Civil Rights

By Dan Aiello

Nearly 50 high school students from communities throughout California came to Sacramento last week to lobby state legislators in support of two bills aimed at protecting students from extreme or unjust discipline policies.

From Crescent City to San Ysidro, Half Moon Bay to Truckee, students gathered for a morning rally on the north steps of the Capitol before meeting with lawmakers and their staff as part of the April 30 Queer Youth Advocacy Day.

Encouraging them to engage lawmakers, students heard firsthand the personal stories of out state legislators and fellow students advocating for AB 1729, Creating Alternatives to Suspension and Expulsion, and AB 2242, Reducing Out of School Suspensions for Minor Infractions that was authored by Assemblyman Roger Dickinson (D-Sacramento).

By Elliot Owen
New America Media

San Francisco civil rights advocates concerned about what they call domestic spying on the city’s Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian (AMEMSA) communities are celebrating new legislation signed into law Wednesday by Mayor Ed Lee.

The Safe San Francisco Civil Rights Ordinance requires San Francisco Police Department officers working with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to be bound by local and state laws strictly governing intelligence gathering of First Amendment protected activities like religious worship.

By Danny Feingold, The Frying Pan

It’s matzah bargain-hunting season, and guess who has entered the fray? That’s right, Walmart.

The world’s largest retailer may not be known for bar mitzvah catering, but apparently the matzah market was too lucrative to pass up. Visit walmart.com, and in less time than it took God to part the Red Sea, you can load up on all variety of matzah products, from matzah ball soup mix to matzah meal. Those looking to brush up on their Pesach basics can even find Celebrate Passover: With Matzah, Maror and Memories, a handy guide to the holiday published by that noted authority on Jewish customs, National Geographic (imagine the charoset photo spreads).

But before you get out your credit card, you might want to consider whether a matzah splurge at Walmart is really in the spirit of Passover. Here’s some unleavened food for thought:

1) Walmart and Poverty

By Wade Henderson
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

This week’s 47th commemoration of the Bloody Sunday March of 1965 marks a new phase in the civil rights movement. It represents a turning point for people from all backgrounds, who are joining together, not only to remember our shared past, but also to fight for a shared future. It’s a moment of recognition from all sides that, though our nation has progressed since 1965, we are not yet finished with the struggle to include everyone in the fullness that American life has to offer.

By Dick Meister
Author, Journalist

The birth date of Cesar Chavez, the late farm workers' leader, will be celebrated next month, and rightly so.  But it's well past time we also celebrated the life of probably the most important of the other leaders who played a major role in winning union rights for farm workers and otherwise helping them combat serious exploitation.

That's Larry Itliong. He died 35 years ago this month at age 63. Itliong got involved in the farm workers' struggle very early in life, not long after he arrived as a 15-year-old immigrant from the Philippine Islands. He was among some 31,000 Filipino men who came to California in the late 1920s.

By Shannon Minter, Esq., and Christopher Stoll, Esq.
National Center for Lesbian Rights

In a long-awaited decision, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that stripped the right to marry from same-sex couples in California, is unconstitutional. Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt authored the majority decision, which was joined by Judge Michael Daly Hawkins. The third judge, N. Randy Smith, dissented.

By Jose Luis Sierra & Zaineb Mohammed
New America Media

Last week, at a press briefing co-hosted by New America Media (NAM) and Common Cause, civil rights lawyers and advocates representing California’s largest ethnic communities spoke of the need to work together to ensure that 2012 elections are open and accessible, in light of a rash of state laws that they say are being deliberately designed to suppress the vote of ethnic minorities and the poor.

Speakers at the briefing included legal experts from the Mexican American Legal Defense Education Fund (MALDEF), Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC), Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Common Cause.

By Marcy Winograd
Former Democratic Candidate for Congress

After the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act, with its codification of imprisonment without charge or trial, I could no longer register voters for the Democratic Party – even with the hope of involving new registrants in the California Democratic Party’s popular Progressive Caucus. If I could not ask someone to join the Democratic Party, I could not in good conscience stay in the party, even as an insurgent writing resolutions and platform planks to end our wars for oil.

Unfortunately, too many corporate Democrats, beholden to big-money donors or to a jobs sector dependent on militarism, vote for perpetual war and the surveillance state, replete with secret wiretaps, black hole prisons, and targeted assassinations. Far too many who are fearful or bought by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee vote for legislation that relegates Palestinians to second-class citizenship and threatens to take our country to the brink of an unthinkable war on Iran.

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
New America Media

GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul just can’t seem to help himself when it comes to his fetish on a law which has been on the books for nearly five decades and which has long since been rendered a moot point by even avowed white supremacists. That’s the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Paul caught much flack when he flatly said he’d have opposed it if he had been in Congress in 1964. He dredged it up again as an issue in 2004 when he voted against a symbolic resolution honoring the law on its fortieth anniversary. He dredged it up again during his abortive presidential bid in 2008. And now he’s dredged it up yet again stumping for 2012 presidential votes.

To hear him tell it, it’s a matter of the simple principle of upholding the sanctity of private property from any government encroachment. It’s a libertarian purism taken to the nth degree and it’s a legal and public policy fraud.

By Dan Aiello

When Iowa's ultra-conservative, anti-gay Family Leader evangelical group declined to endorse Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney at its forum last month, the former Massachusetts governor was quick to turn the non-endorsement into an opportunity to win over LGBT voters in New Hampshire.

"I don't believe in discriminating in employment or opportunity for gay individuals. So I favor gay rights. I do not favor gay marriage," he told the editorial board of the Nashua Telegraph in New Hampshire in mid-November.

To buttress his position, Romney signed the National Organization for Marriage's pledge opposing same-sex marriage, joining candidates Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum.