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News Release Archive | civil rights | Accuracy.Org

40th Anniversary of Title IX: Not Just Sports

June 22, 2012

Title IX was signed on June 23, 1972 by President Richard Nixon and became law on July 1, 1972.

JOANNE SMITH, jsmith at ggenyc.org
Smith, founder and executive director of Girls for Gender Equity, Smith said today: “I benefited from Title IX’s opening up college athletics as many women and girls did, but that’s a small part of what it did. It opened up many aspects of higher education. Still, there is such a gap between the letter of the law and the application of the law. We believe that if administrators and educators were supported to uniformly implement the spirit of Title IX into the daily culture of the school there would be a reduction in gender-based harassment and violence in schools.” Smith is co-author of Hey, Shorty! A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets. See: “Title IX Turns 40, Flaws and All”

MOLLY CARNES, mlcarnes at wisc.edu
Professor in the departments of medicine, psychiatry, and industrial & systems engineering and director of the Center for Women’s Health Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Carnes wrote a piece titled “What Would Patsy Mink Think?” for the Journal of the American Medical Association. The piece states: “Prior to Title IX, only about 10 percent of U.S. medical students were women. Title IX had a personal impact on my life because I entered medical school in 1974. I recently asked separately several women students if they knew what Title IX was. None did.”

Carnes notes that Title IX is also called the Patsy Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act in recognition of one of Title IX’s leading champions. “The 40th anniversary of the passage of Title IX provides an opportunity to reflect on the progress made toward gender equity in medicine… If we are committed to egalitarian principles and if we believe studies confirming that nothing about being a man or woman confers intrinsic superiority in any position within medicine, how could we explain to Patsy Mink our inability to achieve gender equity in the past 40 years after she worked so hard to make it possible?

“Although the explicit prejudice that many women in my generation experienced has been almost (albeit not entirely) eradicated, we are still left with the impact of societal stereotypes about men and women. Stereotypes portray women as more likely than men to be nurturing, supportive, and sympathetic (‘communal’ behaviors) and men as more likely than women to be decisive, independent, and strong (‘agentic’ or action-oriented behaviors). … The pervasiveness of implicit, stereotype-based bias and the way it infiltrates our decision-making processes even when we disavow prejudice may constitute the biggest impediment to realizing the full potential of Title IX.”

GWENDOLYN MINK, wendymink at gmail.com
Gwendolyn Mink has been professor of policy and politics for 30 years and is the author of several books about policies affecting women’s equality. She also is the daughter of Patsy Mink. She said today: “Title IX was one of the biggest policy victories of the feminist movement. The most obvious barriers to women’s educational opportunities were struck down when the law went into effect and the changes accomplished have been long lived. But even so, Title IX’s champions anticipated that the road to full equality would be slow going and that navigating that road successfully would require never ending vigilance to ensure that implementing regulations are not diluted, that compliance is robust, and that girls and women throughout the educational process know their rights and remedies.

“Going forward, vigilant implementation of Title IX also must reach the culture of educational institutions, must dispel stereotypes that impose roadblocks to women’s incorporation on equal footing and must attend to the gross disparities in money and other resources that make it difficult for many girls and women to pursue opportunities that Title IX assures.”

A documentary about Patsy Mink, “Ahead of the Majority” was produced in 2009:.

Tagged With: civil rights, Gwendolyn Mink, Joanne Smith, Molly Carnes, women,

Arizona Immigration Case and “Reverse-Commandeering”

April 25, 2012

Protesters in front of the Supreme Court

MARGARET HU, mhu at law.duke.edu
Hu is an assistant professor at Duke Law School and is the author of a forthcoming article in the U.C. Davis Law Review titled “Reverse-Commandeering.” She just wrote on the American Constitution Society blog: “As the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Arizona v. U.S., one of the main legal questions it considered is this: Whether Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) is preempted by federal immigration law under the Supremacy Clause. This is a statutory-driven inquiry that misses the constitutional mark. The more relevant question is this: Whether SB 1070 poses a threat to the vertical separation of powers. …

“The recent tidal wave of thousands of immigration control efforts proposed by state and local governments can best be characterized as ‘reverse-commandeering’ laws. Setting migration policy at the national level, like establishing a national currency, falls within the sole power of the federal government. Reverse-commandeering by the states is an effort to usurp the federal government’s sole prerogative. This growing movement represents an attempt to control the terms of what federal resources and officers must be appropriated to accommodate a myriad of state immigration enforcement programs. It is a deliberate attempt to skew the immigration enforcement power in favor of the states. …

“Given the impact of immigration policy on foreign and interstate commerce, international treaties, and foreign relations, the Court has concluded that controlling migration patterns is strictly the prerogative of the federal government. Consequently, the growing proliferation of thousands of proposed state and local immigration laws should be examined doctrinally within a commandeering jurisprudential frame. To fail to do so — to continue to accept mirror image theory carte blanche as a favored method of statutory interpretation under the existing preemption doctrine — threatens federal sovereignty. Put another way, it eviscerates the federal government’s ability to develop and implement a coherent, efficacious, and uniform immigration policy at the national level.”

Filed Under: Tagged With: civil rights, constitution, immigration, Margaret Hu,

“Occupy the Justice Department”

April 24, 2012

DANNY GLOVER, FRANCES FOX PIVEN, NORMAN FINKELSTEIN, TALIB KWELI, via April R. Silver, pr at akilaworksongs.com
Actor Danny Glover, activists and authors Frances Fox Piven and Norman Finkelstein and rapper Talib Kweli are among those participating in “Occupy the Justice Department” protests today. The protests demand an end to “systemic police corruption and civil rights violations in Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case and in the cases of hundreds of others across the nation.” They also demand that the government “Release Abu-Jamal; End mass incarceration and the criminalization of Black and Latino Youth; Create jobs, education, and health care, not jails; End solitary confinement and stop torture; End the racist death penalty; Hands off immigrants; Free all political prisoners.”

NOELLE HANRAHAN, globalaudiopi at gmail.com
Hanrahan is the director of Prison Radio. She edited Mumia Abu-Jamal’s book “All Things Censored” and for years has produced his recordings from death row and now from prison (Abu-Jamal was recently released from death row). She said today: “Prison Radio brings the voices of prisoners into the debate on crime and punishment. We have a new recording by Mumia and by other political prisoners. Mumia’s case and voice is emblematic, it represents much of what is wrong in our society. There are 7 million people under correctional control, 2 million actually in prison. About 1 in 46 people will do time in their lifetime. We spend more on prisons than we do on education. It does not lead to public safety, it leads to the public sector not being able to provide what it needs to for a healthy society. What you do to people in prison directly impacts us on the outside — you have HIV and TB spreading in prisons. And it’s devastating to particular communities: 1 in 3 black men will do prison time.”

JOHN CARLOS FREY, via Ben Wyskida, ben at berlinrosen.com
John Carlos Frey is a documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist at the Nation Institute. His exposé on the death of Anastasio Hernández-Rojas aired on Friday on “Need to Know.”

This morning on Democracy Now he said: “Anastasio Hernández-Rojas was caught trying to cross back into the United States. He was detained by Border Patrol agents, went through the detention process. And in the process of being deported, this is when the story really begins. The Border Patrol agents, via their own press release and documents, say that he was combative, Hernández-Rojas was combative. They removed his handcuffs — this is actually in the document — they removed his handcuffs and applied the use of a taser. He fell to the ground, suffered a heart attack and subsequently died. That is what is actually in the police report.

“But the new video and eyewitness testimony proves otherwise. He was handcuffed. He was hogtied. He was not combative. The taser was applied at least five times. He was kicked. He was beaten. He suffered five broken ribs, bruises and cuts all over his body, misaligned teeth. None of that is in the official report. … The Justice Department has not asked any of the eyewitnesses for this information. … So, from our knowledge, it looks like the Justice Department has done absolutely nothing in investigating this case.”

[Note: A previous version of this news release incorrectly identified Talib Kweli as being affiliated with the group Public Enemy.]

Tagged With: Abu-Jamal, civil liberties, civil rights, Danny Glover, Frances Fox Piven, John Carlos Frey, Noelle Hanrahan, Norman Finkelstein, Talib Kweli, torture,

Holder: Kill Jason Bourne

March 6, 2012

The Chicago Tribune reports: “Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. defended the U.S. right to target and kill American citizens overseas in the war on terror … Holder did not take questions from reporters after his remarks, and while he originally was going to answer questions from the law school audience, on Monday morning he abruptly cancelled that plan.”

GLENN GREENWALD, GGreenwald at salon.com
Available for limited number of interviews, Greenwald’s latest book is With Liberty and Justice for Some. He just wrote the piece “Attorney General Holder Defends Execution Without Charges,” which states: “In a speech at Northwestern University yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder provided the most detailed explanation yet for why the Obama administration believes it has the authority to secretly target U.S. citizens for execution by the CIA without even charging them with a crime, notifying them of the accusations, or affording them an opportunity to respond, instead condemning them to death without a shred of transparency or judicial oversight. The administration continues to conceal the legal memorandum it obtained to justify these killings, and, as The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage noted, Holder’s ‘speech contained no footnotes or specific legal citations, and it fell far short of the level of detail contained in the Office of Legal Counsel memo.’ …

“When Obama officials (like Bush officials before them) refer to someone ‘who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,’ what they mean is this: someone the President has accused and then decreed in secret to be a Terrorist without ever proving it with evidence.”

MARCY WHEELER, emptywheel at gmail.com
Wheeler blogs at EmptyWheel.net — she just wrote several pieces on Holder’s speech including “Holder’s Unproven Claims about Anwar al-Awlaki the AQAP Leader,” which states: “If the case that Awlaki [who was assassinated by the U.S. government last September in Yemen] was an imminent threat rests on his leadership role, but we don’t really have any proof of that fact (or, worse, our double agent undermined it after OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] had already signed off on the killing), then the entire argument collapses.

“Moreover, if [the Department of Justice] doesn’t have that evidence (they might, but they certainly haven’t shown it), then consider how much more awful this argument is. It’s bad enough that the Attorney General just argued that due process does not equal judicial due process. But he argued it by claiming that Awlaki was someone they haven’t attempted to prove he was.” See: http://www.emptywheel.net/tag/eric-holder

Wheeler wrote the book: Anatomy of Deceit: How the Bush Administration Used the Media to Sell the Iraq War and Out a Spy.

Holder’s speech

Filed Under: Tagged With: civil rights, Glenn Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler, war,

Indefinite Detention and Assassination: “Clock Back to Pre-Magna Carta Times”

December 22, 2010

ProPublica reports: “The White House is preparing an Executive Order on indefinite detention that will provide periodic reviews of evidence against dozens of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, according to several administration officials.”

In an ABC interview, Attorney General Eric Holder has publicly said the United States wants to “neutralize” the Yemen-based Muslim cleric Anwar al-AwlakiAmerican Empire: Before the Fall, who is said to be the first U.S. citizen added to a CIA list of targets for killing. See Democracy Now report

BRUCE FEIN
Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General and General Counsel to the Federal Communications Commission under President Reagan and is author of the new book American Empire: Before the Fall. He said today: “The AmericaThe United States and Torturen Empire has pushed the due process clock back to pre-Magna Carta times. The new national slogan is, ‘Anything and everything for professed safety, but nothing for liberty or freedom.’”

MARJORIE COHN
Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and author of the new book The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse. She said today: “Indefinite detention violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [Read more...]

Tagged With: assassination, civil liberties, civil rights, constitution, indefinite detention,

Slavery and the States’ Rights Myth

December 20, 2010

The Confederate and Neo-Confederate ReaderAP reports today: “Exactly 150 years after South Carolina became the first state to leave the United States, a group whose purpose is to preserve Confederate history is holding a dance in Charleston.” This is creating much controversy and, says James Loewen, much disinformation about the causes of the Civil War:

JAMES LOEWEN
Loewen is author of the bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me and the new book The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (with Edward Sebesta). Loewen said today: “In 1860 and 1861, when the Southern states seceded, they said why, and it was all about slavery — its protection and extension. They said nothing about states’ rights. Why would they? The federal government was doing what they wanted, from recapturing fugitive slaves to low tariffs. On the contrary, South Carolina (and other states) inveighed AGAINST states’ rights, attacking states that refused to return slaves, for example.” [Read more...]

Tagged With: African Americans, civil rights, slavery,