Know Your Rights

The supreme values ​​of equality and fairness are being challenged in our legislatures and courts. The legal system, long used as a weapon against intolerance, is now being turned on its head to promote and enshrine intolerance.

We have seen this trend on a number of civil liberties issues, including: attacks on same-sex marriage; efforts to restrict abortion rights; individuals and organizations using religion as an excuse to discriminate against or deny services; the dissemination of pseudoscience to perpetuate gender stereotypes and sex segregation in classrooms; a nationwide effort by state legislatures to restrict access to the ballot box; anti-immigrant laws that codify racial categorization by targeting Latinos and other people of color; discriminatory disciplinary practices that expel children of color from schools and push them into the criminal justice system, among others.

The ACLU fights against these efforts that take us back to a time when many people were relegated to second-class citizenship. We want to ensure that everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, disability, nationality, or ideology, is treated equally under the law and that courts and legislatures are instruments for ending discrimination.