News & Commentary

August 26 is Women's Equality Day, commemorating the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote 94 years ago. Unfortunately, we are still a long way from full equality for every woman. The mainstream conversation about women's rights over the last century has at best left behind, and at worst ignored, intersectional identities (women of color, transgender women, poor women, immigrant women, etc.). For example, we often see the data that women who work full time earn, on average, only 77 cents for every dollar men earned. But the figures are astoundingly worse for women of color. African American women earn only approximately 64 cents and Latinas only 54 cents for each dollar earned by a white male.

Many schools in Maine are getting ready to open their doors this week for the start of a new year, and here at the ACLU of Maine we’re getting ready to open our resources up to students, teachers, and educators interested in learning more about civil liberties and civil rights.

Americans are fed up with the unchecked mass surveillance activities of the National Security Agency.

I spent this past weekend in Downeast Maine, tabling at the 40th Annual Machias Wild Blueberry Festival. I drove through Penobscot, Hancock, and Washington counties and arrived in the Machias area late Friday afternoon. The Wild Blueberry Festival is one of the most popular festival events in Washington County, with attendee estimates ranging from 15,000-22,000. This was the ACLU of Maine’s first time participating in the festival. This was also my first time Washington County. I was looking forward to the opportunity to meet both current and potential ACLU members and to talk about the work our organization has been doing across the state.

In 2012, the Portland Police Department acquired a Lenco BearCat, which is essentially an armored, four-wheeled mini-tank with a turret and spaces to fire guns out the sides. The $270,000 price tag paid for by a federal Port Security Grant.

The tragic killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown has raised many questions for the community of Ferguson, as well as the entire nation. From the ACLU’s perspective there are many civil liberties issues at play, which has prompted an immediate response both from our affiliate in Missouri as well as the entire ACLU nationwide.

Recently, two pro-choice groups in Texas released audio evidence of anti-abortion leaders encouraging their activists to track the license plates of clients who access the abortion clinics they protest. The audio, found here, was recorded during an August 4, 2014 Texas Alliance for Life training. In the recording, anti-abortion leaders acknowledge that one of the reasons they stake out clinics is so that they can “track who works there." According to Karen Garnett, executive director of a pro-life organization in north Texas, tracking “the license plates coming into any abortion clinic” using a “kind of…sophisticated little spreadsheet” is a “totally legal” way to make sure abortion doctors have state-regulated hospital admitting privileges. Garnett goes on to say that anti-abortion activists can also use license plates to track women who are accessing the abortion facilities. Tracking patients’ license plates will allow them to know whether or not a client returns to the abortion facility. In the audio, the trainers lay out several other intimidation tactics activists can use, including: identifying and monitoring patients, providers, and clinic staff; obstructing pathways to clinics; tracking the physical descriptions of patients and their vehicles; and using tax records to find new locations of abortion facilities. 

This Friday a new youth curfew law, one of the strictest in the nation, will go into effect in Baltimore. It will require unaccompanied children under the age of 14 to be indoors by 9pm and 14, 15 and 16-year-olds to be indoors by 10pm on weekdays and 11 pm on weekends and during the summer. Children found out after the curfew will be picked up by police and brought to one of two curfew centers where the child's parents will then be called. Parents can face anywhere from a $30-$500 fine.

Gov. LePage announced today that he is pushing forward with a plan to subject people with prior drug felony convictions to drug tests before they can receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits. There's not much I can say about Gov. LePage's proposal that Aasif Mandvi didn't say best in this amazing Daily Show clip: