You may have heard of Carla Hale, the Catholic school teacher fired after her mother's obituary outed her. (Incidentally, want to pressure her school into rehiring her? Change.org has a petition for that.) And she's not the only one, as the folks mentioned here can tell you. But the timing couldn't be worse for the forces of oppression, as Sen. Merkley (D-OR) and Rep. Polis (D-CO) have re-introduced the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (S.815/H.R. 1755), or ENDA. If this ENDA is like past ENDAs, the bill would prevent employers from discriminating against employees because they're gay -- which discrimination would, in fact, include firing them for being gay. I'm eagerly awaiting the crowd of right-wing whiners who claim that people have sincere moral beliefs that being gay is wrong! Well, I have a sincere moral belief that it's not wrong, so whiners can go find the diaper-changing line and leave the rest of us alone. CREDO helps you tell your Senators to support ENDA.
Meanwhile, Sen. Menendez (D-NJ) and Rep. Capuano (D-MA) have reintroduced the Shareholder Protection Act (S. 824/H.R. 1734) in this Congress. As you may remember from previous alerts, the Shareholder Protection Act would give shareholders the right to vote on any campaign spending a corporate board wants to undertake. Even if you sincerely believe that money is speech, and that corporations have the rights of personhood, you have no business opposing this bill, because the money being spent isn't the "corporation"'s money, it's the shareholder's money, and why shouldn't they decide how it's spent? Corporatists will never tell you the real reason why they think shareholders shouldn't get to make those decisions: because it'll take the power away from executives. Haven't we had enough of runaway executive power yet? Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to support the Shareholder Protection Act. Quick, before they spend your pension fund trying to elect people like Josh Mandel.
Finally, as you know, the House of Representatives passed CISPA, the bill that would let corporations and government collude in invading your privacy -- in the interest of "security," of course. And without a warrant, of course, warrants being, as one famous philosopher might say, "quaint" to our elites. Word on the street is that the Senate has no particular stomach to take up CISPA, but that doesn't mean we should declare victory and go home. What if the Senate writes up a similar bill, calling it, I don't know, KISPA? "See, it's a completely different bill, because it has a totally different letter in its title! Now go home, there's nothing to see here." When Senators eagerly place holds on bipartisan bills and uncontroversial nominations for no reason other than that they've lost the debate about said bills and nominations, there's no gutter-level to which they won't stoop. So the Electronic Frontiers Foundation helps you tell the Senate to reject CISPA, in whatever form they may bring it back to life.
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