It's been over a decade since the creation of the "Do Not Call" Registry, and it's mostly worked pretty well -- but neither the Do-Not-Call Implementation Act of 2003 (which created the registry) nor the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007 ever targeted calls from non-profits or political organizations, so Change.org helps you tell the President, Congress, and the FTC to keep non-profits and political organizations from calling people all the time. Of course you've noticed that a lot of political organizations are now "non-profits," but this issue goes deeper than that: if you have a First Amendment right to free association, then why should you have to put up with calls you don't want and which do not redress some grievance under the law (i.e., as calls from bill collectors do)? I suppose some folks say that a political organization's right to call you is sacrosanct, but it's not -- the First Amendment doesn't run in only one direction at once, and some organization's First Amendment rights aren't better than yours.
Meanwhile, the Texas state Board of Education still plans to inflict fundamentalist Christian thought on public school students. We'd ignore them or make fun of them, I suppose, except that Texas buys so many textbooks that textbook publishers will more likely make all their textbooks like Texas's -- which must be why right-wingers have been pushing this ideology on Texas school boards for decades now. Clever, I suppose. But not as clever as it is cowardly -- why are Texas right-wingers so afraid of people finding out that God did not, in fact, hand down the Constitution from Mt. Sinai, but that our Founders hashed out, over a period of years, a very innovative political system that not only gave us the broadest protections for free speech ever given, but protected everyone's right to worship as they see fit? Of course, the question is rhetorical -- fundamentalists don't want to have "a voice in the public square"; they want to have the only voice in the public square. Hence both Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and People for the American Way help you fight religious extremism in public schools.
Finally, the exodus from ALEC continues! The American Legislative Exchange Council, responsible for so much right-wing legislation at the state level for decades but now notorious for pushing Voter ID and pro-pollution legislation (among other things!), has lost the chair of its corporate board, the software corporation SAP America. That's a big deal, but America Online still refuses to respond to pressure to abandon ALEC as well. There are still those who say well, they can do what they like, it's a free country -- as if it's somehow not a free country, also, for those who would pressure them. Like I said, the First Amendment doesn't run in one direction at a time, and a corporation's First Amendment rights aren't bigger than ours. The First Amendment protects you from your government -- it does not protect you from critics, activists, advertisers, or consumers, though so many on the right act like it does, at least when someone criticizes them. So Common Cause help you tell AOL to break away from ALEC and all the damage it's done with its nefarious agenda.
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