You may have heard that President Trump told attendees at the National Prayer Breakfast that he wanted to "get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment." No truth to the rumor that he also said he wanted to annihilate it, rip it to shreds, and go back in time and kill Lyndon Johnson's grandfather so that it'd never even be born. The Johnson Amendment, as you know, prevents churches and similarly tax-exempt organizations from advocating on behalf of candidates, or to donate money to those candidates' campaigns. So Mr. Trump would prefer that churches be tax-exempt without doing the duty that tax-exempt organizations must do, but that may not be the worst part -- the worst part would be the prospect of large corporations using churches as money-laundering schemes, because they can never have too many ways of obscuring the source of their money. I mean, we don't just separate church and state for the state's benefit -- we also do it for the church's benefit. So Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk not to gut the Johnson Amendment.
Also, as you know, the Trump Justice Department (and I put those words together at considerable risk of opening up a hole in space-time!) has revoked the Obama Administration's Title IX guidance which mandated that schools ensure that transgender students can use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity, rather than the birth certificate listed on their gender. So the ACLU helps you tell Attorney General Sessions to reinstate the guidance, and thus protect transgendered students from bullying and discrimination. The DOJ no doubt thinks adding a statement saying it really, really hates bullying and discrimination does the job, but it doesn't -- all the caring words in the world don't do as much as one caring act. Hopefully no trolls are coming along to say that transgendered folk are all child molestors, because they're transgendered. I mean, usually they're a little cleverer than that, but that's how their argument boils down. Since men still commit the vast majority of pederasty (and mostly against girls), we might do better to ban men from public restrooms. Of course, that would be a terrible idea, but that only tells you how terrible the other idea is.
Meanwhile, the FCC, now headed by Ajit Pai, plans to do whatever it can to gut your net neutrality laws, but might also move against new privacy protections put into place by the previous FCC. The FCC would, like most good Americans, prefer that internet service corporations get permission from you before they go selling and mining your personal data, but big corporations, of course, don't want to do that -- they'd rather propagate the myths that privacy protection on the internet is just too hard, or you're a greedy fool for wanting privacy on the internet, or but you'll lose our on all our great deals! The truth is that they'll lose out on that golden opportunity to make money by doing even less work that the internet provides. And I guess I should point out that I don't begrudge them the ability to make money by directing their ads at the right eyeballs more easily -- I begrudge them the "right" to demand that we participate in that, whether we want to or not. So Consumers Union helps you tell the FCC to protect internet customers' privacy.
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