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.
A North Carolina school district’s recently announced plan to resolve a civil rights complaint is an important step toward protecting the rights of students and their families who speak little English, but the Southern Poverty Law Center and Legal Aid of North Carolina, which filed the complaint, are urging school officials to diligently enforce the plan to ensure success.
Though lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students are harassed at twice the rate of other students, a few purposeful steps can help transform a school into a safer place for all students, according to a guide released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project.
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.
