ACLU lawyers met with the press who cover the Supreme Court in Washington D.C. recently to provide an overview of important cases during the 2009-10 term of the high court.

Watch ACLU Legal Director Steven R. Shapiro discuss United States v. Stevens, a case with broad First Amendment concerns.

Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, discusses Salazar v. Buono, a case in which the government is challenging a lower court ruling that a congressional statute transferring a small parcel of land under a cross in the Mojave Desert National Preserve to a private owner failed to resolve a violation of the Establishment Clause.

A malicious and factually inaccurate e-mail accusing the ACLU of not standing solidly on the side of religious liberty – an e-mail that was first circulated six years ago – has once again reared its ugly head and popped up in the e-mail inboxes of people across the country. In an effort to set the record straight, below are two myths the e-mail passes off as truth, followed by the facts which effectively debunk the e-mail’s claims.

MYTH: The ACLU has filed a lawsuit to have all cross-shaped headstones removed from federal cemeteries.

FACT: The ACLU has never once advocated for or initiated any litigation in favor of removing cross-shaped headstones from federal cemeteries. In fact, as the website Politifact.com makes clear, there are no cross-shaped headstones at VA national cemeteries. The headstones and markers the government issues are rectangular.

What the ACLU did do in 2006 was file a lawsuit seeking to protect the right of veterans and their families to choose religious symbols to engrave on headstones in federal cemeteries. The result of this litigation was not the forced removal of any crosses, but rather an expansion of the official government list of religious symbols allowed on headstones by the National Cemeteries Administration of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to include the Wiccan pentacle.

There are military cemeteries with rows of crosses in them, but most of those are in Europe, the final resting place of some American troops killed during World War I and World War II. Those cemeteries are maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission and, according to Politifact.com, are technically owned by the foreign country in which they are located but sit on land given to the U.S. for use in perpetuity as commemorative cemeteries. Politifact.com further reports that commission officials are not aware of any effort – by the ACLU or anyone else – to remove cross-shaped headstones from those sites.

MYTH: The ACLU filed a lawsuit to end prayer in the military completely.

FACT: The ACLU has filed no such lawsuit. This totally false assertion is likely misrepresenting a letter the ACLU and the ACLU of Maryland sent in June 2008 to officials at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis asking them to stop forcing midshipmen to participate in the Academy’s compulsory "noon meal prayers." A New York Times article very effectively details why forcing midshipmen to stand in attendance at the daily "noon meal prayer" is a violation of their religious freedom and rights of conscience.

In the letter sent to the Academy, ACLU of Maryland Legal Director Deborah A. Jeon makes clear that the ACLU opposes compulsory religious services mandated by the government, not voluntary religious exercises by Academy midshipmen. As Jeon writes: "[T]his request is not motivated by any hostility to voluntary religious exercises by Academy midshipmen, nor do we fail to recognize the important place religious faith holds among many in the military. Indeed, the ACLU has long defended the fundamental right of religious communities, families and individuals – including those in the armed services – to practice their faith freely and openly." Let there be no question that the ACLU vigorously defends the right of all Americans to practice religion (PDF).

We at the ACLU sincerely hope that providing you with this factual information regarding the erroneous claims made in the e-mail will not only help you avoid bearing false witness, but, should you desire, also empower you to set the record straight should it find its way to you.

(Originally posted in Jurist.)

Law enforcement officials have, over the past decade, used gatherings of national and international leaders as license to suspend civil liberties. During the recent G-20 Summit, Pittsburgh proved to be no exception. The city was transformed into a police state where our most cherished freedoms, especially the freedom to dissent, were subject to the martial law-type tactics I witnessed behind the Iron Curtain.

While world leaders were quietly secluded behind closed doors, 8-foot-high steel and mesh fences lined most downtown streets. Six thousand police and National Guard troops manned checkpoints, roamed the streets in armored humvees, and were visible everywhere in large groups. In this militarized ghost town, neither common folk nor demonstrators ever got close to the dignitaries.

Before the Summit, local officials paid lip service to the First Amendment. But just as in Poland under martial law in the early 1980's, where only carefully controlled demonstrations sanctioned by communist-party bosses were allowed, protesters who lacked political ties to the establishment in Pittsburgh last week were threatened, harassed, and outright prohibited from peacefully expressing their opposition to G-20 policies.

The gamesmanship began early. Initially resistant to allowing any demonstrations during the Summit, the City eventually relented and permitted several mainstream groups, including former Vice President Al Gore’s climate group, to hold events in a local park.

But when two less politically-connected groups, Codepink and Three Rivers Climate Convergence (3RCC), renewed their requests to use the same park, the City refused. The rich and powerful were welcome in Pittsburgh, but those with edgier critical messages were not.

A federal judge eventually ordered the City to issue permits to Codepink and 3RCC, ruling that no good reason existed for precluding them. Unfortunately, the mistreatment and harassment of 3RCC and other protesters didn’t end with the judge’s order.

Police vehicles blocked 3RCC’s educational and food buses, preventing them from going to the demonstration. City officials permitted the group to leave its tent, artwork, and literature in the park overnight, but would not allow anyone to stand guard- claiming that standing guard would constitute illegal camping. The next day everything was gone. In a moment of surprising candor, the City’s spokeswoman admitted to a local reporter that the Public Works department had confiscated 3RCC’s property. With all necessary props gone, the climate-justice demonstrations never materialized.

Despite this intensive scrutiny, which included dozens of warrantless raids on activists’ homes and meeting places and countless pretextual traffic stops, only one person was arrested prior to the Summit – for giving a nickname instead of her birth name.

In the eeriest parallel to my experiences in martial law Poland, on two consecutive evenings the police inexplicably deemed assemblies of people peacefully gathered in a large, grassy University of Pittsburgh plaza to be “unlawful” and ordered everyone to disperse immediately. Police used an “LRAD” (first-ever civilian use of a military sonic weapon that can cause permanent hearing loss), shot pepper spray into dormitory stairwells, and fired rubber bullets and beanbags at fleeing students and curiosity seekers.

When those assembled tried to follow dispersal orders, many ran into the nearly 1000 riot police that encircled the group. The 100-plus arrestees included many curious, non-participating Pitt students and a few journalists. In this police state, apparently, government-sanctioned assemblies are allowed, but spontaneous demonstrations or gatherings, even peaceful ones, are not.

During the Summit, as expected, a few out-of-town kids broke a dozen windows. Police presence at the crime scenes were minimal, primarily because just a few blocks away the massive manpower surge was suppressing the peaceful gathering at the University. If a few of those police officers had simply stood on street corners around the area, even that little damage would have been minimized, Officers who happened to be standing in front of a targeted coffee shop during the two-person rampage discouraged any vandalism.

Pittsburgh’s use of harassment, intimidation, trickery, and indiscriminate arrests against demonstrators was fairly typical of the recent handling of other large important gatherings at the hands of various groups of law enforcement officials. At times when the imperative to allow freedom of speech and assembly is greatest – when national and international leaders convene – we impose martial law. Surely a more balanced model that provides security and respects civil liberties is possible.

We’re in the midst of Banned Books Week, a national celebration of the right to read. Created in 1982, Banned Books Week aims to raise awareness about challenges to the inclusion of books in libraries, bookstores, and school curricula across the country.

The ACLU, from its landmark 1933 defense of James Joyce’s Ulysses, has long been involved in the fight against the censorship of books. Unfortunately, challenges to free expression are hardly a problem of the past.

In 2008, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom reported that there were 513 challenges to books. School districts, in particular, continue to restrict students’ access to books based on content and viewpoint—usually because of perceived profanity or offensive depictions of race, gender, and, often, even national identity. In 2006, for example, the Miami-Dade County School Board voted to pull copies of Alta Schreier’s Vamos a Cuba because of parents’ complaints about the author’s representation of life in that country. This year, in North Stafford, Virginia, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was challenged as “un-American, leftist propaganda.” Recently, students in an Advanced Placement English class at Eastern High School in Louisville, Kentucky were instructed by their teacher not to read the last 30 pages of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

What do students lose out on by not reading those final pages?

This week provides an opportunity for us to reflect on that question, as well as on the importance of safeguarding the right to free expression. While it is important that authors write freely, it is just as important that readers read freely.

For more information on how you can get involved in Banned Books Week and for a listing of events in your area, visit: http://www.bannedbooksweek.org.