One of the issues that currently affect the concept of civil liberties is LGBT employment discrimination. Even though the Supreme Court allowed same-sex marriages with its 2015 decision, the notion of equality is still relatively unreachable for LGBT representatives because there are no adequate anti-discrimination laws that could protect the civil rights of these individuals (Burn, 2018). More than half of the American states still perceive association with LGBT as a reasonable motive for termination. Barack Obama first introduced the renewed Equality Act in 2015, but the situation with LGBT employment discrimination has not changed since.
As a country with a rich history of slavery, the US is not a stranger to human trafficking. The problem is that within the last two and a half decades, at least 2 million American citizens became the victims of human trafficking (Farrell & Reichert, 2017). The government seems to remain relatively reluctant to the growing number of illegally moved individuals, as there are many undocumented immigrants and human trafficking victims who are either employed unofficially or have a job in the restaurant industry. Intrastate sex trafficking also remains a severe issue to the US due to the fact that both American women and females from other countries are involved in the illegal industries such as pornography and prostitution.
The last problem related to civil liberties in the United States is the prevalence of police brutality. The use of excessive force against people of color by some of the law enforcement officers has always been a major discussion topic for the American community. This ongoing concern has been sparked by the cases of John Crawford III and Michael Brown Jr., leading the law enforcement agencies to transform their approaches to training and culture (Alang et al., 2017). The present-day statistics show that unarmed black men are still much more likely to get involved in a police shooting than their white counterparts. The number of prosecuted police officers has increased substantially since 2015, but the overall state of affairs is still vague.
References
- Alang, S., McAlpine, D., McCreedy, E., & Hardeman, R. (2017). Police brutality and black health: Setting the agenda for public health scholars. American Journal of Public Health, 107(5), 662-665.
- Burn, I. (2018). Not all laws are created equal: Legal differences in state non-discrimination laws and the impact of LGBT employment protections. Journal of Labor Research, 39(4), 462-497.
- Farrell, A., & Reichert, J. (2017). Using US law-enforcement data: Promise and limits in measuring human trafficking. Journal of Human Trafficking, 3(1), 39-60.