This morning I met with members of a working group that’s organizing a yearlong series of events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There are over a dozen organizations contributing to this group and the ACLU is proud to be one of them.
The first couple months of 2014 have already been quite busy, but there’s lots left to come and we hope you'll join us for one or more of the upcoming events. You can find a full listing of events here and we encourage you to bookmark the page because it’s constantly being updated and supplemented with new events.
This weekend is a particularly special event that the ACLU of Maine is sponsoring and that civil libertarians will definitely want to circle on their calendars. As part of the Maine Jewish Film Festival, which runs from March 22-29, there will be a screening of “Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement.” 
If you followed last year’s historic Supreme Court arguments on same-sex marriage you’ll recognize the names Edie and Thea: they were the couple whom the ACLU represented in United States vs. Windsor. In that landmark case, the Supreme Court struck down a key piece of DOMA, the unconstitutional law that had previously allowed the federal government to discriminate against married lesbian and gay couples for the purposes of determining federal benefits and protections.
“Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement” tells the amazing story of Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer, who shared their lives together as a couple in New York City for 44 years. After a 40-year engagement they were finally married in Canada, but when Thea passed away two years later the federal government refused to recognize their marriage and taxed Edie's inheritance from Thea as though they were strangers.
Tickets for the screening are available for purchase online and we hope to see you there. For other civil rights events make sure to bookmark usm.maine.libguides.com/1964 and keep checking back for updates. It’s exciting to have such a rich collection of events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and with so many great organizations working together there promises to be even more in the months ahead.
