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.

Yes, that was awful, but I’m sorry, it had to be said.

Anyway. Hotlining is the practice of bypassing regular Senate procedures and moving legislation through to a vote with little or no floor debate in an attempt to pass the legislation through the unanimous consent of all Senators. As with most things in Congress, it can be helpful, or it can be abused. On the one hand, members of Congress will occasionally hotline a bill when they’re under political pressure to move things along, or when they’re just itching to leave town for recess. (Believe me, there are times when we’re all itching for them to leave town.) As often as not, hotlined bills are noncontroversial, technical bills, resolutions, the sort of thing that rarely makes the papers.

On the other hand, hotlining can be a useful tool to overcome frivolous objections that are only being raised to stall legislation a member of Congress doesn’t like for partisan political reasons. Hotlines typically don’t stand when there’s a valid point of debate. (I say “typically,” thought it’s certainly not impossible. You know anything can happen with those crazy kids.) For example, Senators Snowe and Coburn stopped a recent hotline on the “Wired” bill by raising some important privacy concerns – the same concerns we’d been raising for a while.

And now, if I can do this without dropping it, I’m going to pass the baton back to Allie, who’s going to talk about the difference between committee hearings and markups tomorrow.

Rachel passed away in Wayne, Maine, where she was raised and later she and her husband, Richard McAlee, built a vacation home. Her last moments were spent surrounded by family and friends.

Although Rachel was a staunch abolitionist, her career took her in many directions, always where she could be of service to her fellow person. At the time of her death Rachel was on the staff of the U.S. House Committee of the Judiciary where she covered issues of crime, terrorism and homeland security. Rachel also taught at the Howard University School of Law.

Her service to the ACLU was not solely in the Capital Punishment Project. In fact, she served as Legislative Counsel for the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office and Executive Director of the ACLU of Alaska. Rachel’s dedication to the cause of death penalty abolition could be seen in not only her ACLU work but she was also the Director of Alaskans Against the Death Penalty and Chair of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Rachel’s public service career started early. Prior to law school she was a human rights monitor in Guatemala with the Sanctuary Movement. An internship during her studies at Northeastern Law School took her to Alaska and upon receiving her Juris Doctor degree she returned to work as counsel for the Alaska Public Defender Agency. She earned a Masters from Temple University School of Law.

She wrote and lectured tirelessly to abolish capital punishment. Her first book, Don’t Kill In Our Names: Families Of Murder Victims Speak Out Against the Death Penalty was published in 2003. The book told the stories of family members of murder victims who believed that revenge through the death penalty was not the way to honor their loved ones. In 2005, Rachel authored one of the first investigations on the experiences of the families of the executed, Capital Consequences: Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories.

While teaching us all how to live a full life with cancer she wrote her first novel, Tales Of The District: Life In The Nation’s Capital In A Time Of Terror, which was published in late 2007.

Rachel was also the primary author of Broken Justice: The Death Penalty in Virginia (2003), Broken Justice: The Death Penalty in Alabama (2005), Not in Our Name (1997), and The Forgotten Population: A Look at Death Row in the United States Through the Experiences of Women (2004) and many similar publications for organizations such as the ACLU, the American Friends Service Committee and Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation.

Those of us who were privileged to work with Rachel know that she rarely took credit for her endeavors, was patient with those who failed to keep up with her pace, and was an excellent colleague as well as a good friend.

It is typical of Rachel that in lieu of flowers she asked that those wishing to send a memorial please make a donation to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. She may be gone but her spirit lives on in all those who continue to advance her work of abolition of the death penalty and social justice. As they say in Guatemala on the passing of a friend, Rachel King, Presenté!

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.

More than two years later, a[n NCIS] probe and other documents reveal that the men took advantage of lapses in guard protocol and of lenient policies toward compliant detainees…

…An internal investigation into the guards’ actions found six violations of Guantánamo’s standard operating procedures, procedures that have since been revamped.

The government can’t say it didn’t see the suicides coming. Detainees’ lawyers had warned that, as their clients’ detention dragged on with no end in sight, the men would likely kill themselves in despair. Department of Defense (DOD) officials admitted that by June 2006, there had been at least 41 suicide attempts at Gitmo. When three detainees actually committed suicide that month, government officials went on attack, calling the deaths an “act of asymmetrical warfare waged against [the U.S.]” and a “good PR move to draw attention.”

On July 17, 2007, the ACLU submitted a FOIA request to the DOD seeking the release of records relating to all deaths (which includes suicides, homicides, natural deaths and accidental deaths) and attempted suicides and homicides since the detainees started arriving in Guantánamo in January 2002.

The DOD was, not surprisingly, unresponsive. So in April of this year, we filed a lawsuit asking the courts to enforce our request. In our lawsuit, we pointed out that the government has no basis for withholding this information from the American public, and that people need the information about deaths and attempted suicides “to assess both their causes and their human and policy consequences.”

Last week, we reached a settlement with the DOD, and by September 12, we will start receiving documents. Even before September, we expect to get the NCIS report that WaPo reported on, but we expect that our broader request will yield even more information: information on the suicide of Abdul Rahman Ma’ath Thafir in 2007; the death of Abdul Razzak, reportedly from natural causes last year; and information on attempted suicides.

And, of course, we’ll let you know what we get…

Reading the tea leaves of a judge’s comments during a trial is always a risky business. It is easy to read too much into casual questions, into annoyance that can really be about pace or focus, and so on. And sometimes, things look very different after a trial ends and you begin to think about how to decide.

With that warning, though, by the end of the trial here, the case seemed pretty clear. No one really thought Diane Schroer was “dishonest” or “lacked integrity” for not saying when she applied for the job that she was going to become Diane. (The Library had suggested it had lost confidence in her honesty and integrity since she didn’t.) And no one really tried to find out if she’d have any trouble holding on to her security clearance after she transitioned (the Library said it was very worried, but it did nothing to find out if there could be a problem). The Library wouldn’t hire Ms. Schroer because she was becoming Diane.

So in the end, it all seems to come down to what we mean by sex and sex discrimination. Or, to put it a little more precisely, whether a person’s sex includes gender identity, and whether sex discrimination includes gender identity discrimination.

The judge heard expert witnesses from both sides on what sex means. Ms. Schroer’s was Dr. Walter Bockting, who testified that sex is made up of several factors, including chromosomes, anatomy, and a person’s sense of their sex—their gender identity. To the government’s expert, Dr. Chester Schmidt, sex is chromosomes. He said only biologically determined factors could be a part of sex. It would, according to him, be too messy otherwise. Gender identity, Dr. Schmidt said, could be biological, but there’s too little evidence to know yet.

So now it’s up to the judge to figure out just what that simple, charged, deeply important word sex means.

To the government, sex meant men and women by either biology or body (they aren’t clear about which) when the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed. It has to mean that forever unless Congress changes it.

To Ms. Schroer and the ACLU, gender identity — a man’s sense of himself as a man and a woman’s sense of herself as a woman — has always been a part of a person’s sex. Congress may not have thought about people for whom chromosomes, anatomy and identity did not line up, the ACLU says, but that’s beside the point. We don’t refuse to apply laws to unanticipated situations; if we did, we couldn’t function as a society.

We should know what the judge thinks fairly soon. Stay tuned.

Want to be part of making equality a reality for transgender people? Get busy! Interested in making change in your community on a variety of LGBT issues? Get equal!

Well, there might be.

Sometimes it feels like those of us (trapped) inside the Beltway speak a foreign language, so we wanted to provide you with a glossary of common terms that we throw around, so the next time you read the Blog of Rights or search our site for press releases, you’ll know what we’re talking about. We’ll try not to sound too much like your high school civics class. In fact, we were inspired by two things: Schoolhouse Rock, which some of us grew up watching on ABC, and that famous quote by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (you know, when he said: "Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.")

First up to bat:

Regulations versus Laws: Alright, you know what a law is. You passed high school civics, and you know that a law is passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by the president (or passed by a super-majority of Congress over a president’s veto), and then we (the folks residing in the U.S.) have to obey it. But, laws are not the only rules governing our society. Regulations are rules promulgated (that’s a fancy word for "created") by an administrative agency (a.k.a. part of the executive branch of the government) that guide how laws are implemented. For example, in 1973, Congress passed the Church Amendment, a law that allowed health care providers to refuse to provide abortions or sterilizations or information about abortion or sterilization. On Thursday, August 21, 2008, President Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services proposed regulations that would interpret this law to open up the possibility that institutions and individuals could deny women access to birth control or refuse to provide information and counseling about basic health care services.

The process for promulgating a regulation is different from that of developing a law. First, an administrative agency will propose a draft regulation and publish it in the Federal Register. Then, there will be a comment period of at least 30 days on the draft regulation. Organizations, as well as members of the public, will be welcome to submit comments on the proposal. And the ACLU usually does. After the comment period closes, the agency will consider the comments (or at least they say they do) and then, in due time, the agency will promulgate a final regulation, which will be binding. This process can sometimes take years, and at a minimum takes several months.

Occasionally, the government will pass emergency regulations, which are regulations that go into effect without a public comment period. (This is considered poor form.) The bad news is that, unlike a law which (typically) has the approval of two branches of government, a regulation is promulgated solely by the executive branch. The good news is that once a new president comes into office, his (or her) agencies can revoke old regulations and/or propose new ones that override the old ones. (Of course, this can work against us, as well as in our favor.)

Tune in tomorrow to learn about hotlining!

Last Thursday the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released proposed regulations (PDF) that could seriously undermine women’s access to reproductive health services, including birth control and abortion. Now the public has 30 days to let the Bush administration know precisely what we think of these regulations. Click here for our Action Alert, which will allow you to send comments to HHS.

The Bush administration is trying to spin the proposed regulations as a necessary means of protecting health care workers who refuse to participate in abortions. But federal law has long carefully balanced protections for individual religious liberty and patients’ access to reproductive health care. It’s disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

What’s really new about these proposed regulations is that they appear to take patients’ health needs out of the equation. They expand the ability of health care workers to refuse to provide complete and accurate information and counseling to women who seek services. Moreover, both the regulations, and Secretary of HHS Michael Leavitt’s public comments about them, leave the door open as to whether institutions and individuals can refuse to provide contraception.

Make no mistake: that lack of clarity is intentional. As the Washington Post reports, "…when pressed about whether the regulation would protect health-care workers who consider birth control pills, Plan B and other forms of contraception to be equivalent to abortion, HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt said: ‘This regulation does not seek to resolve any ambiguity in that area.’" Indeed, the Wall Street Journal notes Leavitt’s admission that some medical providers may want to "press the definition."

Not reassuring.

Ditto for Leavitt’s justification for issuing the proposed regulations, which is based on his willful misinterpretation of last November’s statement (PDF) from the ethics committee of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologist. ACOG said that doctors should either be prepared to perform "standard reproductive services" or else refer those patients to someone who will. Leavitt claims that ACOG’s statement could potentially strip noncompliant doctors of their board certification, never mind that both ACOG and the executive director of the certifying board have explicitly told him otherwise.

But these regulations aren’t about responding to facts. This administration has, time and again, put its political and ideological concerns above the best interests of the American people.

They are, however, a very serious threat to women’s health and to existing patient protections that ensure that even in the face of religious refusals women can get the health care they need.

Click here to go to our Action Alert, which will allow you to submit comments to HHS. The deadline is September 20 and volume counts, so please act quickly and tell your friends.

In Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel, The Trial, a man awakens to be suddenly arrested and put on trial for an unspecified crime in a court where no evidence is presented. Hey, at least he got a trial! Most detainees at Guantánamo Bay are still waiting to defend themselves against their crimes — real or imaginary.

My latest Civil Discourse comic is about an imaginary series of secret detention camps hidden within other secret detention camps. The final camp in the series, ‘Uttermost Secret Camp Supreme 17," is a dimensional rift where not even the laws of physics apply.

I look forward to the day when we don’t have to use the words "Orwellian" and "Kafka-esque" to describe our treatment of detainees in the "War on Terror." Maybe the next President will try to live up to the writings Jefferson instead of Kafka.

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.