Victory!

Karen Hannant and her partner were one of the 300 couples legally married in Michigan on March 21, 2014, when Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage was ruled unconstitutional. Hannant’s employer Heritage Academies provides spousal benefits for its married employees, including health insurance coverage. When Hannant requested that her spouse be covered, Heritage told her that they would only recognize marriages between opposite-sex couples. 

In March 2015, the ACLU of Michigan filed a complaint on behalf of Hannant with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), arguing that Heritage’s refusal to provide benefits to Hannant’s spouse was unlawful sex discrimination by an employer in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. 

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality in June 2015, Heritage agreed to provide benefits to the same-sex spouses of its employees. Following EEOC investigation and mediation, the parties reached a financial settlement in June 2016. 

(ACLU Attorney Jay Kaplan)

Read our 2017-2018 Legal Docket

For years, the Grand Rapids Police Department solicited business owners to sign “Letters of Intent to Prosecute Trespassers.” These letters did not articulate a business owner’s desire to keep a specific person off their property and were not directed at any particular person. Instead, police officers used these generalized letters to decide for themselves who does not “belong” on premises that are generally open to the public. In many cases, the police arrested people who did nothing wrong, including patrons of the business. In 2013 the ACLU brought a federal lawsuit to challenge the use of these letters to make arrests without the individualized probable cause required by the Fourth Amendment. The plaintiffs include Jacob Manyong, who allegedly “trespassed” when his vehicle entered a business parking lot for several seconds as he pulled out of an adjacent public parking lot, and Kirk McConer, who was arrested for “trespassing” when he stopped to chat with a friend as he exited a store after buying a soda. An expert retained by the ACLU for the case found that African Americans are more than twice as likely to be arrested for trespassing than whites. In 2018 Judge Paul Maloney also ruled in our favor in the federal case. The city paid our clients damages in April 2019, and we were able to reach a settlement on attorneys’ fees in January 2020. The city has also made significant changes to the use of the no-trespass letters. (Hightower v. City of Grand Rapids; ACLU of Michigan Attorneys Miriam Aukerman, Michael J. Steinberg and Marc Allen; National ACLU Attorney Jason Williamson; Cooperating Attorneys Julia Kelly and Bryan Waldman.) 

Before same-sex marriage was made legal in Michigan, unmarried same-sex couples often had difficulty jointly adopting children in Michigan. Some judges, however, allowed second-parent adoptions, where a non-biological parent joins with a biological parent to adopt a child they are raising together. 

T.J. McCant adopted in this way in 2005, receiving a valid order of adoption from a Shiawassee County judge. Later, McCant became disabled and applied for Social Security benefits that any disabled parent can receive to help raise his or her legal child. An administrative law judge in the Social Security Administration denied benefits, stating that McCant’s adoption is invalid because unmarried couples are not permitted to jointly adopt children under Michigan law. 

The ACLU of Michigan represented McCant in appealing this decision to the Social Security Appeals Council in 2014. We argued that unmarried couples are allowed to adopt, and in any event once a valid adoption order is issued by a state judge, the child is entitled to the same benefits that would be due to a legally adopted child in any other family. 

In November 2014 the Appeals Council remanded the case to the local field office for reconsideration of its initial decision. In January 2018, an administrative law judge issued a decision in McCant’s favor, awarding back benefits from 2011 through the present. 

(ACLU Attorney Jay Kaplan)