News & Commentary

We asked candidates running for State Representative in House Districts 115, 113, 104, and 47 about their positions on 13 key pieces of legislation affecting civil rights and civil liberties in our state. We then studied the results to determine which candidates were supportive of ACLU of Texas priorities. The scores below reflect how current state lawmakers voted during the 2017 legislative session. For challengers, the scores indicate how they would have voted, as indicated in their responses to our candidate questionnaire. Here are the bills we analyzed in each section. Click the header to find out more about each category:

2017 was a dark time for LGBTQ Texans. During the 85th Texas legislative session, lawmakers filed some 25 anti-LGBTQ bills that either permitted or in some cases mandated discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community.

Just one day before President Trump announced his intention to ban transgender service members from the U.S. military—in a series of tweets the U.S. military itself was unprepared for—21 members of the Texas Senate voted to advance their own anti-transgender agenda.

This post originally appeared on the ACLU National website.

This post originally appeared on the ACLU National website

Earlier this week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced in a press release his office’s support for a lawsuit that would allow states to deny drivers’ licenses to immigrants who hold federal work permits. In other words, if he can’t do anything about immigrants having the right to a job, at least he can try to stop them from traveling to it.

This post originally appeared on the ACLU National website

In the backrooms of the Texas Capitol last week, members of the House of Representatives further chipped away Texans’ access to reproductive health care by voting to defund Planned Parenthood. Denying healthcare to thousands of Texans who depend on these services is bad enough, but the outrage shouldn’t end there. Worse still, the deal was struck in a seeming attempt to divide those who care about justice. Lawmakers tried to trade one wrong for another: defund Planned Parenthood or make it impossible for transgender Texans to participate in everyday life by barring them from the public restroom that corresponds to their gender identity.