration seeks to block Arizona’s SB 1070 from taking effect, federal authorities are pushing cities in California and elsewhere to adopt a new “voluntary” program that will lead to the same kind of racial profiling as the Arizona law, immigrant rights advocates charged Wednesday.

The Secure Communities program, or S-Comm, was introduced in California in April 2009 and became active in San Francisco last month.

Counties around the Bay Area have been compelled to adopt the program, which requires local law enforcement to automatically and instantly share with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the fingerprints of any immigrant who is arrested, even if that individual is later proven to be innocent or is found guilty of an extremely minor offense.

By Bob Reid

It seems appropriate on the 4th of July weekend to write about gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) was a result of the Clinton Administration's failed effort to pass a repeal of the statute. There was strong opposition back then led by Senator Sam Nunn D-Georgia. He was a powerful member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the major roadblock to repeal. This resulted in the terrible law that forced men and women to stay in the military closet in order to serve their country.   

Former President Jimmy Carter had it right when he said at the time Clinton was trying to act on a campaign promise to repeal the law. Carter said "Sign an executive order and then force it to a vote in the Congress." Show some guts he was saying. It most likely would have failed but it would have forced the issue.   

By Aaron Glantz
New America Media

SAN FRANCISCO - California’s utility and telecommunications companies are doing hundreds of millions of dollars more business with minority contractors, according to a new report from the Greenlining Institute, a Bay Area think tank.

But the organization says the news is not all good for minority firms. According to Greenlining’s report, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric are lagging behind their competitors. Cable companies, which increasingly compete with regulated telecommunications firms for broadband business, have virtually no minority contracting portfolio at all.

By Alegria De La Cruz
Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment

For most Californians, the west side of the San Joaquin Valley is the flat, sere and desolate country you pass through on your way to someplace else. You’re more apt to remember the rest stops on I-5 than the features of the surrounding landscape. But the “Westside” is special to me.

My grandparents settled here in the 1940s. In the 1970s, they co-founded one of the region’s first farmworker co-ops near the small town of Raisin City. I remember picking and packing cherry tomatoes with my cousins on our land. My husband, too, has deep roots in the soils of the western San Joaquin Valley.  When he was old enough to do physical labor, he joined his parents, cousins and friends, laboring in the local fields and dairies. His family still lives and works in the region, and we celebrate our birthdays and anniversaries on their one-acre ranch near the small town of Burrell.

By Chris Moore
Equality California

Last week's elections were invigorating! The outcomes are generally very favorable for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Californians and could prove to be history making. There are, however, some dangerous candidates on the horizon that will require our community to be energized and cohesive in order to beat them.

Nearly every single EQCA endorsed candidate won their primary yesterday, and we were hard at work helping to make that happen. Our Political Action Committee and its many donors directly contributed to candidates' campaigns. Our volunteers and staff made over 20,000 phone calls to urge support of our candidates and to get out the vote. We sent over 140,000 pieces of mail to every corner of the state. And to ensure that our candidates succeeded, we closed our offices yesterday and our 44 staff spent the day working on the most critical campaigns.