The American Civil Liberties Union announced earlier in the week that they are suing the state of Tennessee in an attempt to protect the right of hookers to give people AIDS. The group has been joined by several other organizations in a federal lawsuit that claims Tennessee’s new statute on aggravated prostitution, along with the accompanying sex offender registration requirements, are unconstitutional and violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Transgender Law Center and the ACLU of Tennessee in the U.S. District Court in Memphis on behalf of four plaintiffs identified as “Jane Does” and OUTMemphis, a local nonprofit that serves the LGBTQ community, writes a local outlets.
Aggravated prostitution is defined by Tennessee law as when a person, knowing that they are HIV positive, “engages in sexual activity as a business or is an inmate in a house of prostitution or loiters in a public place for the purpose of being hired to engage in sexual activity.”
It is a class C felony, and those who violate it must register as a lifetime “violent sex offender.”
“People convicted of Aggravated Prostitution must spend years in prison and then register as violent sex offenders for the rest of their lives ― meaning they cannot access the housing, employment, healthcare and community life that they need to get back on their feet,” said Molly Quinn, executive director of OUTMemphis, in a news release. “This statute solely targets people because of their HIV status and keeps them in cycles of poverty, while posing absolutely zero benefit to public health and safety.”
Instead of criminalizing HIV, which disproportionately targets people who are already socially and financially marginalized, lawmakers should invest in evidence-based public health support for people with HIV.
Tennessee, we'll see you in court.
— ACLU (@ACLU) October 24, 2023
According to The Daily Caller, Tennessee law forbids “a person from knowingly giving someone HIV through ‘intimate contact’ without first informing their partner they had the disease and obtaining consent, Justia US Law noted. There is another law in Tennessee that prohibits a person who knows they have HIV from engaging in prostitution, soliciting prostitution or being ‘an inmate in a house of prostitution’, the outlet noted.
African American men are six times more likely to die from HIV than non-Hispanic white males, the US Office of Minority Health reported.
HIV is the virus that weakens one’s immune system and whose final stage is AIDS, which is when one’s immune system is so weakened it is vulnerable to ordinary infections causing serious issues, Cleveland Clinic reported. Especially without treatment, AIDS is considered to be a lethal condition over time, a review paper published in the Public Health journal noted.”
As it has slowly been taken over by leftwing activists, the ACLU has faced what the New York Times has labeled as an identity crisis.
The newspaper explained, “Once a Bastion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Identity Crisis,” headlined an article that explained that “an organization that has defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan is split by an internal debate over whether supporting progressive causes is more important.”
“It was supposed to be the celebration of a grand career,” the newspaper lamented, “as the American Civil Liberties Union presented a prestigious award to the longtime lawyer David Goldberger. He had argued one of its most famous cases, defending the free speech rights of Nazis in the 1970s to march in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors.
Mr. Goldberger, now 79, adored the A.C.L.U. But at his celebratory luncheon in 2017, he listened to one speaker after another and felt a growing unease.
A law professor argued that the free speech rights of the far right were not worthy of defense by the A.C.L.U. and that Black people experienced offensive speech far more viscerally than white allies. In the hallway outside, an A.C.L.U. official argued it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.”
Goldberger told The Times that the experience left him feeling a profound disappointment in the organization that he once loved. “I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,” he said in a recent interview. “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”
In Tennessee, the “civil rights” group has revealed what it’s replaced free speech with.
