The American Civil Liberties Union is the foremost defender of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The ACLU has played a major role in nearly every critical civil liberties battle of the last century — in courtrooms, in Congress and in the public arena.

That proud tradition continues today. And in the midst of the government's efforts to curtail freedom in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the ACLU has taken on an unprecedented workload and become even more important.

As we work to protect rights and liberties immediately at risk in the current crisis environment, you can also count on the ACLU to continue defending core liberties that are still at risk, but that have nothing to do with national security concerns. We don't have the luxury of putting other core issues on a back burner as we fight new battles.

We now know from long experience that we can never let our guard down when it comes to protecting fundamental rights including keeping the government out of religion, freedom of speech, the right to choose, and equal rights for lesbians and gay men.

For it is in times like these, when attention is naturally focused elsewhere, that the foes of liberty are most likely to take advantage of a climate of fear and nostalgia to push an anti-liberty agenda that has nothing to do with the concerns at hand.

Below is a listing of some of our most significant recent victories:

• Defeated many of the Bush Administration's most egregious attempts to deny liberty in the name of national security. Federal judges in New Jersey and Michigan rejected the government's blanket policy of conducting secret deportation hearings in post-September 11 cases as a violation of the First Amendment. The ACLU brought both cases on behalf of news organizations and members of the public. We also led a massive media campaign which forced the Administration to dramatically scale back its proposed domestic spy program, Operation TIPS, which would have recruited postal and utility workers to spy on Americans in their homes.
• Hailed four major victories in the ACLU's ongoing campaign to abolish capital punishment in America. In the states, Illinois and then Maryland declared moratoriums on the death penalty. And in the courts, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that that executing people with mental retardation violates the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual" punishment. The Court also ruled that a death penalty trial must be resolved be a jury rather than a judge. Finally, a U.S. District Judge declared that the federal death penalty is unconstitutional.
• Defended in a U.S. Appeals Court the right of Colorado teens to have immediate access to an abortion without seeking parental consent. Parental consent laws put teens at grave risk, preventing them from getting critical health care even when they face serious medical conditions.
• Successfully challenged the Louisiana Governor's Program on Abstinence which was using federal funds intended for abstinence-only sex education programs to impermissibly advance religion. This landmark victory came on the heels of another ACLU victory over a Louisiana law authorizing "spoken prayer" at public school-sponsored events.
• Spearheaded the overwhelming defeat of an effort by the Christian Coalition and others to overturn a Florida human rights ordinance that bans discrimination against gays and lesbians in housing, employment, lending and public.
• Filed several lawsuits to fix the fundamental inequities in our electoral system that were revealed in the 2000 elections. Victories have come in South Carolina, Montana and Illinois, and we have also filed a major lawsuit that challenges California's discriminatory voting system.

These are only a handful of the cases in which the ACLU has successfully defended our most basic civil liberties. For a more comprehensive history of the ACLU and civil rights, please click here.