News & Commentary

Months before professional football player Colin Kaepernick registered his protest against police violence by refusing to stand for the national anthem, an African American Lincoln Park Middle School student who shares Kaepernick’s frustrations carried out his own quiet protest by refusing to stand for the daily classroom recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

I’m a “glass half full” kind of guy, but it hasn’t been easy these past two months to feel optimistic about prospects for LGBT equality in Michigan.

In 2006 and 2011, the state legislature expanded the Sex Offender Registration Act (SORA), originally passed in 1994, creating harsher measures for registrants. The amendments retroactively made most registrants register for life and imposed geographic exclusion zones barring them from living, working, or spending time with their children in large areas of every city and town. Additionally, the legislature added extensive and onerous new in-person reporting requirements that make it a crime for registrants to borrow a car, travel for a week, or get a new email account without immediately notifying the police. The changes were imposed without due process or a mechanism for review or appeal for the vast majority of registrants. 

NOTICE ABOUT FOOD LOST DUE TO POWER OUTAGES:  If you lost food purchased with back benefits you received from this lawsuit, you must file a claim with DHHS WITHIN 10 DAYS OF WHEN YOU LOST THE FOOD.  Write out a statement about what food you lost, when you lost it (which could be several days after the storm was over) and include the language: “I understand that there are penalties for intentional misrepresentation of facts, including but not limited to, a charge of penalty for a false claim.” Make sure to date your statement and make a copy of it before you take it to DHHS. Please call the Barry Call Center at 313 578 6826 and let us know that you have filed a claim. 

The good news is that lead levels in Flint’s water continue to drop.

The verdict is in, it seems: LGBT co-parents can have their kids unilaterally taken away from them by their former partner (the legal parent) - and the highest court in Michigan has essentially said it doesn't give a damn.

Recent tragic police-related shootings have demonstrated yet again that sudden, violent deaths at the hands of police can capture headlines and public attention. But out of sight and forgotten are thousands of victims of illegal racially discriminatory encounters with police who survived, but who nevertheless ended up in prison cells.

It isn’t really about bathrooms, is it?

Two important cases involving the ACLU of Michigan--one involving water shutoffs in Detroit and the other a challenge to Michigan’s emergency manager law--will be heard by the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati next week.