Abraham Frei-Pearson - Diversity

The American Civil Liberties Union is an organization devoted to preserving the individual rights guaranteed by the constitution and laws of the United States. The ACLU works on a number of different issues, including capital punishment, which they oppose, prisoners rights, racial justice, and free speech. The ACLU typically has attorneys to represent groups whose civil rights they feel are being oppressed. The ACLU was founded in 1920 by a group of people protesting the imprisonment of those found distributing anti-war literature. It was a major player in the trial of John Scopes, in Brown v. Board of Education, and in Roe v. Wade.

The ACLU is frequently in the midst of controversy because of its tendency to defend people against their own government, and often against the majority in their own country. The ACLU is famous, or perhaps infamous, for being a major player in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and then also defending the right to assembly of the Ku Klux Klan.

Today, the ACLU continues to fight for the civil rights of minorities. They are most actively and publicly involved in preventing the United States government from using torture, protecting the right of free speech on the internet, and protecting the rights of gays and lesbians. In the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, the supreme court accepted the ACLU's argument that the right to privacy covers relationships between gay men and lesbians, striking down a Texas law that made same-sex intimacy a crime.