civil-rights-and-liberties

"When schools cloak spiritual practices in the language of science, they bypass parental authority and compromise the religious freedom of students."

"The refusal to register Segero Unam Christian Academy raises serious questions about the state of freedom of religion or belief in South Korea. When neutrality is interpreted to exclude faith‑based education from legal recognition, it becomes a tool of exclusion rather than fairness. When a pastor’s public advocacy for constitutional freedoms is treated as disqualifying “political activity,” the boundary between education policy and ideological policing becomes dangerously thin."

"In 2010, a Bolivian law granted to the state a monopoly on the formation of teachers. As a consequence, private institutions were gradually closed, including the Catholic Sedes Sapientiae and a parallel Adventist college. The question at issue is whether states are entitled to create monopolies in certain fields of higher education that exclude private academic institutions, including those inspired by specific religious values."

"Our children are starving for people who can provide them with practical skills that will allow them to build a life for themselves. There are many adults who have those skills and would love the opportunity to prepare [children] for a jobs-based economy, if only they were allowed. There are welders, machinists, lawyers, artists, graphic designers, writers, accountants and more out there, all with skills our children need. …Why shouldn’t any principal at a public school have the option to hire someone like me with significant real-world experience?"

"Freedom of expression, association, and education are important, intimate, and public rights but in an ideal list or hierarchy they come after [ freedom of religion or belief ], and it can even be argued that they derive from it."

"Before COVID-19, nearly 700 people died everyday because of poverty and inequality in this country. The frontlines of this pandemic will be the poor and dispossessed - those who do not have access to healthcare, housing, water, decent wages, stable work or - and those who are continuing to work in this crisis, meeting our health care and other needs."

"With its broad sweep, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us into an unprecedented national emergency. This emergency, however, results from a deeper and much longer term crisis — that of poverty and inequality, and of a society that ignores the needs of 140 million people who are poor or a $400 emergency away from being poor."

"We cannot return to normal. Addressing the depth of the crises that have been revealed in this pandemic means enacting , expanding social welfare programs, ensuring access to water and sanitation, cash assistance to poor and low income families, good jobs, s and an annual income and protecting our democracy. It means ensuring that our abundant s are used for the general welfare, instead of war, walls, and the wealthy."

"It should not have taken a pandemic to raise these resources. In June 2019, we presented a Poor People’s Moral Budget to the House Budget Committee, showing that we can meet these needs for this entire country. If you had taken up this Moral Budget, we would have already moved towards infusing more than $1.2 trillion into the economy to invest in health care, good jobs, living wages, housing, water and sanitation services and more."

"This is not the time for trickle-down solutions. We know that when you lift from the bottom, everybody rises. There are concrete solutions to this immediate crisis and the longer term illnesses we have been battling for months, years and decades before. We will continue to organize and build power until you meet these demands. Many millions of us have been hurting for far too long. We will not be silent anymore."

"It's not so good to refer to what you're going to do as a sit-in. That right there castrates you. Right there it brings you down. What goes with it? Think of the image of someone sitting. An old woman can sit. An old man can sit. A chump can sit. A coward can sit. Anything can sit. Well, you and I have been sitting long enough and it's time for us today to start doing some standing and some fighting to back that up."

"Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the talisman of liberty. I admit that it is perilous to confer the franchise upon the ignorant and degraded; but if an educational test cannot be established, let suffrage be extended to all men of proper age, regardless of color. It may well be questioned whether the negro does not understand the nature of our institutions better than the equally ignorant foreigner. He was intelligent enough to understand from the beginning of the war that the destiny of his race was involved in it. He was intelligent enough to be true to that Union which his educated and traitorous master was endeavoring to destroy. He came to us in the hour of our sorest need, and by his aid, under God, the republic was saved. Shall we now be guilty of the unutterable meanness, not only of thrusting him beyond the pale of its blessings, but of committing his destiny to the tender mercies of those pardoned rebels who have been so reluctantly compelled to take their feet from his neck and their hands from his throat? But someone says it is dangerous at this time to make new experiments. I answer, it is always safe to do justice. However, to grant suffrage to the black man in this country is not innovation, but restoration. It is a return to the ancient principles and practices of the fathers."

"The act of registering to vote does several things. It marks the beginning of political modernization by broadening the base of participation. It also does something the existentialists talk about: it gives one a sense of being. The black man who goes to register is saying to the white man, “No.” He is saying: “You have said that I cannot vote. You have said that this is my place. This is where I should remain. You have contained me and I am saying ‘No’ to your containment. I am stepping out of bounds. I am saying ‘No’ to you and thereby I am creating a better life for myself. I am resisting someone who has contained me.” That is what the first act does. The black person begins to live. He begins to create his own existence when he says “No” to someone who contains him. But obviously this is not enough. Once the black man has knocked back centuries of fear, once he is willing to resist, he then must decide how best to use that vote. To listen to those whites who conspired for so many years to deny him the ballot would be a return to that previous subordinated condition. He must move independently. The development of this awareness is a job as tedious and laborious as inspiring people to register in the first place. In fact, many people who would aspire to the role of an organizer drop off simply because they do not have the energy, the stamina, to knock on doors day after day. That is why one finds many such people sitting in coffee shops talking and theorizing instead of organizing."

"Let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote."

"Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace."

"At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen."

"Every segment of our population, and every individual, has a right to expect from his government a fair deal."

"Any kind of civil rights movement in the Soviet Union would have been ruthlessly smashed. Obviously. There would have been nothing left of it in no time at all. Most people would never even hear about it."

"[I]t seems to me that this past century has accomplished two Civil Rights movements. First, the right for blacks and Hispanics and people from all different nationalities to take their place in the middle of society and that has been achieved at great cost. It is a tremendous struggle in America, but now we think nothing of walking into an office and finding that a black person is the president of the company instead of a janitor cleaning the hallways. And then we learned that the talent that blacks and Hispanics have, always had, their intelligence, dedication and willingness to work is no less than anybody else. They have been able to persevere and finally I think we have really overcome tremendous amounts of prejudice, not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The second great Civil Rights movement was equality for women. It started at the end of the last century. Women finally got to vote. We've gotten all the way to the point now where women aren't expected to stay home and just be mothers and it's okay to be a single parent and it's okay to go out and pursue your ambition and your dreams. And that's been a very important breakthrough because there are so many areas where women are more talented and have more to offer than men do. And now we are beginning to see everybody working side by side in society and in the workplace. But, there remains one HUGE minority that is still terribly discriminated against. And that population is the disabled population. And that comprises 1/5 of the world's population. In the United States, for example, we have 54 million disabled people and the thing that's very difficult is when blacks and Hispanics and women were fighting for equal rights there was a level of discomfort. But nothing approaching what happens when "normal" people look at the disabled and are uncomfortable. That is a prejudice that they MUST overcome because we're not in a position to always look our very best or to feel our very best, or to be pleasing to the eye because we have suffered terrible debilitating diseases and injuries. But what's happening now is the kind of discrimination that is so bad and I want to tell you that it exceeds any prejudice that ever occurred before in the previous civil rights movements."

"I believe the preservation of our civil liberties to be the most fundamental and important of all our governmental problems, because it always has been with us and always will be with us and if we ever permit those liberties to be destroyed, there will be nothing left in our system worthy of preservation. They constitute the soul of democracy. I believe that there is grave danger in this country of losing our civil liberties as they have been lost in other countries."

"It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. … They...consequently are instruments of injustice. The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."

"What white people learned from the Civil Rights era was how not to appear to be racists, even to themselves. They came away from the 1960s knowing that racism was a matter of using the wrong words or expressing the wrong attitudes publicly. They trained their internal monologues to mirror an egalitarian or deracinated public discourse: no slurs, just a continual stream of . That was the essence of white anti-racism: don't say the wrong thing."

"There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.""

"Some highly religious people are outraged that atheists would publicly declare their lack of faith. Accordingly many of the people who belong to atheist associations hide their beliefs from most others, knowing from experience it could affect their employment, membership in other clubs, and social connections. It reminds me of the reaction of many high RWAs when homosexuals began to come out: “Don’t these people know they’re supposed to be ashamed of what they are?” That in turn reminded me of the reaction of many White supremists to the civil rights movement: “Don’t these n------ know they’re inferior and should never be treated as our equals?” Fortunately, eventually, minorities can overcome these reactions."

"Thomas Jefferson was right in declaring that all human beings are created (or, or if you will, are by nature) equal. They are also, in terms of their individual differences, unequal in the varying degrees to which they possess the species-specific potentialities common to all. These individual inequalities, when they are recognized as subordinate to the basic equality of all human beings in their common humanity or specific nature, do not generate difficulties that must be overcome or eradicated in order to increase social justice."

"Civil Rights opened the windows. When you open the windows, it does not mean that everybody will get through. We must create our own opportunities."

""What threatens democracy is hunger, it is misery, it is the disease of those who have no resources to face it. These are the evils that can threaten democracy, but never the people in the public square in the use of their legitimate and democratic rights"."

"These technical services are intentionally designed to be monopolies, to exploit...the network effect, particularly in secure messengers, things like Whatsapp or Facebook itself, which is not secure at all, so that the only way you can talk to someone or the only way you can read this is that you must use this service..."

"Here's the thing - they sell that as a service to law enforcement agencies without a warrant. They don't have to go to court and say, you know, we need a warrant... They can do it on much lower authorities, like subpoenas and things like that... that's just this location information... What about your actual calling records? ...calling records are a proxy for what's called a person's social graph... that's the state of play today."

"Eric Schmidt, former head of Google, argued that, you know, privacy is dead, that culture's changed, that we don't care about this anymore, that it's not right."

"For example, AT&T has been storing all of our movements... cell-site location information - for every handset [customers & non-customers]... that happens to be connected to one of their towers...."

"And then they sell... or... rent this capability. Facebook says they don't sell data, which is absurd because...they're collecting all of the data and then they're selling... to the highest bidder... what they're selling is access to your eyeballs...access to your mind.... It's you being exploited, and you don't see it happening...."

"Going back to 2009, they're storing this. They have the last 10 years of your movements, and everyone you know, more or less..."

"The political argument that we get here all the time is if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

"Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away."

"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

"Are people aware of the extent of the intrusion? Are people aware of what is happening? And is it necessary? Is it something they consented to? And I think for the vast majority of people, the answer is no.... Z"

"Stevens says he thinks if Roe v. Wade had been written more narrowly, the court might have avoided some of the criticism that ensued. “In all candor,” he told me, “I think Harry [Blackmun] could have written a better opinion. I think if the opinion had said what Potter Stewart said very briefly” — namely that the right to marital and family privacy previously recognized by the court included a right to choose abortion — “it might have been much more acceptable, instead of trying to create a new doctrine that really didn’t make sense.”"

"[I]n 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft revived the tactics that nearly fifty years ago had shocked physicians and much of the public and propelled abortion law reform forward. Ashcroft subpoenaed thousands of patient records from hospitals and Planned Parenthood clinics in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Michigan, Missouri, California, Nebraska, and elsewhere in search of evidence that physicians had performed “medically unnecessary” abortions in violation of the new “partial-birth” abortion ban passed by Congress the year before. Hospitals refused to provide the records, citing a violation of patient privacy and the privacy of medical records (privacy that President George W. Bush had declared a “fundamental right” and written into law only the year before as part of HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Individual physicians and reproductive rights organizations sued; Democrats in Congress protested Ashcroft’s actions. Courts gave conflicting opinions on the privacy of patients’ medical records, though eventually the federal government withdrew the demand for records."

"We felt that there is too much phone tapping going on in this country. Everyone has a right to their privacy."

"When Facebook is sort of grinding down your privacy, you don't see it. And although you will feel it, you won't feel it for years.... these companies have quietly created perfect records of everything you've done, everywhere you've gone, everything you've clicked, everything you've liked, how long you've stayed on a page, you know, when you had to scroll up to reread a section. All of that is captured, and they use this to model ways to influence your behavior to actually shape and manipulate the decisions you make as a human being."

"And for us to hear that today, to begin with, should just, you know, raise the hairs on the back of our neck a little bit and go, why do we have any rights? What are rights for? If we're in a democracy - right?"

"Privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in."

"Who could deny that privacy is a jewel? It has always been the mark of privilege, the distinguishing feature of a truly urbane culture. Out of the cave, the tribal tepee, the pueblo, the community fortress, man emerged to build himself a house of his own with a shelter in it for himself and his diversions. Every age has seen it so. The poor might have to huddle together in cities for need’s sake, and the frontiersman cling to his neighbors for the sake of protection. But in each civilization, as it advanced, those who could afford it chose the luxury of a withdrawing-place."

"Indeed, with this invention of privacy, this creation of domesticity, and this construction of the public, politically active citizen, adultery became first and foremost something that women could do anywhere, but that men could do only in their own homes. Where as women were adulterers, men kept concubines in the next room. It was therefore above all women's political activity that was conflated with their sexual activity-above all the public space surrounding the woman citizen that was saturated with the sexual and the biological. Male polical actors were, if anything, detached from their sexuality. If they had a sexual identity as all, it was only in the small, contained domestic space that in their case was confined to the home and conjugal relationship. The result was thus an unexpected inversion of the public/private distinction so fundamental to liberal notions of appropriate governance. Women-idealized as the overseers of private, domestic space-ceased to have any but a public role, with every private, sexual, and biologicl aspect of their lives displayed and regulated for the sake of the common good. Men-idealized as public actors-were reduced to a private role, their sexuality politically non-existent except in specifically defined and extreme circumstances."

"The better argument for the result reached in Roe v. Wade is that it's necessary for the equality of women, rather than grounding it in the privacy right."

"Because a man or woman more gifted than the common multitude bestows upon the world some poem or romance, some picture, statue, or musical composition, of excellence and beauty, by what possible right can the world pry into his or her privacy and discuss his or her fortunes and character? The work belongs to the public, the creator of the work does not. The invasion of private life and character never was so great or so general as it is in the last years of this century. It is born of two despicable parents, curiosity and malignity. Beneath all the flattery, which too frequently covers with flowers the snake of inquisitiveness, the snake's hiss of envy may be plainly heard by those who have ears to hear."

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."

"I have difficulty in concluding, as the Court does, that the right of "privacy" is involved in this case. Texas, by the statute here challenged, bars the performance of a medical abortion by a licensed physician on a plaintiff such as Roe. A transaction resulting in an operation such as this is not "private" in the ordinary usage of that word. Nor is the "privacy" that the Court finds here even a distant relative of the freedom from searches and seizures protected by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which the Court has referred to as embodying a right to privacy. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967)."

"Dellapenna also noted the radical nature of the reasoning in Roe-that a right to abortion is found in a right to privacy, which itself is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution."