Sisters on Castro Street T he Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, San Francisco's irreverent but highly relevant order of drag nuns, became the target of controversy when their permit for a Castro Street celebration on Easter Sunday was challenged by a Catholic newspaper. In testimony to the Board of Supervisors, the ACLU-NC cited a plethora of cases to show that the city had no legal basis to revoke the permit. The Board voted not to rescind the permit, acknowledging that any other action would have infringed on the rights of the sisters. April, the ACLU-NC testified at the San Francisco Board of Supervisor's Housing and Social Policy Committee against proposed revisions to the San Francisco Municipal Code regulating the posting of signs, handbills and banners, arguing that the proposed ordinance infringed on the constitutionally recognized right to engage in anonymous speech. The ordinance would have required individuals to include their names and addresses on all posted signs.
Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.
I n a lawsuit filed by the ACLU affiliates of Northern and Southern California and the First Amendment Project, Molloy v. Regents of the University of California , the California Supreme Court ruled in June that a student reporter and the UC Santa Barbara student newspaper, The Daily Nexus, may not pursue their allegation against former Governor Pete Wilson and the U.C. Board of Regents for violating the state's Open Meeting Act when they spoke privately to discuss the vote abolishing affirmative action. The Court also held that any cases claiming violations of the open meeting law must be filed within thirty days of the alleged violation, which allows public officials to meet secretly if they can hide any evidence of wrong doing for a month. The ACLU argued that Governor Wilson's private telephone conversations with a majority of the Regents for the purpose of obtaining a promise to vote in favor of the resolutions prior to the public meeting at which the Regents abolished affirmative action was a violation of the Bagley-Keene Act. However, in a victory for open government, in September Governor Davis signed into law a bill that reverses the California Supreme Court's decision. The new law specifically allows public officials to be sued for past violations of the Open Meeting Act.