American Civil Liberties Union

You can’t catch HIV from a toilet seat.

You can’t catch HIV from kitchen utensils.

You can’t catch HIV from everyday contact with the people around you. 

Old news, right? In fact, all of those points were made in Understanding AIDS, the health information pamphlet mailed to every American household by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in 1988. But apparently the message was lost on folks at the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC). 

You can’t tell by looking at someone whether he or she is living with HIV. That is, unless you catch a glimpse of a man who’s living with HIV in the state of Alabama’s prison system.

There are over 200 male prisoners living with HIV in Alabama.  The Alabama Department of Corrections requires each of them to wear a white armband at all times, making their health status obvious to other inmates, prison staff, and visitors.  The practice is a huge affront to prisoners’ privacy and confidentiality, and it’s one of several forms of discrimination against prisoners living with HIV that we’re fighting to stop in the Henderson v. Thomascase, currently on trial in federal court in Montgomery. As we’ve said before, public health authorities have been explaining since the 1980s that routine physical contact does not transmit HIV.

The momentum behind efforts – strongly supported by the ACLU – to narrow the current sweeping, unprecedented religious exemption...

On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times published a powerful editorial arguing that a blank check for religiously affiliated organizations – far beyond houses of worship – to discriminate in employment against LGBT people should not be the price paid to enact the long-sought and critically important Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).