News & Commentary

By Anthony Siegrist

My name is Anthony. I’m 16 and I live in Clearwater, Florida with my moms and three siblings. I was adopted by my parents when I was 13 years old after having spent four years in foster care.

I heard about the bill that the Florida legislature is now considering that would allow child placing agencies—including those who work with children in the foster care system—to refuse to place children with families if the agencies have religious objections to those families, regardless of the needs of the child.

This bill could have prevented me from having the family I have today had it been in effect when I needed a family.

As we enter the second half of the Florida legislative session, several bills we warned you about continue to advance. Two in particular seem to be getting a lot of traction.

First, Florida is considering a 24 hour waiting period for women seeking an abortion. The bills sponsored by Sen. Anitere Flores (R-Miami) and Rep. Jennifer Sullivan (R-Eustis) require a woman to make two trips to a facility at least 24 hours apart in order to give a woman time to “reflect” upon her decision to have an abortion. This bill imposes many hardships on women and is not medically necessary.

By Karen J. Kiley, Clinical Fellow, Speech, Privacy, & Technology Project, ACLU

Modern technology makes our lives more convenient, and our deaths more complicated. Today when we die we leave behind not just physical belongings but also a vast amount of electronic “belongings.” Photos are no longer printed in an album on a shelf; but uploaded and shared. Diaries are not handwritten journals anymore; but a series of blogs or tweets. Salacious love letters aren’t penned on paper and burned or thrown away; but sent via email or text where fleeting feelings can be preserved forever.

In the last two weeks, Florida legislative committees have voted to: ban trans people from public bathrooms; release your private electronic data after you die; hide evidence from police body cameras from the public; allow adoption agencies to use their beliefs as a reason to keep kids from gay, single, mixed-faith or other families; and insert themselves between a woman seeking an abortion and her doctor.

Can civil rights and liberties get a break in this state?

By: Salvador Montalvo, Chef

One of my greatest passions in life is the culinary arts. I’m a chef with more than a decade of experience and the thing I enjoy the most about cooking is the possibility to mix flavors, styles and cultures. With food, the diversity of flavors enriches our palates. Just like in our community, and in our labor force, diversity offers us great strength and benefits.

For this reason, I have always made an effort in my professional life about creating an inclusive environment for all employees, including those that identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT).

The Florida Legislature completed its first week of the 2015 session on Friday, and we are sorry to report that among its first activities, it advanced a bill that would discriminate against transgender individuals in public accommodations like bathrooms, locker rooms and other places where there is an expectation of privacy.

Reacting to the historic passage of a transgender-inclusive amendment to the important human rights ordinance in Miami-Dade county, and targeted at reversing others across the state, HB 583 makes it a crime to use a bathroom that does not coordinate with the sex on one’s birth certificate or drivers’ license. Both the bathroom user and the company that provides the public restroom can even by sued by members of the public. The bill cleared its first committee on the second day of the legislative session.

By Chase Strangio, Staff Attorney, ACLUGetting arrested for using the bathroom could become the law in Florida.Using a public restroom is something most people have done. For many non-transgender people, the experience might be gross or inconvenient, but most people don't have serious concerns about whether they will be harassed, attacked, or arrested when walking into a bathroom. But for most trans people, this is precisely what we think about every time we walk into the bathroom.

Gov. Rick Scott’s drug testing crusade comes to an end as state decides not to challenge appeals court ruling finding mandatory suspicionless government searches of TANF applicants unconstitutional

By: Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project

The ACLU is releasing records today obtained from law enforcement agencies across Florida about their acquisition and use of sophisticated cell phone location tracking devices known as “Stingrays.” These records provide the most detailed account to date of how law enforcement agencies across a single state are relying on the technology. (The full records are available here.)

The results should be troubling for anyone who cares about privacy rights, judicial oversight of police activities, and the rule of law. The documents paint a detailed picture of police using an invasive technology — one that can follow you inside your house — in many hundreds of cases and almost entirely in secret.