On Friday, a district court in Missouri rejected a case brought by a mining company challenging the federal birth control rule that requires employer health plans to cover contraception without a co-pay. The Missouri case is one of 30 pending, and it is the first case to be dismissed on the merits. It’s a tremendous victory for women, particularly those employed by the mining company.
By Johanna Miller, New York Civil Liberties Union at 7:07pm
You won't believe what passes for sex ed in classrooms across New York State: An anatomy lesson defining the vagina as a "sperm deposit", a handout portraying women as "hazardous material", cautioning students that same-sex attraction is a cause to seek "counseling."
By Merissa Kovach, Field Organizer, ACLU of Michigan & Maggie McGuire, Communications Associate, ACLU of Michigan at 5:22pm
As Michigan legislators observed states quickly upping the ante with extreme war on women policies like the personhood amendments and mandatory vaginal probe laws, they must have grown tired of our state merely being a face in the crowd; so they decided to dole out their own special brand of bat-crackers crazy in the form of an outrageous, monster War on Women Mega Bill.
We’ve written about the War on Women Mega Bill before, which combines every attack on women's health into the greatest assault on reproductive rights in our state’s history.
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is a popular definition of insanity. Those of us across the country trying repeatedly to pass bills that would prohibit the shackling of pregnant women in jails and prisons are hardly insane. Dedicated? Yes. Stubborn? Possibly. Unwilling to accept women suffering? Absolutely.
This year marks the third attempt to get a signature on a bipartisan, unanimously supported bill in California (AB 2530) that would ban the practice of putting incarcerated pregnant women in dangerous shackles. Similar bills have passed two previous legislative sessions with overwhelming support from both political parties, only to be vetoed. Opposition from the powerful law enforcement lobby surely played a role in these vetoes. But we have persevered, and this year we’ve been successful in keeping law enforcement neutral. While we’re happy with this progress, we still need the Governor to sign the bill.
So much has been said about Rep. ToddAkin in the past few days and yet there’s so much more I still want to say. But I won’t (except for a little bit at the end) because, Todd Akin is just a piece of the story
By Daniel Bullard-Bates, ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief at 1:04pm
For several years, the public high schools of Enfield, Connecticut held their graduation ceremony in the First Cathedral Church in nearby Bloomfield. Students, friends, and family entered the building under a large cross, passed through a lobby decorated with religious banners, and entered into the main sanctuary, where the graduation ceremony took place below a stained glass cross and two banners that read “Jesus Christ is Lord” and “I am God.” Attending graduation meant going to church.
