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’s annual census of extremist groups found that the number of far-right antigovernment groups has reached an all-time high, continuing powerful growth by a movement that is becoming increasingly militant as President Obama enters his second term and Congress debates gun control measures. The SPLC warned top federal law enforcement officials of the potential for domestic terrorism and urged the creation of a task force to assess the resources devoted to the threat.
Alabama’s high poverty rate and lax regulatory environment make it a “paradise” for predatory lenders that intentionally trap the state’s poor in a cycle of high-interest, unaffordable debt, according to a new SPLC report that includes recommendations for reforming the small-dollar loan industry.
The Southern Poverty Law Center today filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging the Court to uphold a lower court’s ruling that Proposition 8 violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. Proposition 8, or “Prop. 8”, is the 2008 ballot initiative that took away marriage for same-sex couples in California. The brief was filed in Hollingsworth v. Perry.
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.
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.
Stacy Dawson, an openly gay junior at Scott County Central High School in Missouri, simply wants to attend the school prom this spring with his boyfriend. But his school, like many others across the country, prohibits same-sex couples from attending dances together.
The SPLC today urged the school to rescind its policy, calling it an unconstitutional infringement on Dawson’s right to free expression under the First Amendment.
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.
