At the New Year I spoke here about eleven excellent accomplishments of my state's ACLU chapter. Maryland is a better place for that hard work. The nation, too, benefits from the determination of the American Civil Liberties Union to defend our Constitution. Our Constitution and its Bill of Rights embody American Exceptionalism. I want to highlight, now, a number of 2011 successes from around the country.

     I also want to alert you to a new film about the Lovings, the Virginia couple who, with the ACLU's help, took their case to to the Supreme Court which then struck down Virginia's and other states' vile anti-miscegenation laws in 1967 which forbade white and black people from marrying one another. (see below)

      And yes...I am compelled to ask again:  if people you know find even the memory of those laws abhorrent but are willing to bar gays from marriage, ask them to spell out precisely why, under law, same-sex marriage ought to be illegal when they support interracial marriage without even thinking about it. Reject slogans as non-responsive. Demand thoughtful, reasoned answers.

     The American Civil Liberties Union was a prime mover in each of the following excellent, winning causes.

          . January 

Illinois repeals its death penalty after months of study, including exhaustive interviews with families of murder victims who overwhelmingly told the governor that the death penalty brings them neither relief nor 'closure'. 

          . February

The Justice Department ditches its defense in the courts of the indefensible so-called 'Defense of Marriage Act'.

          . March

A federal court accepts our challenge to President Bush's FISA Amendment Act which gave the executive branch unchecked power to collect your emails and listen to your phone calls. 

          . April

Worst provisions of Arizona's anti-immigrant bill are blocked in federal court. Copy-cat provisions are stymied in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, and Utah. Fourteen other states that had similar legislation pending drop those bills. 

Florida's secretive, sped-up foreclosure procedures are exposed as denials of constitutional due-process. Most of those whose homes were scheduled for sped-up forclosures were members of minority groups.             

          . May

The organization helps expose a pattern of denial of civil rights to ordinary citizens in Puerto Rico, leading to the resignation of the Chief of Police of the country's second largest police force. 

          . June

ACLU lobbies successfully for marriage equality in New York. 

          . July

We lend support to the president's Supportive School Initiative to try to break the school-to-prison patterns in many minority communities.               

          . August

35 ACLU affiliates send 381 Freedom of Information Act requests to uncover when/why/how law enforcement uses cell phone location data to track ordinary citizens.

          . September

ACLU succeeds at stopping the city of South Bend, Indiana from (unconstitutionally) giving taxpayer-purchased land to a private religious school.

          . October

ACLU helps get a federal judge to force Kansas to reinstate federal family-planning funding to the state's sole provider of these services in an impoverished county. The clinic's doors remain open.

          . November

The ACLU is in the forefront of the move to defeat Mississippi's so-called Personhood Amendment that not only threatened to outlaw abortion but also some forms of fertility treatments and contraceptives. 

          . And Now, in 2012:

A school district in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, has agreed, after the ACLU sued, to halt prayer rallies at (public) middle school assemblies. As part of the agreement, the school district admitted to violating first amendment protections against taxpayer-funded state entities promoting one religion over others. Prior to our involvement in the case (requested by parents of children in the Chesterfield Schools), at least one middle school had held numerous evangelical rallies and assemblies.

     Needless to say, these are just some of the most well-known actions ACLU has taken this past year to protect the Constitution.

     This is the ACLU's ninety-first year.

     May it thrive. 

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"The Lovings: A Couple That Changed History

Mildred and Richard Loving never set out to have their marriage become the subject of one of the most famous civil rights cases of the last century. But it was their deep affection for one another and sheer determination that the heart won out over hate that led them to the Supreme Court, where the ACLU represented them in a landmark case that struck down state bans on interracial marriage.

Now, this saga of a 17-year-old Black woman who wanted nothing else than to marry her white 23-year-old childhood sweetheart will be recounted in The Loving Story, a documentary that will be shown, appropriately, on Valentine’s Day, at 9 p.m. ET.

“This is a love story,” said director Nancy Buirski. “And it’s a story about people who were told they couldn’t love who they wanted to love.”

After the Lovings married in Washington, D.C. in 1958, they returned to their home state of Virginia, where soon after they were rousted out of bed and arrested for violating the state’s anti-miscegenation law. A state judge sentenced them to a year in jail, but suspended the sentence if they would leave the state for 25 years.

The Lovings left to live in Washington, but were arrested again five years later for traveling together, when they returned to Virginia to visit relatives. After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the couple wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy for help. They asked if the landmark law would allow them to be in the same car together. Kennedy referred them to the National Capitol Area office of the ACLU, which took on their case.

Volunteer attorneys Philip Hirschkop and Bernard Cohen represented the couple in losing appeals on the newest charges in district and appellate courts. "It was a terrible time in America," Cohen told The Washington Post in 2008. "Racism was ripe and this was the last de jure vestige of racism — there was a lot of de facto racism, but this law was...the last on-the-books manifestation of slavery in America."

Loving v. Virginia, went to the Supreme Court, where in 1967 the justices struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage.

Richard Loving died in a car crash in 1975. Mildred Loving died of pneumonia in 2008.

The documentary features rare home movies of the Lovings and their three children as well as never-before-seen outtakes from a photo shoot given to the couple by a Life magazine photographer. Also heard are excerpts from the oral arguments at the Supreme Court.

“Anybody can change history,” Buirski said. “These were humble people, modest in every respect, who wanted to come home to live with their family in Virginia.”

^{...from the ACLU Blog of Rights}