March 31, 2019

Mississippi has become the latest state to protect the free-speech and associational rights of non-profit donors, a position that the Goldwater Institute has strongly advocated in capitols and courtrooms across the country. The new law protects charitable donors from having their names put on a government list, which would expose them to potential harassment and intimidation by their ideological opponents.

Since the 1950s, the Supreme Court has protected donors’ privacy when they contribute to nonprofits, ruling that government officials can’t force advocacy groups to turn over the identities of their supporters to public officials. But donor privacy has come under attack in cities like Santa Fe, New Mexico,and Denver, Colorado, where the cities have demanded that nonprofits give the government a list of their donors when they spend money communicating with voters about city ballot measures.The Goldwater Institute is standing in defense of nonprofit organizations, their donors, and the First Amendment by challenging those laws in court.

Read more about Mississippi’s new law here, and read about the 1958 U.S. Supreme Court case of NAACP v. Alabama, which upheld the constitutional right to donate anonymously to nonprofit organizations.

Arizona Acts to Ensure that Employees and Job-Seekers Know Their Rights

Thanks to the Right to Earn a Living Act developed by the Goldwater Institute, Arizona job-seekers enjoy some of the greatest protections from arbitrary occupational licensing restrictions in the country. Under that law, if the government wants to restrict a person’s right to earn an honest living, the burden is on the government, not the job-seeker, to prove that the restriction is appropriate. 

Unfortunately, some job-seekers do not know their rights and may be prevented from working in the job of their choice because of it. Thanks to a new law supported by the Goldwater Institute, employees and job-seekers are guaranteed to have a better sense of what their rights are under that law.

Read more about the new law on the In Defense of Libertyblog.

How Do You Fight Prejudice? Get Outside Your Bubble (and Big Cities)

You might expect cities to be bastions of tolerance in America—after all, they offer greater exposure to culture, not to mention the progressive politics frequently associated with open-mindedness. 

But it turns out that many cities and their environs are among the most politically prejudiced places in America—and that should tell us something about how we can all work to improve how we relate to one another.

Read more about it in a new article by Jennifer Tiedemann, the Deputy Director of Communications at the Goldwater Institute, in The Daily Caller.