News & Commentary

UPDATE: On July 5, 2016, the Michigan Court of Appeals officially made it more difficult for same-sex co-parents to have parental rights with their children after a break-up. The Court reversed a favorable decision in Lake v Putnam, where our client Michelle Lake co-parented her son with her former partner, Kerri Putnam prior to marriage equality being available in Michigan.  After the parties broke up, Putnam took their son away and refused to allow Michelle to have any contact.  She filed a petition for parenting time arguing that she was an equitable parent and had legal standing to do so.  The trial court agreed and Putnam appealed.  Without even considering the best interests of their son, the Court of Appeals majority stated that because the parties were not married (even though Michigan law unconstitutionally prohibited them from doing so), Michelle had no parental rights nor legal standing to be able to see her son. 

Britain's Guardian newspaper deserves kudos for two recent articles dealing with the issue of testing for lead in municipal water supplies. Although one is national in scope, both stories have direct links to Flint, and both build on reporting done last year by the ACLU of Michigan.

It was Monday, May 9, 2016 and the week began with a press conference. U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Vanita Gupta, head of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, were to announce a legal challenge to North Carolina’s anti-transgender House Bill 2. Lynch in her remarks compared laws like HB2 to Jim Crow laws of the past and as the nation’s first female, African-American woman attorney general her words directly confronting discrimination against the transgender community held special weight.

Hopeful but wary.

Unfortunately, it’s increasingly a common story. A woman who is expecting a baby rushes to the hospital knowing that something is going horribly awry. Her heart rate is elevated, and she is bleeding. Sadly, the pregnancy is doomed. Crying and upset, she realizes she needs an abortion because she knows the pregnancy won’t make it to term. And she knows she is getting sicker.   

ACLU at the Michigan Capitol – May 16, 2016

In September 2015, when the state of Michigan was still adamantly denying that the water in Flint was contaminated with lead, Hurley Medical Center pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha unveiled a study of Flint children that proved conclusively that the state’s denials were false and that Flint was enmeshed in a full-blown public-health disaster.

For decades transgender people have been fired or turned away from jobs just because of who they are. Courts and federal agencies are finally starting to recognize this for what it is — illegal sex discrimination — and they’re holding employers accountable.But now, a Michigan funeral home is trying to turn back the clock by claiming that this country’s religious freedom protections give it a license to discriminate against transgender employees. As we explain in our recently filed friend-of-the-court brief, religious freedom doesn’t give employers a free pass to evade our civil rights laws, whether those laws are being used to remedy discrimination against women, people of color, or transgender individuals.

ACLU at the Michigan Capitol – May 2, 2016