Two pro-gun groups conspired with an anti-gay hate group to create political mailers that used a gay couple’s copyrighted engagement photo to attack candidates in the 2012 Colorado Republican primaries, according to an SPLC motion filed in federal court today.

A federal court sharply criticized a Florida sheriff for using pepper spray on children and for failing to prevent violence at the Polk County Jail in an opinion that advances a Southern Poverty Law Center case against the sheriff.

Forty-eight years ago, SPLC founder Morris Dees stood at the Alabama Capitol at the end of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march and heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak on the importance of the vote in democracy. In his view, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the section that contains extra voting rights protections that apply mainly to the South — is still necessary.

Responding to complaints of pervasive anti-LGBT harassment at the Moss Point School District in Mississippi, the SPLC today demanded that school officials act to protect LGBT students or face a federal lawsuit. 

Poultry workers in Alabama often suffer significant injuries as they endure grueling, dangerous working conditions and frequent threats of deportation or firing, a problem that could grow worse under proposed new USDA regulations, according to a report by the SPLC and the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.

The SPLC asked a federal court today to block a section of the Defense of Marriage Act that bars the federal government from providing veterans’ benefits to legally married same-sex couples.

 

In a motion for summary judgment, the SPLC urged the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to declare as unconstitutional Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act and two other statutes that prohibit the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.

As Congress debates comprehensive immigration reform, lawmakers should not look to the current federal guestworker program – a program rife with labor and human rights violations – as a model for handling the future flow of low-wage foreign workers, according to an SPLC report released today.

 

Close to Slavery has been updated to include changes to the program during the past six years as well as new stories of the abuse that persists. Since its initial release, Close to Slavery has become the definitive assessment of the modern H-2 guestworker program.

The state of Alabama may be a step closer to exonerating all of the Scottsboro Boys – nine black youths falsely accused of raping two white women 80 years ago in a case that called the nation’s attention to the deadly racial injustice of the Jim Crow South.

As federal lawmakers appear ready to consider federal immigration reform, the Southern Poverty Law Center urged federal lawmakers today to examine federal guestworker programs, which are rife with abuse and violations of workers’ rights.

As schools have adopted discipline policies that favor incarceration over education, children of color and children with disabilities are bearing the brunt of these policies at alarming rates, a trend that teachers can change, according to the new issue of Teaching Tolerance magazine, released today by the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project.