If you ran a small public health or workers' rights organization with a shoestring budget, what on earth could make you refuse to take a lot of money from the government?
For some, being asked to take the so-called "anti-prostitution pledge" was enough. The pledge is a few lines in a big law. The law — the U.S. Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act — pours billions of dollars into the global fight against AIDS and other diseases. The pledge says that to get some of this money, groups doing HIV prevention work have to mouth the government's position "opposing prostitution," and avoid doing anything an official might construe as promoting prostitution. In practice, that has meant that health services providers and advocates for the rights of vulnerable workers have to close their doors to women and men who need help but who are involved in sex work.
Back in 2006, I interviewed many girls who had been confined in New York’s juvenile prisons. The girls described harsh, prisonlike environments where physical force was used to punish and control them, sexual and psychological abuse occurred, and schooling was haphazard and insufficient. One girl summed up by saying: "I just want to tell people before someone gets really hurt."
Here at the ACLU, we've seen — and challenged — many of the ways in which the government singles out women for surveillance and control over our private lives. The never-ending fight for reproductive freedom is one obvious example. But even we were amazed when a state health department told an expectant mother that it wouldn't give her baby a birth certificate unless she told the state private medical facts, including her abortion history and whether she had smoked cigarettes or drunk alcohol while pregnant.
Today, a federal appeals court in Manhattan heard oral argument in a case challenging the so-called "anti-prostitution pledge," which is part of a law called the U.S. Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act. On one side, the government argued that it can require nonprofit groups who accept any government funding for anti-AIDS work to declare that they oppose prostitution — that is, take the pledge — and that it can bar them from saying or doing anything that could promote prostitution. On the other side was a group of nongovernmental humanitarian organizations that are dedicated to fighting AIDS in the parts of the world most hard-hit by the pandemic. They argued that the pledge requirement violates their First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
Go to a men's prison on any given visiting day and you'll see the same scene: a throng of women who've come to visit their loved ones, often with children in tow. Many will have traveled hours for a brief visit. Go to a women's prison and you're likely to find a much smaller group of visitors. It's ironic that women, who are usually the glue that hold families together, often find themselves very alone
On May 22, the ACLU Women's Rights Project concluded two weeks of intensive investigation into the conditions of confinement experienced by girls in the custody of the Texas Youth Commission. TYC has in recent months been rocked by a scandal involving severe sexual and physical abuse of incarcerated children and a cover-up by the agency.
If you ran a small public health or workers' rights organization with a shoestring budget, what on earth could make you refuse to take a lot of money from the government?
Back in 2006, I 