Civil Rights

The Rev. Raymond Soeoth and his wife fled Indonesia in 1999 fearing persecution practicing their Christian faith. They arrived in America seeking asylum and were granted the right to live and work here while their applications were processed. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rejected Soeoth's application in 2004 and insisted on detaining him. Yet, he was not a flight risk and had never been convicted of a crime. After two and a half years in immigration detention, Soeoth was finally granted a hearing in front of an immigration judge who immediately ordered his release. Having returned to his wife, his community and his congregation, Soeoth won the right to reopen his case and will likely now be granted asylum. Read more...

The Texas Senate adjourned this week without a final vote on the “Sanctuary Cities” legislation that was one of Gov. Rick Perry’s “emergency” items at the start of the year. The bill, which became an umbrella for a package of harsh immigration measures, crumbled during a 30-day special session of the legislature as top business leaders urged Texas not to become another Arizona. The following is a joint statement by SEIU International Secretary-Treasurer Eliseo Medina and SEIU Texas State Council President Al Martinez:

Now that the GOP-led Texas Legislature has failed for the second time in two months to pass anti-Hispanic, anti-immigrant legislation, the leaders should ask themselves whether anything is ever accomplished by the politics of division.

The answer should be ‘No.’ Left in the wake of the horrible Texas debate is a failed political exercise that divided the state and did nothing to fix the immigration system.

The immigration package would have turned Texas into another Arizona by instituting racial profiling against Hispanics, imposing unfunded mandates on local governments, and draining the economy of a reliable workforce and tourism dollars.

It is with great pride that I stand with this bipartisan group in support of the long-overdue Equal Rights Amendment. I can’t help but think of the words of our former colleague and feminist pioneer Pat Schroeder, when she was asked if being a mother would get in the way of her duties as a member of Congress. She said: “I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both.” 

This month, a civil rights milestone - the 44th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in the ACLU case, Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state bans on interracial marriage - will be heralded in a new documentary that will have an exclusive congressional screening. The Loving Story superbly chronicles the story of Mildred and Richard Lovings’ courageous fight and the Supreme Court decision that bears their name.

While for most Americans, Loving v. Virginia is just another distant civil rights event in America’s long civil and human rights journey, for me, the opposite is true. This case was one that not only changed the landscape of American culture; it has also touched me personally. As a black woman married to a white man and in my work at the ACLU, I am an advocate for the imperfect institution of marriage for everyone, including gay and lesbian couples.

To put this all in context, imagine that you are sitting next to me on the floor of the Murphy family living room in 1963, watching “Leave it to Beaver” on a black and white television set in a middle-class black home in a segregated neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland. I had a school-girl crush on Wally, the oldest son in the TV series. Unlike my three older brothers, Wally was patient, reasonable and rational. He was also white.

Fifty years ago next month, my father, then a 35-year-old refugee from Hitler’s Germany with a young wife and two small children at home, boarded a Trailways bus headed for Jackson, Mississippi.

Like the 427 other freedom riders who rode voluntarily into the terror that was the segregated South in May and June of 1961, my father set out to violate the illegal state laws that barred white-skinned people from sitting together with black-skinned people on public transit  – laws that were vigorously enforced not only by police but also by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council. Only weeks before, a mob of angry segregationists in Anniston, Alabama had attacked and set fire to a bus with dozens of black and white freedom riders trapped inside.

My father’s purpose in joining that Freedom Ride was twofold: to pressure the federal government into enforcing the Supreme Court’s decision that racial segregation in interstate travel violated the U.S. Constitution; and, just as importantly, to focus public attention on the injustice, brutality and defiance of the Jim Crow South. 

Yesterday, President Obama called for the public to rally behind the idea of comprehensive immigration reform. I am very supportive, and I know many of my colleagues are as well. We have been waiting for this moment and stand ready to work with the President on this legislation. The President should help guide members by laying out a legislative model of what he envisions in the reform process.

Until we achieve comprehensive immigration reform, we will continue to have two Americas. One that has realized the American Dream and one where millions of our friends, neighbors and coworkers live in the shadows, separated from their families by a broken immigration system. Every day we wait, our economy loses hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax revenue and consumer spending. Immigration reform would yield $1.5 trillion to the U.S. GDP over a ten year period. This is what I call economic recovery. Immigrants are a critical part of our economy, culture, and our national identity. We need to be one nation, indivisible. That is why we need comprehensive immigration reform now. 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave these remarks on maternal health on Tuesday.

Sunday is Mother’s Day, in case any of you need reminding. And many of us will find ways to celebrate and thank our mothers, and we’ll be grateful for all of the blessings that we’ve been given. But let’s not forget that becoming a mother can be a dangerous and life threatening undertaking. Every year, nearly 360,000 women worldwide don’t survive childbirth. Four million babies die during childbirth or within a few weeks. Most of these deaths can be prevented. 

And there are some encouraging trends. Recent data confirms that the global maternal mortality ratio has declined 34 percent between 1990 and 2008. In Bangladesh, for example, maternal mortality has gone down by 40 percent. In Nepal, where it was the first time, many years ago, that I saw a birthing kit, which some of you know is one of UNICEF’s great contributions, and in Nepal it’s dropped 50 percent. 

So our investments in family planning and maternal and newborn health have contributed to a decline of at least 30 percent in maternal deaths in 19 countries. And I want to underscore that because all too often people wonder, well, what happens with this money that you spend and that the Congress appropriates to be spent? Well, this is one example of where we can really trace U.S. Government efforts that have made a difference in the lives of women, babies, and children. 

So it’s clear that with the right tools, the right partnerships, and the right commitment, we can achieve real results. It’s not only the right thing to do; it is the smart thing to do as well. Improving the health and status of women and girls acts as a positive multiplier because when women succeed, they lift themselves, they lift their families and their communities along with them. 

According to a recent analysis published in The Lancet, half the reduction in child mortality over the past 40 years can be directly attributed to better education for women. If a woman knows better how to care for her child, she will demand more and receive more, enabling her to do so.

So that’s why we’ve put women and children at the heart of our development efforts, including our Global Health Initiative. Through the Global Health Initiative, we’ve set very ambitious new targets for improvement in maternal and child health and access to family planning. 

We want our efforts to be broad-based, self-sustaining, and country-led. So we’re working to build health systems that give women and children access to an integrated package of essential health services, from prenatal care and skilled birth attendants to reproductive healthcare, immunization services, and the prevention for mother-to-child HIV transmission. 

We’re funding scientists to identify what works to improve women and children’s health and to spread those practices. We’re also working together to remove barriers, and there are still so many barriers. There are economic barriers, cultural barriers, social and even legal barriers that keep women from getting access to healthcare. And we’re creating these innovative, cross-cutting solutions that depend upon better coordination on the ground. 

We’ve recently launched an initiative to spur innovation, prevention, and treatment for pregnant women and newborns, as well as an alliance to increase access to family planning and reduce maternal and neonatal deaths in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. 

Last year, we started the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, something that I have to confess I wasn’t as focused on until I really began paying attention because cooking a meal for your family is something that people do every single day, mostly women. But the toxic smoke caused by open fires or unventilated cookstoves kills nearly 2 million women and young children every year. So I think we have a lot that we know needs to be done and a lot of opportunities to do it better. 

Today, I am pleased to announce another tool in our arsenal, another roster of impressive partners, to create the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action, or MAMA. I love acronyms when they work. Together with Johnson & Johnson and with the help of the UN Foundation, the mHealth Alliance and BabyCenter, we will harness the power of mobile technology to deliver vital health information to mothers across the globe. 

Women in developing countries, some of the women most at risk for pregnancy-related problems, will be able to use their cell phones to get health information via text messages or voicemails, and the information can even be customized for the stage of pregnancy or the age of their children. 

Over the next three years, this $10 million partnership will be piloted in three countries –Bangladesh, South Africa, and India – and if it is successful, as we expect it to be, we will expand it. We have the ability, therefore, to help more women live healthy lives and more babies to get off to a healthy start; and that’s why we have to keep asking ourselves what works and let’s take it to scale, and if it doesn’t work, let’s quit doing it and find something more innovative and effective. 

Thanks to the attention of the UN Secretary General and other leaders, we’re finally giving this issue the attention it deserves. And there are so many of you in this room, as I look around, who have been leading voices. You’ve been advocates, policy makers, service providers, leaders in every sector. 

And I thank you, because it’s going to take all of us. This has to be a team effort, because there is so much to be done and so many positive results that we can achieve together.

So let me now have the great pleasure of welcoming to the podium the CEO of Johnson & Johnson – and I thank him and all of the representatives of J&J for being part of this very exciting program – Bill Weldon. 

Today, Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) will re-introduce the bipartisan and fully inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). But it will not pass this session.

That said, what can we reasonably hope to accomplish in Congress on ENDA in the short run?

I believe that the church should be the conscience of our culture. The call to care for “the least of these,” to feed the hungry and to care for the sick, is at the very core of our tradition. As Congress continues to wrangle over the federal budget, it is morally unacceptable that the deepest cuts under consideration target programs that fight disease, hunger and extreme poverty around the world.

The federal deficit is of genuine concern to us all. We understand that tough choices and sacrifices are necessary. But given that international humanitarian assistance programs represent less than half of 1 percent of the total federal budget, the suggested cuts will do little to rectify our budget crisis. 

In New York State, I am legally female for most purposes for which a driver’s license is useful, but male for those purposes for which a birth certificate is used.  I’m a woman, in a legal marriage entered into under New York law with another woman, though it took three hours to get a marriage license from the New York City Clerk. We file jointly for income taxes, since federal DOMA shouldn’t apply to us. Some states might apply their super-DOMAs to us.

In Texas (a wrongful death action), Florida (a child custody matter) and Kansas (an estate proceeding), legally female transgender women and a legally male transgender man who had valid marriage licenses saw their marriages invalidated by courts.  In three states (Ohio, Tennessee, and Idaho), transgender people can’t ever get their birth certificates corrected – and in those states, it’s likely that same-sex marriage is already legal for some couples, much as it has been legal in parts of Texas since 1999.

Federally, I can get a passport as female today, but if I had to change my sex designation for social security after October 2002, I couldn’t.