News & Commentary

This morning, I re-watched a Democracy Now segment featuring Canadian doctor and addiction specialist Gabor Mate. In the segment, Amy Goodman asked Dr. Mate about his thoughts on the use of the criminal justice system to address drug addiction. He responded:

Every fall, the ACLU of Maine hosts three regional student conferences that bring together students from across the state to learn about the civil rights and civil liberties that matter most to young people. Not every school is able to attend those conferences, however, whether because of scheduling conflicts or just sheer travel distance. So to make sure that no schools are left out, we hit the road every year during the spring semester to take our presentations into classrooms in every corner of Maine.

On Monday, President Obama rolled out his plan for the next year’s federal budget. The budget plan includes two specific gains in the area of women’s reproductive health care.

Nothing is better than spending a frigid, snowy weekend inside reading a really good book. I spent this particularly cold weekend reading Just Mercy, a memoir by Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative.

According to a newly disclosed email, obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives collaborated on plans to monitor gun show attendees using automatic license plate readers.

Advocates for Youth – an organization that advocates for the reproductive rights of young people – has produced a new play called Out of Silence: Abortion Stories from the 1 in 3 Campaign. The play, designed for use on college campuses, is a dramatization of 14 stories submitted to the Advocates for Youth’s 1 in 3 Campaign, a grassroots movement invested in the stigma-defeating power of storytelling.

According to documents recently obtained by the ACLU, the Drug Enforcement Administration has initiated a new program linking its National License Plate Recognition initiative with those of law enforcement agencies across the country. According to ACLU Senior Policy Analyst, Jay Stanley, this new program raises major civil liberties concerns, as it would allow the federal government to collect and store huge amounts of data tracking the movements of motorists across the country.

Five years ago, Nick George was going through security at Philadelphia International Airport when he was suddenly asked to step aside for additional screening. What followed was an unbelievable ordeal that ended with him being aggressively interrogated, marched through the airport in handcuffs, and locked in a jail cell for nearly five hours – all because he was carrying a set of English-Arabic flashcards for his college language class along with a book critical of U.S. foreign policy.

Update: On the night of January 21, Congressional leadership decided to pull the vote on a 20-week abortion ban scheduled for today. They instead plan to vote on H.R. 7, "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion," which threatens women’s health and access to abortion by denying access to health insurance coverage that includes coverage of abortion beyond the most narrow of circumstances. The ACLU will oppose all attempts to interfere with reproductive rights.