Stories from the ACLU of Washington

This Independence Day, celebrate the Fight for Freedom by becoming involved with the ACLU of Washington.  You can utilize our activist toolkit, take quizzes, gather resources, and join our e-activist network. 

It is a fundamental principle of a democratic society that public employees should be held accountable for their actions. In May, a Seattle arbitrator undermined that principle by ruling that the City of Seattle’s contract with the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild requires the city to withhold the names of police officers who were disciplined for misconduct. Thankfully, City Attorney Pete Holmes has decided to challenge this decision and is fighting to keep this information public.

This month, the Richland School Board voted 3 to 2 to exclude Sherman Alexie’s award-winning book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian from Richland high school classrooms. Alexie’s semiautobiographical novel won the National Book Award for young adults in 2007. It tells the story of Arnold “Junior” Spirit, a teenager growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, where Alexie also grew up. Junior struggles as an awkward but bright 14-year-old who loves drawing comics. The book tackles many tough issues, including racism, alcoholism, poverty, death, as well as more typical teenage struggles like fitting in. The book was piloted for Richland’s ninth-grade language arts curriculum because of its realistic portrayal of the high school experience and compelling theme of perseverance. The piloting teacher acknowledged that the book contains some profanity and sexual references.

For those of you who took last week’s pop quiz on street speech, you will be glad to know that some area police officers also are brushing up on free speech rights of people on sidewalks and in public plazas.

Imagine being awakened in the middle of the night by police, arrested, and ultimately convicted and sentenced to a term of one-three years in prison for the offense of . . . loving the wrong person. This is not a hypothetical scenario from a mythical land. It happened in America, and not too terribly long ago. June 12 marked the 44th anniversary of a landmark Supreme Court decision and ACLU case, Loving v. Virginia, which held that laws banning interracial marriage were not permissible under the U.S. Constitution.