While efforts to outlaw protesting at the state level have gone nowhere, and quite deservedly so, governments hit protestors with "rioting" and "battery" charges more and more these days -- even when police batter protestors after Trump supporters attack them, as happened at an anti-war protest in Jacksonville in early April. (Wait, aren't Trump supporters supposed to be as sick of the Middle East wars as us? Not these folks, I guess!) Naturally, video and eyewitness accounts of the violence don't exactly make the police look very good, so Color of Change helps you tell the Duval County State Attorney to drop these charges against the Jacksonville protestors. Just so happens the Duval County State Attorney in question, Melissa Nelson, defeated incumbent Angela Corey in November. You may remember Ms. Corey as the prosecutor who put Marissa Alexander in jail for firing a warning shot in the direction of her abusive ex-husband (despite Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, naturally!). One would hope that turning bad prosecutors out of office would result in better prosecutions. And I'd sure like to see that here, too.
Meanwhile, H.R. 2282/S. 1006, the Equality Act, would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to explicitly include gay and transgendered folks in its protections -- resulting in a far more comprehensive bill than, say, ENDA was. Americans are considerably more sanguine toward gay rights than they used to be -- not all Americans, of course, but if we waited for all Americans to agree on legislation before we passed it, we'd no doubt still have slavery in the South -- but I suppose right-wingers will use TEH CIVIL RIGHTZ PROTECTIONZ FOR TEH TRANSVESTITEZ!!!!! as the wedge between good Americans and this bill. (Of course, I know the difference between a transvestite and a transgendered person; I mean to insinuate that right-wingers more easily confuse the two.) Here's the thing: the notion that transgendered folks molest children is utter bullshit, and the notion that transgendered folks have never before used the same bathrooms as the rest of us is also utter bullshit. So Freedom for All Americans helps you tell your Congressfolk to support civil rights for gay and transgendered folks by supporting the Equality Act.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject legislation that would kill regulations keeping Wall Street from destroying our economy again, then Sum of Us, Consumers Union, and PennPIRG all help you do that. The bill in question is H.R. 10, the Financial CHOICE Act of 2017, and I bet you just can't guess who will get all the choice if this bill passes -- that's right, the banksters, the same ones who blew a hole in our economy in 2008 with their casino games, and would blow another hole in our economy if Congress lifted "onerous" rules, like, you know, the ones that allow the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to find fraud artists like Wells Fargo. Have you noticed how much right-wingers complain these days about having to follow the rules? Why, it's almost like they're acting out their fantasies about what liberals are like. OK, more likely they're projecting and deflecting, but the "righteous" "anger" right-wingers spew over our government's attempts to protect people from financial predators is certainly misplaced. It's also just as certainly not conservative./p>
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