Both houses of Congress are conferencing out the annual defense authorization bill -- and, naturally, the Russell Amendment to the bill would let religiously-affiliated federal contractors to take federal money and still discriminate against job applicants on the basis of their religion. I've long said that if you take federal money you should abide by federal rules, but perhaps I should really be saying you take our money, you play by our rules, since federal money is taxpayer money, which is our money. And only a small, vocal, and immature segment of our population really thinks it's all right for corporations to claim "religious freedom" or whatever and refuse to hire people who don't belong to their preferred religion, all while taking our money. And this small, vocal, and immature segment of our population really shouldn't get all the say about everything. Hence Americans United for the Separation of Church and State helps you tell your Senators to reject the Russell Amendment. Remember: your government should be protecting your freedom of religion, not some corporation's "freedom of religion," or some CEO's "freedom of religion.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell our government to stop sending military weapons to local police departments, then Roots Action still helps you do that. I've wrestled with the gun control aspects of this action, and to the question "should we really let citizens have whatever weapons they like and not police?" I've answered "yes" -- our laws confer upon police officers certain authorities that citizens do not have, like the authority to arrest people, so I don't worry about the state's level of firepower. I find it hard to imagine that police officers really need tanks and rubber bullets and grenade launchers to get corporate criminals, let alone murderers, drug pushers, and burglars -- most of that work getting these criminals needs to be done before the arrest. But some police will be honest enough to tell you that they don't want these weapons to fight crime -- they want them to fight protestors, which fact all by itself refutes the notion that protesting in public doesn't do any good. I mean, if it didn't, they wouldn't "need" military-grade weapons from our government, would they?
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