Noooooo! It is absolutely nowhere in the Constitution that Christianity, or indeed any religion, is the official religion of the United States. In fact, the sole mention of "religion" in the Constitution is in the First Amendment, which states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (emphasis ours)

Translation: Congress can’t establish a religion or stop you from practicing yours. ‘Nuff said.

Obviously, we need to keep bringing lawsuits like the one we filed today against the officials on the Santa Rosa County School Board in Pensacola, Fla. They must be a part of that 55 percent who believe the U.S. is a Christian nation, and take it as an excuse to force their religion on others: promoting and endorsing prayers at graduation ceremonies and other school events, sponsoring religious ceremonies and holding official school events at churches.

In fact, teachers and staff at Pace High School preach about "judgment day with the Lord" and offer Bible readings and biblical interpretations during student meetings. That kind of stuff is constitutionally protected—that’s, right, by the First Amendment—at private schools, in religious communities and, of course, at home, but that’s where it ends. Any government- or publicly funded school should never endorse, promote or espouse any religion.

Don’t even get us started on the pledge of allegiance.

Just as thousands of political protesters descend upon Denver — and Denver police prep their makeshift prison warehouse — the NYCLU today released startling new footage from New York’s arrest-marred protests four years ago. The video offers Denver police a perfect lesson in what not to do in confronting political protesters during a convention.

The filmmaker, Michael Schiller, is the lead plaintiff in one of the NYCLU’s Republican National Convention cases. Schiller was taping protestors near the World Trade Center on August 31, 2004, when the NYPD used netting to form a cordon and arrest en masse hundreds of lawful protestors, as well as some peaceful observers. That day, nearly 1,200 people were arrested across New York City.

In an interview with the Associated Press last week, NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman spoke of the irony that political conventions— events that are supposed to be the epitome of the democratic process — are used by local and national law enforcement as an excuse to trample on the Bill of Rights. Time and time again, lawful activities are turned into grounds for arrest when the convention comes to town.

“Changing the law to transform innocent behavior into a crime where it poses no threat to public safety is entirely uncalled for and inconsistent with principles of the First Amendment,” she said. “It has a chilling effect on free speech and that has been found time and time again to be improper under First Amendment principles.”

Click here for more info on protest during the 2004 RNC convention. To read about the NYCLU’s latest victory in the Schiller case, click here.

An overwhelming number of political discussions are taking place in publicly accessible but privately owned, online town squares. Which means that this important political speech depends on service providers, users, and content owners all doing their part to safeguard free speech.

Unfortunately, political speech has been threatened repeatedly by claims that controversial material violates a site’s terms of use or infringes copyrights or trademark rights. Here are just a few recent examples:

• The International Olympics Committee (IOC) demanded that YouTube remove a video of a protest by Students For a Free Tibet, based on a bogus copyright infringement claim. The IOC subsequently withdrew the notice, but the IOC’s demand is a lesson in the dangers of hair-trigger Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedowns by service providers.
• An alleged terms of service violation caused YouTube to take down a slideshow of a military funeral.
• Another alleged terms of use violation caused YouTube to remove a video critical of John McCain, apparently because the video included numerous graphic images of the effects of war.But those images were integral to the commentary: the video focused on McCain’s support for the Iraq war.
• An apparent copyright complaint caused Broadview networks to shut down a political website parodying Exxon’s environmental policies.
• The Republican National Committee threatened the online vendor CafePress for allowing users to create T-shirts using Republican trademarks, like "Grand Old Party," or the official version of the elephant logo.
• The Chicago AutoShow tried to use allegations of trademark infringement to force the shutdown of a satirical website promoting transportation alternatives
• The Associated Press tried to use the DMCA  to force the takedown of blog entries that reproduced excerpts of AP news stories—some of them just a few words long.

ACLU of Northern California and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urge service providers to take extra precautions before pulling the plug on political speech. Remember that you’re facilitating a new era of reason and debate, and that there are laws that protect you as a facilitator. By taking that responsibility seriously, you’ll do right by your users, content owners and the political process.

We urge content owners to count to ten and look at the Fair Use Frequently Asked Questions and Fair Use Principles for User-Generated Video Content for some guidance before firing off a complaint.Remember that you are legally obligated to consider whether the use of your material is a fair use.

Consider carefully whether actions may result in the loss of free speech, and remember: the antidote to free speech that you don’t like is more free speech. Make your voice heard with a written blog post, a video blog post, or a message in the comment thread. We also urge users to contact us if they feel that their political speech has been improperly censored.

As we move forward into the fall election season, the Internet can continue to revitalize our political lives in exciting and unforeseen ways — but only if service providers, users, and content owners all do their parts. No matter where you stand on the candidates or the issues, we should all agree on one principle: No Downtime for Online Free Speech!

Is this really how the Denver police intend to treat protestors? It’s not out of the realm of possibility, as it’s eerily reminiscent of how the New York Police Department treated arrested protestors four years ago during the Republican National Convention (RNC).

On August 6, the ACLU of Colorado requested more information about the logistics behind protestors’ access to food, water, bathrooms, medical care and attorneys in a letter (PDF) sent to the Denver Sheriff’s department and Manager of Safety. In the letter, the ACLU of Colorado notes the lengthy processing times of past mass-arrest incidents, and the NYPD’s botched handling of the RNC in 2004, which resulted in two lawsuits brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which are still pending before the courts.

Illustration drawn by Sami al Hajj while detained at Guantánamo.

Sami al Hajj was arrested in December 2001 by Pakistani authorities as he tried to re-enter Afghanistan, the location of his news assignment. He was turned over to United States officials and arrived in Guantánamo in June 2002. Sami al Hajj was released six years later on May 1, 2008, without ever having been charged with a crime. Although the longterm detention and seemingly arbitrary release of so-called “enemy combatants” without charge is, quite disturbingly, not unique, what does make his case unique is the fact that he is a journalist, and the U.S. government has consistently failed to show that he was acting in any other manner when he was detained and sent to Guantánamo.

The extremely troubling nature of Sami al Hajj’s case was highlighted in a recent article by Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle. The article cites allegations made by Sami al Hajj and his attorney, Clive Stafford Smith of the Londonbased human rights organization Reprieve, that assert that Sami al Hajj’s detention may have been due to the fact that he worked for Al Jazeera, the largest broadcaster in the Arab world and nothing more. Al Jazeera has been consistently attacked by the U.S. government for its alleged inaccurate coverage of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as U.S. policy more broadly. This criticism has been countered by people across the Arab world, as well as here at home who view Al Jazeera’s coverage of the U.S. led wars as a welcome reprieve from the censored imbedded journalism conducted by the mainstream U.S. media. Al Jazeera English was also recently nominated for two Emmy Awards in the news and current affairs categories.

Egelko’s article quotes Sami al Hajj’s human rights attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, stating that Sami al Hajj and he “calculated about 135 times [Sami had] been interrogated, and about the first 120 the only interest [his interrogators] had was Al-Jazeera.” Clive Stafford Smith was further quoted as stating that the interrogators of Sami al Hajj “told him that they thought Al-Jazeera was an al Qaeda front.” While we have no independent way of verifying the validity of this statement, the state of press freedom in the United States gives added weight to the seriousness of such allegations. As Reporters Without Borders’ most recent press freedom index shows, the United States’ rank is far from its rhetoric. The U.S. is ranked 48th in the world for press freedom, and 111th in the world for press freedom when viewing the U.S. extraterritorially.

The freedom of the press is vital to the maintenance and security of our republic. Allegations such as Sami al Hajj’s, while unverifiable, should make us all more aware of both the importance of such a freedom and the ease with which the government can take it away.

Right before rushing out of town for August, the Senate failed to move a motion forward on federal media shield legislation by a narrow margin. Even though a bipartisan majority of senators support passage of the much-needed shield law, the Senate — once again — allowed partisan politics to trump good policy. Luckily, this will not be the last word on the fate of the bill. There is still plenty of time in the fall to bring the bill back to the floor and all indications are that the bill is still in the mix.

Passing a strong federal media shield law is critical in order to protect a journalist’s ability to do his or her job and, as always with legislation, the devil is now in the details. As the bill has moved closer to passage with a veto-proof majority in the Senate, its language has been weakened. Recently proposed modifications to the Senate bill come dangerously close to gutting the intended protections. That won’t do. We need a strong and unambiguous shield bill to move forward, but if the bill’s sponsors bow to the will of the administration, the bill will become meaningless.

Americans have all, unfortunately, seen our government attempting to conceal embarrassing or unlawful activities by hiding behind trumped up declarations of national security has gotten out of hand. Imagine if a story about the CIA’s black sites or the administration’s warrantless wiretapping had never been published. How would our government ever be held accountable for its actions if it weren’t for a free press and its confidential sources? Those stories, not to mention Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, only became public after the authors’ sources were assured anonymity. We need to make sure that sacred relationship between a journalist and his or her source is protected.

Did you know that 49 states and even the District of Columbia recognize some form of reporter shield law? The lack of a federal statute means that reporters’ protection — and the public’s right to know — only stretches so far. We at the ACLU aren’t giving up on our efforts to get a strong federal shield law passed before the end of this Congress — nor will the hundreds of other groups and organizations that have been working tirelessly on this bill. Keep your eyes glued to the ACLU’s Blog of Rights for any new developments when Congress returns in September. Until then, we’ll keep stewing…

And we’re not
alone! Today
the ACLU was joined by 10 wide-ranging organizations, from the First Amendment Project to the Directors Guild of America, on a friend-of-the-court-brief filed with the Supreme Court.

In the brief, we criticize the FCC’s regulation of “indecent speech” as arbitrary, inconsistent and irreconcilable with core First Amendment values and urge the Supreme Court to uphold a lower court ruling (PDF) in FCC v. Fox Television stations striking down the recent FCC attempts at censorship.

Here’s an excerpt:

The FCC’s conduct in the thirty years since Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978), narrowly permitted censorship of “indecency” has been unpredictable, at times sweeping, and highly subjective. The problem intensified in 2004 after the Commission announced that even one “fleeting expletive” was now, in most circumstances, barred from the airwaves; then applied that new rule to reverse its previous decision that the rock star Bono’s single exclamation (“fucking brilliant!”) was enough to make a Golden Globe Awards program unlawfully indecent and profane. In the next two years, the agency made additional arbitrary judgments, finding no indecency in the movie Saving Private Ryan” with its many expletives, but condemning the Martin Scorsese documentary, “The Blues” because of vulgar words used by musicians and their music industry colleagues. Thirty years of such discretionary and inconsistent decision-making compels the conclusion that the entire indecency regime is vague, arbitrary, capricious, and overbroad. The fleeting expletives rule in particular has had a widespread chilling effect on valuable programming. And the unconstitutionality of the present system is not remedied by the existence of a late-night “safe harbor” for possibly indecent programs.

More info at www.aclu.org/bleep

Cheek was heading to China not as an athlete, but as a human rights activist: He heads Team Darfur, a coalition of nearly 400 athletes, 72 of whom are competing in the upcoming Olympic games, who work to raise awareness about the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region. Team Darfur’s advocacy has included criticism of the Chinese government’s support of the regime in Darfur.

Cheek suspects his visa has been revoked because of his outspokenness against the Chinese government about its policies supporting the Sudanese government. But when he asked for an explanation as to why he’s been shut out of the country, he was told that the Chinese visa office wasn’t required to give one.

While it might not be much of a shock to hear that China is censoring speech, it’s less known that the U.S. government does the same exact thing. It’s a practice called ideological exclusion. The practice was born during the Cold War in an effort to keep suspected Communists out of the country — resurrected by the Patriot Act, today it’s used by our government to keep out scholars, artists, and political figures whose views run contrary to the Bush administration’s. (Check out our timeline of those who have been excluded in the past.).

The ACLU is fighting two cases of ideological exclusion. One is that of Professor Tariq Ramadan, a renowned scholar of Islam; the second is that of South African scholar Adam Habib. Both are academics the Departments of State and Homeland of Security (DHS) have excluded based on their political views. The ACLU suspects that Habib’s criticism of the war in Iraq, and Ramadan’s criticism of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East are what’s keeping these two noted scholars out of the country. The U.S. government’s actions are preventing Professor Ramadan and Professor Habib from attending speaking engagement in the U.S. and have the effect of censoring the ideas U.S. audiences are allowed to hear.

In both cases, the U.S., like China, originally refused to disclose its reason for excluding Professor Ramadan and Professor Habib. After the ACLU went to court, the government claimed that the exclusions were based on national security concerns. Melissa Goodman, one of the ACLU attorneys who’s representing Habib and Ramadan, wrote in the U.K.’s Mail & Guardian last year:

National security should not to be used as a guise to silence critical or controversial views. By following a policy of ideological exclusion, the US government seems to be ignoring the hard lessons of history. When the Congress repealed the Cold War era communist exclusion laws, it determined that "it is not in the interests of the United States to establish one standard of ideology for citizens and another for foreigners who wish to visit the United States", and that ideological exclusion caused "the reputation of the United States as an open society, tolerant of divergent ideas" to suffer.

The imposition of an ideological litmus test at the border betrays those principles. What the US needs most is to be engaged with the world and open to criticism, not — isolated from it.

One of the reasons the International Olympic Committee awarded the upcoming games to China was to give that country the opportunity to show the world that its record on human rights has improved. But as both China and the U.S. have shown, it still has a long way to go.

One of the best moments in recent journalistic history was when Ms. Thomas berated White House Press Secretary Dana Perino on torture, then turned her disgust towards her fellow journalists for their inertia. When it became public that President Bush not only knew of high-level meetings on torture but condoned them, Thomas asked:

THOMAS: The President has said publicly several times, in two consecutive news conferences a few months ago, and you have said over and over again, we do not torture. Now he has admitted that he did sign off on torture, he did know about it. So how do you reconcile this credibility gap?

MS. PERINO: Helen, you’re taking liberties with the what the President said. The United States has not, is not torturing any detainees in the global war on terror. And General Hayden, amongst others, have spoken on Capitol Hill fully in this regard, and it is — I’ll leave it where it is. The President is accurate in saying what he said.

THOMAS: That’s not my question. My question is, why did he state publicly, we do not torture —

MS. PERINO: Because we do not.

THOMAS: — when he really did know that we do?

MS. PERINO: No, that’s what I mean, Helen. We’ve talked about the legal authorities —

THOMAS: Are you saying that we did not?

MS. PERINO: I am saying we did not, yes.

THOMAS: How can you when you have photographs and everything else? I mean, how can you say that when he admits that he knew about it?

MS. PERINO: Helen, I think that you’re — again, I think you’re conflating some issues and you’re misconstruing what the President said.

THOMAS: I’m asking for the credibility of this country, not just this administration.

MS. PERINO: And what I’m telling you is we have — torture has not occurred. And you can go back through all the public record. Just make sure — I would just respectfully ask you not to misconstrue what the President said.

THOMAS: You’re denying, in this room, that we torture and we have tortured?

MS. PERINO: Yes, I am denying that. Elaine, did you have one?

ELAINE (?): I have one on Zimbabwe, actually.

THOMAS: Where is everybody? For God’s sakes.

Helen, oh Helen. Marry me?

In May, the indomitable Ms. Thomas took ill and her seat in the briefing room has remained empty since (mostly). Her persistent and insightful challenges to the office of the president have set the bar for all White House correspondents. Especially in light of this administration’s consistent and flagrant disregard for the rule of law and Congress’ on again, off again relationship with oversight, Ms. Thomas is more valuable than ever. Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery and several more years of throwing rocks at the thrown.

Ms. Thomas, there’ll never be another like you. Happy birthday, ma’am.

P.S. Hey Congress, hope you’re enjoying your break. I know I’m enjoying your vacation. Just a reminder: Let’s make sure you pass a strong shield law when you get back.