Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Civil Rights Roundup: 11/29/08

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

The White House is asking its (now totally apolitical!) Justice Department to hamper 200,000 Ohio residents from voting.

Black voters are really nervous about the integrity of this election.

A Black Brazilian immigrant gets a lesson in racism upon arriving in America.

Lawyers have finally secured access to a top-secret Guantanamo Bay camp where we hold high-ranking terrorist suspects.

The total number of hate crimes dropped slightly this year, with falls in race and religion-based attacks making up for rises in targeting based on sexual orientation and ethnicity/national origin. As far as I can tell, this means we're no longer hating based on being Black or Muslim, now the problem is being Gay or Latino.

It's also not a great time to be a Jew.

A judge in Ohio has required the state to allow the homeless to register with addresses that are not buildings.

The LA Times calls for the re-enfranchisement of ex-felons.

Anita Hill (of all people!) says racial amnesia may be the cure for our racial ills.

Nearly 20% of New York City's Asian population lives in poverty.

Criminals are targeting illegal immigrants, whom they see as easy marks because they're afraid to go to the police.

The 11th Circuit upheld sectarian prayer hosted by local governmental agencies, so long as the process was open to people of all faith backgrounds. Amazingly, this is actually an improvement over the 4th Circuit, which held that the state could host prayers and then proactively exclude those from disfavored minority faiths.

An Orthodox Catholic group is protesting Fordham University (a Jesuit school) giving an ethics award to pro-choice Justice Stephen Breyer.

1 comment:

PG said...

A judge in Ohio has required the state to allow the homeless to register with addresses that are not buildings.

I was talking to someone the other day about the difficulties of registering sex offenders who are homeless, because they don't have a stable address. It would make for a nice roundup if someone wrote a paper on all of the laws that pre-suppose one's having a fixed residence.