August, 28 2017, 11:30am EDT
ACLU Files Lawsuit Challenging Trump's Transgender Service Member Ban
The American Civil Liberties Union and Covington & Burling LLP today filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging the president's directive banning transgender service members from continuing to serve in the military or receiving medically necessary health care, and banning men and women who are transgender from enlisting.
MARYLAND
The American Civil Liberties Union and Covington & Burling LLP today filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging the president's directive banning transgender service members from continuing to serve in the military or receiving medically necessary health care, and banning men and women who are transgender from enlisting.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the ACLU of Maryland and six current members of the armed forces who are transgender: Petty Officer First Class Brock Stone, Senior Airman John Doe, Airman First Class Seven Ero George, Petty Officer First Class Teagan Gilbert, Staff Sergeant Kate Cole, and Technical Sergeant Tommie Parker.
In the lawsuit, the ACLU argues that the ban violates the constitutional guarantees of equal protection and substantive due process by singling out transgender individuals for unequal and discriminatory treatment. The lawsuit argues that the ban discriminates based on sex and transgender status and that the ban is based on uninformed speculation, myths and stereotypes, moral disapproval, and a bare desire to harm this already vulnerable group.
"Each and every claim made by the President Trump to justify this ban can be easily debunked by the conclusions drawn from the Department of Defense's own review process. Allowing men and women who are transgender to serve openly and providing them with necessary health care does nothing to harm military readiness or unit cohesion," said Josh Block, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's LGBT & HIV Project. "Men and women who are transgender with the courage and capacity to serve deserve more from their commander-in-chief."
At the culmination of a thorough process, the Department of Defense concluded in 2016 that there was no basis for the military to exclude transgender individuals from openly serving their country, subject to the same fitness requirements as other service members. This review process carefully considered and rejected the notion that medical costs, military readiness, or other factors presented any reason to discriminate against transgender service members, many of whom had already been serving with honor in silence for years.
For example, Petty Officer First Class Brock Stone has served in the U.S. Navy for 9years, including a nine-month deployment to Afghanistan. He has received extensive and costly training and is skilled in his field. He has devoted and risked his life for the United States and is seeking nothing more than the ability to continue to do so on the same terms as his fellow officers.
The other individual plaintiffs are:
- Staff Sergeant Cole has served in the U.S. Army for almost 10 years, including a one-year deployment to Afghanistan where she served as a team leader and designated marksman.
- Senior Airman Doe has served for approximately six years on active duty in the U.S. Air Force, where he was awarded "Airman of the Year" for his flight and hopes to serve in the armed forces for his entire career.
- Airman First Class George is a member of the Air National Guard. He is training as a nurse and intends to pursue a commission in the U.S. Army.
- Petty Officer First Class Gilbert has served in the U.S. Navy for 13 years, including a one-year deployment to Afghanistan, and currently serves as an Information Technology specialist.
- Technical Sergeant Parker served in the Marine Corps for four years and has served in the Air National Guard for 16 years, currently as a fuel technician.
The plaintiffs are represented by the ACLU, the ACLU of Maryland, and Covington & Burling LLP.
The filing can be found here:
https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/stone-v-trump-complaint
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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DOE Investigating Columbia University for Anti-Palestinian Harassment
"Students have the right to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, without fear of unequal treatment, racist attacks, or being denied access to an education by their university," one lawyer said.
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Palestine Legal announced Thursday that the U.S. Department of Education has launched a federal investigation into "extreme anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic harassment" at Columbia University a week after the advocacy group filed a complaint on behalf of four students and a campus organization.
"While the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) looks into all complaints it receives, it only opens a formal investigation when it determines the facts warrant a deeper look," Palestine Legal pointed out on social media. "The complaint explains how Columbia has allowed and contributed to a pervasive anti-Palestinian environment on campus—including students receiving death threats, being harassed for wearing keffiyehs or hijab, doxxed, harassed by [administration], suspended, locked out of campus, and more."
"Instead of protecting Palestinian and associated students when their voices are most needed to oppose an ongoing genocide, Columbia has taken actions to reinforce this hostile climate in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," added the group.
"The law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."
Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath stressed that "the law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."
"Students have the right to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, without fear of unequal treatment, racist attacks, or being denied access to an education by their university," the lawyer added.
Since the filing, which highlighted that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik invited "the New York Police Department (NYPD) onto campus for the first time in decades to arrest over 100 students who had been peacefully protesting Israel's genocide of Palestinians," the Ivy League leader has called officers back to the school for more arrests.
On Tuesday night, the NYPD "violently arrested and brutalized dozens of student protestors, some with guns drawn, using sledgehammers, batons, and flash-bang explosives," noted Palestine Legal, which represents Maryam Alwan, Deen Haleem, Daria Mateescu, and Layla Saliba as well as Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
Columbia is one of many American campuses where administrators have called the police, who have behaved aggressively toward students and faculty nonviolently demonstrating to demand that their schools and the U.S. government stop supporting the Israeli assault of Gaza, which has killed at least 34,596 Palestinians in under seven months.
The Interceptrevealed last week that OCR opened an investigation into the University of Massachusetts Amherst after Palestine Legal filed a complaint "on behalf of 18 UMass students who have been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted."
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—who has supported peaceful student protests and whose daughter Isra Hirsi was suspended from Columbia's Barnard College for protesting last month—highlighted the reporting on social media and some of the verbal attacks that students have endured.
OCR has opened a probe into Emory University following a complaint filed by Palestine Legal and the Council on American Islamic Relations, Georgia (CAIR-GA), according toThe Guardian. The newspaper noted Thursday that complaints have also been filed about Rutgers University in New Jersey and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Emory spokesperson Laura Diamond said in a statement that the university "does not tolerate behavior or actions that threaten, harm or target individuals because of their identities or backgrounds."
CAIR-GA executive director Azka Mahmood said that she hopes the investigation into Emory helps "make sure that the systems put in place against bias are used for everyone across the board—so we can produce a comfortable, equitable place for Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students in the future."
The probes and complaints are notably being conducted and reviewed by an administration that has condemned campus protests while arming Israeli forces engaged in what the International Court of Justice has called a plausibly genocidal campaign in Gaza.
After U.S. President Joe Biden delivered brief remarks on the demonstrations Thursday morning, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and national deputy director at CAIR, said his "claim that 'dissent must never lead to disorder' defies American history, from the Boston Tea Party to the tactics that civil rights activists, Vietnam War protesters, and anti-apartheid activists used to confront injustice."
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Bilal Baydoun, director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, testified that "in America today, a fair price, let alone a sweet deal, is harder and harder to come by. In the age of corporate concentration and high-powered algorithms, pricing is in the midst of a troubling transformation, and the price tag as we know it may become a relic of the past."
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"For some essential goods like household paper towels, shrinkflation accounted for roughly 10% of the price increase consumers experienced over the last four years," Baydoun added. "Indeed, big profits increasingly come in smaller packages."
Accountable.US president Caroline Ciccone and other executive members of the group submitted a statement for the record asserting that "the American people are fed up with corporate greed and price gouging."
The statement continues:
Even as inflation has gone down, prices remain too high. Americans understand that corporate greed is a major driver of costs that make it difficult for their families to make ends meet.
Corporate profits have exploded since 2020, and a recent study by our partners at the Groundwork Collaborative found that for much of 2023, corporate profits drove 53% of inflation. Comparatively, over the 40 years before the pandemic, profits drove just 11% of price growth. In the final three months of 2023, corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion, according to Commerce Department data.
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Earlier this year, Brown and Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) introduced a bill "to crack down on companies shrinking their products and raising their prices."
The Shrinkflation Prevention Act would:
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Repercussions of American universities' crackdowns on student protesters are becoming increasingly evident this week as faculty members, public speakers, and others who collaborate with higher education institutions announced they would cut ties with schools that have repressed students' constitutional right to protest against Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza.
On Thursday, Dipali Mukhopadhyay, a former Columbia University professor who is still affiliated with the school's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, announced on social media that she had written to Columbia President Minouche Shafik to ask that her "current affiliation with the university be removed."
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On Wednesday, End Climate Silence founder Genevieve Guenther announced she was canceling her scheduled keynote address at Columbia's symposium on climate and language, which she was supposed to give Friday.
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Two renowned authors also informed University of Southern California (USC) on Sunday that they will not speak at upcoming events due to the school's deployment of armed officers to arrest 93 student protesters in recent weeks and its decision to keep 2024 valedictorian Asna Tabassum, a Muslim supporter of Palestinian rights, from delivering a commencement address.
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Zhang and Noble, who had been scheduled to speak at USC's doctoral and master's degree commencement ceremonies, called on speakers at the graduations of 38 USC satellite campuses "to join us by signing this letter; withdrawing from USC events; and supporting USC students, as well as thousands of students nationwide who deserve respect, not arrest and punishment by their own universities, for courageously speaking truth to power."
Last week, more than 2,100 academics from across the globe signed a statement expressing solidarity with student and faculty protesters and supporting an "academic and cultural boycott" of the school.
Former New Yorker editor Erin Overbey on Wednesday called on "all journalists of conscience" to boycott the Pulitzer Prizes, which are administered by Columbia and are set to be awarded next week. The NYPD threatened student journalists and Columbia School of Journalism Dean Jelani Cobb with arrest during its raid of Hamilton Hall this week.
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While the Pulitzer Prize Board on Thursday put out a statement praising "the tireless efforts of student journalists across our nation's college campuses, who are covering protests and unrest in the face of great personal and academic risk," it faced criticism for using passive voice when noting that the NYPD "was called onto campus" at Columbia.
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