"The ACLU has considered its special mission, since its founding
seventy-six years ago, to be the defense and expansion of civil liberties
based on the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment. The First
Amendment, before 1920, when the ACLU was founded, had very rarely been
used, and the United States Supreme Court had only on very rare occasions
addressed the kind of civil liberties that we now take for granted as
protected by the First Amendment . . .
We are one of the largest, if not the largest, progressive
organizations in the State of Connecticut. We are one of the few
progressive organizations in the State of Connecticut to actually have a
full-time lobbyist at the State Capital . . . We currently have an
anti-school-voucher coalition, we have a freedom-to-marry coalition, which
is an anti-D.O.M.A., Defense of Marriage Act, coalition. The
anti-death-penalty network is based out of our [Hartford offices]; . .
.
The National ACLU brings more cases and argues more cases before the
United States Supreme Court than any private law firm or any individual
entity in the United States with the exception of the United States
Solicitor General . . .
I'm an organizer, not an attorney; I was the National Field Director
for the First Lady's Health Care Reform Plan . . . So my view of the world
is from an organizing point of view, and given the problems that we've had
on campuses in Connecticut, and the inevitability that those will continue
in the future to arise as problems on various campuses, we have a need, in
the State of Connecticut, I feel, to develop a support system, a system
whereby students at Yale can talk to students at Wesleyan when they have a
problem, as they did last semester, with the Middletown Police Department
stopping anyone who was walking down the street who was Black. We have a
need to connect students from other campuses to support, for example, The
Lantern, the newspaper at Connecticut State University, when the
administration tries to shut them down for running a story about
corruption among school officials . . .
Those incidents are not unique to those particular campuses, nor are
they unusual, and having the ability for students to be organized and then
also enabling them to interact, would be a good thing to do for us and for
the students. Right now in Connecticut there is no forum for
civil-rights-interested organizations to talk with each other . . . and
women's groups are finding themselves isolated on campuses. So that's
part of our objective in getting campus groups together . . . We are
coming up to a legislative session in Connecticut which, if it follows the
recent trend in legislative sessions, will put a considerable number of
civil liberties at danger. Last year, for example, in the Connecticut
Legislature, we dealt with an amendment which we were lucky enough to
defeat, which would have overturned a case we won last year that banned
military recruiters from recruiting on campuses that receive state aid,
because of the fact that they discriminate . . . The Connecticut State
Supreme Court ruled that, indeed, any campus that receives state funds
cannot discriminate, and it cannot allow discriminatory employers to
recruit on campus . . .
This year we will deal with a remedy for the Sheffield case,
which was a case we won last year, the first successful desegregation case
in any state since 1974. It's the very first case in the United States
which addresses desegregation and quality education based on the State
Constitution. {Fortunately, Connecticut has a portion of its Constitution
which says that segregated education is illegal and unconstitutional and
is wrong, we won that case and now we need to do a remedy on it; it could
be the biggest example of educational change in the country . . .}
Connecticut is one of those states that does not have laws that
specifically define marriage as between one man and one woman . . . so
it's possible that when the Hawaii court system makes a definitive ruling,
probably in January or February, or perhaps even March, various states
across the country will react based on the new provisions that D.O.M.A.
allows them to. And Connecticut could be one of those states that could
hold out and possibly defeat that kind of effort, thereby allowing people
who are of the same sex who are legally married to move here and still
retain those rights . . .
There are number of provisions that have come up over the past
several years in Connecticut and also at the federal level that deal with
censorship on the internet. We are at a critical time for this avenue of
communication . . . a challenge [introduced in Pennsylvania] was able to
get the court to determine that basically internet communication was an
ongoing conversation and as such was [protected] . . . It is always in our
interest to take those cases which are in Connecticut or the surrounding
areas, that we have an interest in and run them into the larger
community."
