A 2023 Texas law allowing public schools to hire chaplains, or accept them as volunteers, to provide student support services has inspired more states to consider copycat legislation. In March 2024, the Florida Legislature passed a school chaplain bill, which now awaits the governor’s signature. Similar bills have been introduced in 13 other states: Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Utah.

Most of the proposed legislation authorizing school chaplains would allow chaplains to take on sensitive and critical responsibilities, such as counseling students, without the same qualifications as school counselors or other student support staff.

The ACLU, along with faith groups and other civil rights organizations, has vigorously opposed these efforts. Allowing chaplains in public schools violates students’ and families’ right to religious freedom. And, because chaplains are typically not trained or certified to provide educational or counseling services to youth, students are likely to receive inadequate mental health support that, in some cases, may be harmful.

Allowing public schools to establish paid or voluntary positions for chaplains will inevitably lead to evangelizing and religious coercion of students. This violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which, along with the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, safeguards the constitutional right to religious liberty. Courts have repeatedly ruled that it is unconstitutional for public schools to invite religious leaders to engage in religious activities with students or to promote religious doctrine to them.

A Religious Public Charter School in Oklahoma? Not on Our Watch.

A charter school approved by state officials would unlawfully discriminate and teach a religious curriculum. We’re suing.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

Chaplains are trained to provide spiritual guidance. They do not have the experience necessary to ensure that they adhere to public schools’ educational mandates and avoid veering into impermissible religious counseling and promotion of religion. In fact, many of the bills proposed across the country specifically state that school chaplains do not need the same qualifications or certifications as school counselors or staff who provide other support services for students. Exempting chaplains from the same professional requirements as other school staff makes clear that installing them in public schools is not about helping students, but is yet another effort to subject children to unconstitutional government sponsored religious indoctrination.

Authorizing untrained and uncertified chaplains to engage in the same duties as school counselors will result in inadequate mental health support for students. In some cases, chaplains may provide inappropriate responses or interventions that could gravely harm students, including those experiencing mental health crises, LGBTQ students, and other vulnerable individuals. When a student seeks mental health care at school, that care should be provided by a qualified professional.

School chaplain bills usurp the role of religious communities. Chaplains themselves have opposed these bills, arguing that they would “misuse the authority of chaplains of any religion” and “cause division among student bodies” that include students of myriad faiths as well as non-religious students.

These bills also undermine the fundamental promise of our public education system: Public schools must serve all students equally. The ACLU, together with faith groups, civil rights organizations, and chaplains nationwide, is pushing back against these unconstitutional efforts to impose religion on public school students. To ensure that our public schools remain safe and welcoming for everyone, state lawmakers and school boards must do the same.

As a Black transgender woman and a former sex worker, it’s not unusual for me to face harassment and profiling from police. Regardless of whether we’re engaged in sex work or not, police frequently target transgender women like myself for searches and arrest, using anything from condoms to cash as “proof” we were engaged in sex work. For those who actually do engage in sex work, the criminalization of that livelihood raises the stakes of police encounters, and laws that criminalize our HIV status even more so.

In 2010, I was arrested in Memphis, Tennessee, and charged under the state’s aggravated prostitution statute, a law that raises sex work from a misdemeanor to a felony strictly on the basis of my HIV diagnosis. The law, passed in a wave of fear and panic following the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1991, doesn’t require transmission of HIV, or even an act that could possibly transmit HIV, for prosecution. It applies to everyone living with HIV, regardless of whether they are taking precautions to ensure there is no possibility of transmission or if they have disclosed their status. It targets someone like me solely on the basis of my HIV status – a protected disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act – even though there are lots of ways people living with HIV can have safe sex.

Most alarmingly, the law requires me, and anyone else convicted under it, to register a “violent sex offender” for the rest of my life, even though I have committed no such violent act and only engaged in consensual sexual activity between adults. This unfair registration requirement has denied me housing opportunities, leading me to be homeless for more than a year, with no access to shelters or support programs. It shut down job opportunities and has made it difficult to maintain a living. In fact, just 23 percent of people charged under Tennessee’s law are employed in traditional wage work after their conviction.

Even though my conviction had nothing to do with children, I cannot legally be alone with my nephew, whom I love. I’m afraid to have children of my own for fear of how my registration would impact them and my ability to parent them. This needless shame and embarrassment has been made worse by the public status of my registration, giving strangers the ability to harass, or even blackmail, me.

When I first pleaded guilty to my charges, I was not informed of any of the specifics about registration. I was not informed my registration would be for the rest of my life – despite the fact that I haven’t hurt a living soul. Tennessee’s law is a relic from a time before treatments such as antiretroviral therapy (ART) and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), which can reduce viral loads to undetectable levels, blocking the possibility of transmission of HIV. I had no idea such a law was even still on the books.Many other states have repealed their HIV criminalization laws because of opposition by advocates and medical experts alike.Studies consistently show the laws don’t work to reduce HIV transmission, but rather interfere with people’s willingness to get tested, which is the most effective way to reduce transmission.

In October 2023, the ACLU, the ACLU of Tennessee, and the Transgender Law Center filed a lawsuit to challenge Tennessee’s aggravated prostitution law on the basis that it discriminates against people living with HIV, like me, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. I joined this lawsuit because this law has had such a detrimental impact on me and my life. No one should be forced to endure what I have endured.

As a child in New Jersey, I grew up hearing stories of my mother’s flight attendant days in South Korea. A few stuck out to me even at a young age – such as hearing she needed to maintain a certain weight to get into the flight attendant program and that she had to quit her job once she got married. I couldn’t understand why my mother had to quit her dream job, the job that allowed her to travel to Hawaii and Paris, the two places she had always wanted to go since she was little, just because she got married. My mother also told me how women either lied about being married to keep their jobs or were pressured to quit by their superiors if they were public about their marital status or were pregnant. Although airlines across the world have since rolled back official policies restricting marital status and pregnancy for flight attendants in response to federal civil rights laws, many still perpetuate gender discrimination through dress code restrictions and limitations on lactating.

Unfortunately, what my mother faced as a female flight attendant was common across the globe. The role of women in the airline industry has long been limited to societal constructs of what it means to be “feminine.” Women flight attendants have been hypersexualized through revealing uniforms and advertisements, such as an infamous ad campaign run by a now discontinued airline in which a flight attendant states, “I’m Cheryl; Fly me.” To maintain this public perception of flight attendants as sexually and romantically available, airlines imposed informal and formal restrictions on the height, weight, and age of flight attendants as public imaging and marketing tools. In the 1950s, airlines began to institute mandatory retirement ages for flight attendants, 35 and older, to further reinforce their image of a desirable woman. Flight attendants were fired for getting married or becoming pregnant until the 1970’s.

Nowadays, we see this sexualization in current “female” flight attendant uniform policies – skirt, high heels, tight clothing, low-cut blouses – which are indicative of the longstanding stereotypes of what it means to be a “woman” in the airline industry. Restrictive uniform and grooming policies that reinforce stereotypical categories of “male” or “female” harm people of all genders, particularly women and nonbinary people. This was the case in Wetherell v. Alaska Airlines, in which a nonbinary flight attendant was required to adhere to an inflexible uniform policy that forced them to conform to rigid gender stereotypes. In May 2023, the ACLU, the ACLU of Washington, and the Washington State Attorney General’s Office secured a consent decree against Alaska Airlines, requiring the removal of all gendered restrictions from its uniform policy for flight attendants and additional training on gender identity and gender expression.

Wetherell v. Alaska Airlines

The ACLU and partners represented Justin Wetherell, a flight-attendant and flight-attendant instructor based in Seattle.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

Dress code restrictions aren’t the only gender discrimination issue that airlines need to work on. New parents in the airline industry need to be able to pump breast milk aboard aircraft during noncritical flight phases. Lactation accommodations are now the norm in many places thanks to landmark legislation including the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections (PUMP) for Nursing Mothers Act of 2022. The PUMP Act guarantees the right to pump at work and provides federal labor protection for new parents in most industries who want to pump milk during their workday without fear of being fired by their employer. But the PUMP Act excluded flight crews, and as a result, airlines have dragged their feet at implementing basic accommodations, forcing their employees to delay pumping due to their flight schedules, resulting in pain, discomfort, and infections, or to stop breastfeeding earlier than they intended.

We have fought to ensure pregnant flight attendants have the right to pump at work. In partnership with the ACLU of Colorado and other organizations, we secured two settlements agreements on behalf of Frontier flight attendants and pilots who had previously been denied pregnancy and breastfeeding accommodations by Frontier. As a result of the settlement, Frontier made important policy changes addressing pregnancy and lactation accommodations on the ground and during flights, including a policy change allowing flight crew to pump breast milk while in the air.

Now that Frontier is leading the way, other airlines should follow suit. That’s why we sent a letter to 28 airlines urging them to adopt policies expressly permitting flight crews to pump breast milk aboard an aircraft.

For those airlines that don’t follow in Frontier’s footsteps, we need the AIR PUMP Act to expand PUMP’s critical protection to flight crews, making clear that all airlines must provide employees who are lactating with the basic accommodations they need, such as pumping during non-critical phases of the flight. But in the meanwhile, we’re very glad to know that there’s currently a bipartisan effort, in both the House and Senate, to require the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Authority to give written guidance to air carriers so that flight crew members will be able to pump without being penalized.

No working mother should be forced to choose between their job or nursing their child. We applaud Congress for passing the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, and now it’s time to finish the job and stand by working parents in the airline industry.