Underlying these conversations are the civil liberties concerns posed by the burgeoning field of genetic testing. First, these tests create the potential for new forms of discrimination against people with genetic predispositions for various hereditary diseases. The ACLU has been active in promoting the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which was finally, after 12 years of consideration by Congress, signed into law in May. The law is far from perfect, but provides essential baseline protections that will allow individuals to speak more freely about hereditary risks for disease, and to undergo testing if they choose, without worrying that they will be fired by their employers or dropped by their health insurance.

Second, there is the issue of the patenting of human genes. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted thousands of patents on human genetic sequences, including many associated with hereditary diseases. Genes associated with breast cancer, ovarian cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, hereditary hemochromatosis, and some types of asthma, melanoma, and colorectal cancer are just some examples of genes that have been patented. Patent holders have exclusive control over these genes for 20 years, during which time they can prevent anyone else from studying the genes or testing patients for harmful mutations. While the purpose of the patent system is to encourage innovation, the high licensing and diagnostic testing fees that some biotech companies charge for use of “their” genes are inhibiting biomedical research and interfering with patient care. Both Joanna Rudnick (the director, producer, and subject of In the Family) and Christina Applegate have drawn attention to the fact that the BRCA test, offered exclusively by BRCA gene patent owner Myriad Genetics, costs up to $3,000 and is not covered by all insurances, raising issues of access for many women, particularly poor women and women of color. In addition, patents on human genes raise troubling questions about the right of patients to access information about themselves and whether parts of human beings should be patentable at all.

As the 23rd annual National Breast Cancer Awareness Month begins, and as the conversations about BRCA testing continue, let’s bring to the fore a discussion about the fundamental rights to access and freedom from discrimination that are essential in order for women, their doctors, and researchers to work together to combat breast cancer and make the best healthcare decisions.

To understand the question more fully, let’s take a quick look at the relevant legal history:

In the years following the Civil War, there was a wave of action to try to create racial equality in the United States and dismantle the legacy of slavery. The States ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, and Congress passed a series of civil rights laws, including 42 United States Code Section 1983, which allowed people to go to court to enforce the rights set forth in those amendments. Section 1983 has become a critical tool for enforcing our constitutional rights, and has played a key role in some of the most important civil rights and civil liberties battles of the last century, including Brown v. Board of Education, Tinker v. Des Moines, and Faulkner v. Jones.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress passed Title IX and other civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in education, employment, housing, and voting. These statutory laws supplement and reinforce the protections established in the Civil War Amendments, but have neither the breadth nor the sanctity of constitutional protections.

So the question is, when Congress passed Title IX, did it intend for that law to override people’s ability to enforce constitutional protections, particularly the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of Equal Protection under law, by bringing cases under Section 1983?

The answer is, no. Congress’s intent in passing Title IX was to provide additional protections for those most vulnerable to discrimination, not to take away already-existing ones. To say that Title IX replaces the right to enforce Equal Protection under the Constitution through Section 1983 is like telling a tightrope walker that you’ve replaced the big, sturdy net that has always been there to catch her with a much smaller net that will be placed right under the rope but will only catch her at certain points along her walk. While the new net may be a welcome additional protection, it is no substitute for the big, reliable net down below.

The court’s decision in Fitzgerald could have an effect well beyond sex discrimination in education; Section 1983 is a vehicle for access to many constitutional rights, including freedom of expression, due process rights, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and the freedom from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and national origin. If the Supreme Court decides that Jacqueline Fitzgerald does not have the right to bring an Equal Protection claim, it could mean that all Americans will have tangibly fewer enforceable rights than they do now.

Unfortunately, many courts have been issuing restrictive interpretations of people’s ability to enforce constitutional rights in court. It is critical that our next administration take a strong and affirmative stand to uphold the Constitution and ensure that the courts will do the same.

Sign the Constitution Voter pledge to make sure that the next president will be committed to restoring the Constitution and the fundamental freedoms it protects and to safeguarding access to the courts to enforce those freedoms. And visit www.aclu.org/titleix to learn more about the Title IX work of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project.

In March 2007 the DOC abruptly moved the women from Edna Mahan Correctional Facility to New Jersey State Prison, where they were held in lockdown conditions – confined in their cells for up to 22 hours a day and denied basic movement within the prison. Unlike the male prisoners, the women were denied access to the prison school and law library, and to basic hygiene and privacy.

While it is a victory that these women will no longer be subjected to the repressive and discriminatory treatment they suffered at NJSP, this is far from a satisfactory solution to the array of flaws in New Jersey’s criminal justice system challenged in our lawsuit. Edna Mahan has problematic conditions of its own, including overcrowding in the medium-security units, Stowe and Hillcrest, and insufficient transportation provided to family members wishing to visit their loved ones. Recently, even when visitors have been able to make the long journey to the prison, they have found that their visits have been shortened to only 45 minutes. Edna Mahan, the state’s sole women’s prison, is located in the northwest corner of New Jersey, and like women’s prisons in so many states, it is far from prisoners’ families.

In addition, transfers like these should not occur arbitrarily. Each time these women are shuffled back and forth at the DOC’s whim, they are uprooted and traumatized, and the few possessions they have are often confiscated or destroyed, or simply disappear. The DOC must create and implement a humane procedure for all transfers, including notices, hearings, and protocols for guards.

Although the DOC claims that Wednesday’s transfer was unrelated to the ACLU lawsuit, it’s clear that they hope to make the suit go away with this move. However, until the DOC provides a viable plan to house women prisoners and meet their needs, we will continue to stand up for women incarcerated in New Jersey and will challenge unconstitutional conditions and other rights violations.

For more information about this case, Jones v. Hayman, including statements from the women prisoners, visit our case page.

Oh, we were suffering until suffrage,
Not a woman here could vote, no matter what age,
Then the 19th Amendment struck down that restrictive rule. (Oh yeah!)

It was 88 years ago today that the 19th Amendment of the Constitution was certified, guaranteeing women the right to vote in this country. And this day brings cause to celebrate a huge step towards universal suffrage — or, put more simply, expanding the right to vote to every man and woman in America.

It’s stunning to think of how far we’ve come. In 1919, a woman couldn’t enter a voting booth. In 2008, a woman serves as Secretary of State. A woman serves as Speaker of the House. And America very nearly saw its first woman on the presidential ballot.

In recent years, women have consistently cast a majority of votes in presidential elections. In this exhilarating election year, women are once again poised to represent a greater piece of the electoral pie than men.

But sometimes the appearance of progress fails to tell the whole story.

There are still far too many barriers that stand in the way of truly universal suffrage. According to a census data analysis by Project Vote (PDF), restrictions on the right to vote, like state photo identification laws, are likely to harm women voters (as well as minorities, people with disabilities, and senior citizens) disproportionately.

They found:

• Women are more than twice as likely as men not to have a drivers’ license.
• One of every five senior women does not have a license.
• Of all Americans without a license, over 70 percent are women.

So let’s celebrate today, but never take our eyes off the prize, because we’re not there yet. The obstacles to full voting equality aren’t what they were, but they’re not what they should be: nonexistent. Until that day, we’ll have to keep fighting to end disenfranchising laws and practices that stand in the way of voting equality.

Each year the State Department issues more than 2,000 A-3 and G-5 visas that allow diplomats to bring into the U.S. their "attendants, servants, or personal employees." Yet little is done to provide these workers with information or support that could protect them against physical, emotional or sexual abuse and trafficking. And even when the worker can escape from the diplomat’s home and tries to hold him accountable, she must overcome the so-far impossible hurdle of diplomatic immunity.

In light of these facts, Sen. Durbin demanded answers to a series of pointed questions about the State Department’s reluctance to take responsibility for the treatment of domestic workers after it provides them visas to enter the United States. He also correctly characterized as "unacceptable" the State Department’s long delays in providing information during investigations into allegations of abuse.

Senator Durbin also expressed concern about the State Department’s opposition to certain provisions in the Senate version of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) (S. 3061) which he has cosponsored with Senators Biden, Brownback, and others. One such provision would require the State Department to interview domestic workers before renewing their visas in order to ensure they are not being abused. TheState Department’s objection? The interviews would be too burdensome.

Durbin’s response:

"Why is this small burden not outweighed by the benefit of discovering whether domestic workers are being abused or exploited?"

It’s encouraging to see that there are still lawmakers willing to defend the human rights of those who are most vulnerable. Thank you, Senator Durbin, for calling the State Department to task for its utter disregard for the lives of women who came to this country to provide for themselves and their families and instead became modern-day slaves.

We hope Secretary Rice takes to heart Senator Durbin’s request to "act expeditiously and diligently to hold diplomats accountable for their actions" and to stop turning a blind eye to the impunity with which diplomats and members of their households abuse their domestic workers. And we will continue to work with Senators Durbin, Biden, Brownback, Representative Berman and others in Congress to preserve and further strengthen the TVPRA provisions that protect workers and hold diplomats accountable.

To read profiles of domestic workers who have come forward and to learn more about the ACLU’s work on this issue, check out: www.aclu.org/domesticworkers.

The State Department issues each of these domestic workers a special visa to come to this country to work for a specific diplomat, and the Department is well aware of the extremely vulnerable position this puts the workers in – both because diplomats’ homes (to which domestic workers are often confined) are off-limits to U.S. law enforcement and as a result of the power the visa arrangement gives diplomats over their workers’ ability to remain in this country. But thus far, the State Department has refused to accept responsibility for what happens to these workers once they have arrived in the U.S. Just last week, in a statement of interest filed with the court in a case brought on behalf of three Indian women enslaved by a Kuwaiti diplomat, the State Department, as it has in the past, insisted that United States courts can do nothing to hold foreign diplomats accountable for extreme human rights abuses, even when the abuses rise to the level of human trafficking and slavery.

The GAO report both documents and is itself an illustration of one of the key failures of the U.S. government to address this problem: there is no systematic tracking or protection of workers who are brought to the U.S. by foreign diplomats. The report is a first step towards documenting diplomatic abuse and exploitation, but in leaving out any details about the 42 cases it investigated, it fails to bring to light the reality of this problem. In November 2007 the ACLU created our own spreadsheet of the 59 cases we were aware of to date, containing as many details as we were able to access about the workers, diplomats, and types of abuses.

As Caroline Frederickson wrote yesterday on the Huffington Post, legislation is required to tackle the web of problems that have allowed these injustices to continue for so long.

To read profiles of domestic workers who have come forward and to learn more about the ACLU’s work on this issue, check out: www.aclu.org/domesticworkers.

In the settlement, reached in February of this year, Management Systems agreed to institute a Domestic Violence, Dating Violence, Sexual Assault, and Stalking Policy, which prohibits the company from evicting tenants or discriminating against applicants on the basis that they are victims of any of these forms of violence. The policy also allows tenants to end their leases early if they need to flee violence and gives them the option of relocating to another property managed by the company.

We were delighted to learn from the compliance report that Management Systems has distributed the new domestic violence policy to tenants and employees, and even more significantly, that ten properties throughout Detroit managed by the company have already accepted the policy. This means that there are now 543 units available to tenants who need to relocate for safety reasons.

“I feel great because they adopted new policy changes and it can help other women or men in the situation that I was in so they won’t have to go through the things that I went through.”

“There is a huge interconnection between homelessness and domestic violence; one study has shown that 90 percent of homeless women have experienced abuse in their lifetimes. The over 500 units that are part of the relocation pool are a great resource for survivors.”

To listen to the podcasts of Tanica and Sandra and to learn more about this case, go to: www.aclu.org/womensrights/violence/33989res20070221.html.

For more information about WRP’s work on sex discrimination in housing, check out: www.aclu.org/fairhousingforwomen.

In March 2007, the DOC transferred approximately 40 women prisoners from the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, New Jersey’s sole women’s prison, to the NJSP. As a result of this move, the women are deprived of the programming and services they received at Edna Mahan, and are subject to more repressive conditions than other prisoners incarcerated for similar crimes at either prison.

In December 2007, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and the ACLU of New Jersey filed a lawsuit, Jones v. Hayman, charging that the oppressive conditions the women face at NJSP are unconstitutional and discriminatory based on sex.

While we’re thrilled with today’s decision, it didn’t come without some controversy. In March, we learned that James Drumm, Assistant Administrator of the NJSP, offered women prisoners sentence reductions in exchange for making false statements describing the conditions at NJSP as better than they were. After one prisoner told us about the offer, she was beaten by a prison guard. Women prisoners described a campaign of intimidation to punish and silence women who told us about what was going on.

The court’s decision will prevent the DOC from moving any more women into the men’s prison while our lawsuit proceeds. The court also granted our clients’ request to pursue their claims as a class action suit, and denied a motion by the DOC to dismiss the case.

It could not be more ironic that one of the buildings that contains the holding cells of the Brownwood State School – a high-security youth prison in central Texas — is called “Freedom Dorm.” Approximately 150 girls are currently incarcerated at Brownwood; nationwide, more than 14,000 girls are in prison on any given night. When you think of “juvenile detention centers” you might imagine something like a boarding school, but in fact, many facilities look much like adult prisons.

A solitary confinement cell at the now-closed Marlin Intake and Orientation Center

A cell at the Corsicana Residential Treatment Center, a facility for children with mental illness or serious emotional disturbance

A solitary confinement cell at Brownwood.

Girls are restrained with brutal physical force and are regularly locked up in solitary confinement — a punishment used for minor misbehaviors as well as for girls who express wanting to hurt themselves.

“If we don’t agree to get on the floor… they come in with the shield, they ram you against the wall, and then they throw you on the floor. I got my chin busted open — I had to get four stitches and I got my tooth chipped.”

— 16-year-old girl incarcerated at Brownwood

Especially given that almost every one of these girls has suffered multiple traumas — including sexual abuse, physical abuse, drug addiction, mental illness, poverty, and violence — it is shocking how the very system that professes to rehabilitate them utterly fails to provide them with treatment or education, and instead re-traumatizes them.

“The SA system is not at all what you would call protective toward an SA person. It stands for ‘suicide alert,’ but staff make fun of it and call it ‘stupid alert’ or ‘seeking attention alert,’ because they think that when we cut ourselves or when we try to commit suicide that we’re seeking attention even though we’re going through hard times.”

— 16-year-old girl incarcerated at Brownwood

The girls incarcerated at Brownwood receive virtually no professional counseling and are seen infrequently by psychiatrists, who often do no more than prescribe dangerous combinations of psychotropic drugs in high dosages. At Brownwood, some of the girls are seen by a “telecom” psychiatrist who conducts appointments via teleconference. As one girl put it, “How can you trust someone you can only see on TV?” Not receiving proper treatment and left alone with their emotions, many girls are driven to cut themselves, bang their heads against the concrete walls, and attempt suicide.

Cuts a girl at Corsicana inflicted on herself.

The response to these behaviors is physical restraint, pepper spray, and further solitary confinement.

In the hopes of bringing to light this broken system and changing these inhumane practices, five of the girls at the Brownwood prison, with the help of the ACLU, filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the Texas Youth Commission, which operates all youth prisons in Texas. The lawsuit charges that TYC subjects the girls to unwarranted solitary confinement, routine strip searches and brutal physical force. The filing coincided with the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s release of its 2008 KIDS COUNT Data Book, which features an essay on the need to reform the juvenile justice system in the U.S.

For more information on the ACLU’s work on girls in youth prisons, including excerpts of interviews with the girls held in the Brownwood facility, check out:
www.aclu.org/girlsinprison.

For this reason my family and I are attending the ACLU Membership Conference this June in Washington, D.C., our Nation’s capital. Most people look at the capital as a place that keeps our country held together and that’s the way that it should be. Our capital is the seat of justice and equality in our Nation — EQUALITY being the key word. Separating students into different groups based on sex is wrong, and it doesn’t make things equal for all students. Our society is not based on your gender, and the schools are supposed to prepare us for when we enter the real world. How does separating students by sex prepare us for society when society is not segregated that way?

One day before school started last summer, I went into the school to find out who my teachers were and I was happy with those results. All the trouble started when I found out that I had five all-girls’ classes, and my parents and I had no say in what kind of classes I was put in. The past two years that I was at Breckinridge County Middle School, we were given the choice to be in "gender-specific" or co-educational classes. My family and I had always chosen co-educational classes, but this year my rights and my fellow students’ rights were taken away because we no longer had the right to choose.

The even bigger problem is that the all-girls’ classes and the all-boys’ classes are supposed to be equal, but that’s not the way it worked at my school. The all-girls’ math class that I was in was much more advanced than the all-boys’ math class. The other part of this problem is that the single-sex classes were the only Algebra 1 classes in the eighth grade; there wasn’t a co-educational class to match the single-sex classes like there is supposed to be. We were offered the chance to switch into a new co-educational class but our teacher told us that the class would be made up of a combination of Algebra and Pre-Algebra students and would not move as fast as the all-girls’ math class. Most of the students, including me, were afraid to switch because we would not be moving at a pace that would challenge us and allow us to learn at our capability level.

My family and I are so excited about coming to Washington, D.C., for the ACLU Membership Conference. We can’t wait to meet other people who care about civil rights as much as we do. I am hoping to meet other young people who care about human rights. This trip means a lot to me and my family; we can’t wait to tell our story. I am also very excited to learn about the other types of rights the ACLU fights for!

Listen to a podcast of Nikki, her father Frankie, and sister Stacey, talk about their case.