News & Commentary

"In a year of historic victories for LGBT people, this one ranks near the top." So begins the ACLU statement on passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in the Senate today. 

Today I listened as two people who have been together for decades described how their lives have changed since they got married in July. Mostly it's in the details: they save a few hundred dollars each month in health care costs. They no longer cart around a huge pile of paperwork everywhere they go to prove their relationship to each other. They call each other spouse, not partner.

Each Friday, we’ll bring you updates on the latest civil liberties news from Maine and the nation.

In 1967, the Supreme Court famously ruled that “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.” In doing so, the Court rejected Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute as unconstitutional, thus ending all race-based restrictions on marriage across the United States. Like most landmark rulings, the story behind Loving vs. Virginia is not just about the legal issues, it’s also about the people who were affected and how they fought to get justice. On Wednesday, you can hear that amazing story.

It used to be just LGB (Lesbian Gay Bisexual). Now the official acronym is LGBTQIA, a veritable alphabet soup of different ways to identify oneself by gender or by sexual orientation. I must admit I had to look up what some of those letters represented, notably the 'QIA' part, and according to my research this rainbow of letters (the new ROY G BIV if you will) stands for Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Questioning/Queer Intersex and Asexual. Each term is simultaneously a separate category with specific criteria or no category at all. Conceivably you can apply only one term to your body, your sexual preference or state of mind, no terms at all or maybe even as many as four at a time. And the bevy of new terminology to describe various forms of gender expression or sexual orientation is growing daily. The University California - San Diego has kindly created something of a dictionary of LGBTQIA words for those feeling as confused as I was.

Each Friday, we’ll bring you updates on the latest civil liberties news from Maine and the nation. 

Thursday morning, Chelsea Manning came out as a transgender woman. Following her announcement, a military spokesman stated that the Army will not provide gender affirming healthcare for Ms. Manning, which raises significant constitutional concerns. The national ACLU writes:

Each Friday, we’ll bring you updates on the latest civil liberties news from Maine and the nation. 

We went into the 126th Legislature with a plan: to bring Maine's privacy laws up to speed with advancing technology. To that end, we proposed a 5-bill privacy package with bipartisan sponsorship. And while it was an uphill battle the whole way, we were successful in winning privacy protections and standing up for the 4th Amendment!