News & Commentary

Cross-Posted at the ACLU's Blog of Rights.

Dear LGBT Students, GSA Members, and Friends,

The ACLU of Illinois has been fighting for reproductive freedom and for vulnerable teens for nearly 40 years. Unfortunately, we lost a round in our battle against compelled parental involvement in a teen's decision to have an abortion.

A historic agreement brought about by the ACLU of Illinois will require state officials to offer residents in "institutions for mental diseases" or IMDs the opportunity to move into community-based settings and was filed Monday in federal court, according to the Chicago Tribune.The agreement comes in Williams vs. Quinn, a case filed in 2005 that said Illinois violated the civil rights of 4,500 mentally ill people living in IMDs due to unnecessary segregation, among other factors, which violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Download theFact Sheet on Williams v. Quinn.According to The Associated Press, under the new agreement, the state would help 256 residents move into community housing by the end of one year. By the end of two years, another 384 residents would get help moving.Benjamin Wolf, associate legal director for the ACLU of Illinois, said this is a momentous day for our clients."It also is a good day for the people of

Recently, the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the ACLU of Illinois spoke out on behalf of a concerned member of the Centralia community who learned that Centralia High School had a blanket policy compelling all students to stand during the morning recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. After the ACLU of Illinois was contacted, we sent a letter on February 2nd to the school district noting that compelling standing during the Pledge at the school is a violation of the First Amendment and runs counter to long standing case law on the subject. Read our letter to the high school officials.A few days after receiving the letter, the school

The government is preparing a first-ever study of housing discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people that will include data from Chicago and begin Thursday, according to the Huffington Post.Starting Thursday, the U.S. Housing an

It is time to end Illinois' flawed and expensive death penalty system. For more than a decade, Illinois has had a moratorium on the use of the death penalty. The moratorium was adopted after a serious of high-profile incidents, including an instance in which a man's execution was stayed a mere 48 hours before the sentence was to be carried out, and was later exonerated! To date, a total of 20 innocent people have been exonerated while on death row in Illinois.

The first full-body scanners will arrive next week at O'Hare International Airport, according to a Chicago Tribune article. In the article, Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois said the body scanners are an invasion of privacy: The full-body imaging mac