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Task Force supports repealing the Real ID Act

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Inc., strongly opposes the Real ID Act passed in May 2005. We support efforts at the state level for states to opt-out of complying with the Real ID Act and support federal efforts to repeal the Real ID Act.

The Real ID Act should be repealed because it has harmful effects on the LGBT community, LGBT and non-LGBT immigrants, and it violates important rights that are crucial to a healthy democracy and particularly important to LGBT people, such as privacy rights, civil liberties and civil rights.

The Real ID Act will increase discrimination and violence against transgender members of the LGBT community. Licenses that reflect a person’s updated information could be more difficult to acquire under Real ID and private information about former names or gender changes will be more easily accessible. Both of these realities will expose transgender people to increased discrimination and violence.

The Real ID Act threatens LGBT and non-LGBT immigrants. First, the Real ID Act makes it harder to get asylum by changing the burden of proof to show persecution, which many LGBT immigrants may find they are unable to meet. Second, non-citizen immigrants who have lawful immigration status may be unable to get ID because they fail the database check with notoriously incomplete/erroneous federal databases or they have other foreign documents to show identity, other than an official passport, which is the case especially with refugees.

The Real ID Act erodes civil liberties through the creation of a de facto national identity card and threatens privacy through data-basing and data-sharing. Privacy and civil liberties are critically important for LGBT people in this country; true freedom for LGBT people cannot be attained in a country without strong rights of privacy and civil liberties. Privacy and civil liberties are crucial to a healthy democracy and the Real ID Act endangers our country by violating these rights. The LGBT community opposes any attempt to roll back the right to privacy and other civil liberties.

The Task Force is working on the national level to repeal the Real ID Act before it goes into effect in 2008. We’ve made it easy for you to take action, too, so click the buttons at left to send letters to your senators and representatives.

For more information from our partners working against the Real ID Act, visit:
National Center for Transgender Equality at www.nctequality.org
ACLU at www.realnightmare.org or www.aclu.org
Electronic Privacy Information Center at www.epic.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation at www.eff.org
©2007 The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund, founded in 1974 as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Inc., works to build the grassroots political power of the LGBT community to win complete equality. We do this through direct and grassroots lobbying to defeat anti-LGBT ballot initiatives and legislation and pass pro-LGBT legislation and other measures. We also analyze and report on the positions of candidates for public office on issues of importance to the LGBT community. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) non-profit corporation incorporated in New York. Contributions to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund are not tax deductible.


National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Inc. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Inc.