Long story short: tell Arkansas state legislators to fund family planning programs if they're really that against abortion, tell our Treasury Department to stop states from misusing COVID funding, tell New York Gov. Hochul to extend clemency to Randolph Jamison and Robert Webster, and tell the Sullivan County (TN) School Board to reinstate teacher Matthew Hawn. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Care2 helps you tell Arkansas state legislators to fund family planning programs if they're so concerned about abortions. And that includes birth control! Pick your damn poison, right-wingers! Of course they scream about birth control as much as they scream about abortion, which might lead you to think they don't really care about abortion; rather, they care about stoking rage over abortion, which you can't do quite as well if you actually reduce abortion, right? Colorado made it easy to get IUDs in 2009, and guess what? Their teen birth rate fell over 50% and their teen abortion rate fell over 60% over the next eight years. As long as our media use sex to sell stuff, and we keep buying it, we're not going to reduce abortions by making women wear chastity belts. But this is America! We can still reduce abortions, if we use common sense.
Black Lives Matter helps you tell our Treasury Department to investigate state misuse of COVID relief funds. Like, for example, Alabama's plan to use it to build more prisons! That's what the world needs, more prisons -- certainly not more policies that help people stay the hell out of prison! And you know Alabama ain't gonna fill those prisons with corporate criminals, but with Black folks who were all "resisting arrest." Aside from all of that, how does prison construction constitute relief for good Americans struggling to pay their bills and stay out of the hospital? The American Rescue Plan aimed to help folks pay their bills, not help state governments build prisons so their corporate cronies could get richer. So yeah, our Treasury Department should definitely be stopping corruption from happening.
Change.org helps you tell New York Gov. Hochul to extend clemency to Randolph Jamison. If you're familiar with action alerts like these, you'll see a pattern: man serves absurd amount of time not at all befitting the crime he committed, and becomes a model prisoner -- plus he's already survived cancer and COVID one time each in prison and surviving them again if (when?) they comes back ain't a sure bet, and besides, did he really do the crime of which he's convicted? That would be "possession of narcotics," said narcotics being on the floor of a car with five other people in it. For that -- and also for being Black, I'll bet -- he's already served 32 years in prison. And the laws that mandated these absurd sentences are no more, so what's the hold up?
Change.org also helps you tell Gov. Hochul to extend some mercy to Robert Webster, convicted of arson at age 17 and sentenced to 50 years to life in prison, of which he's served 34, again, as a model prisoner who's become the first member of his family to get an Associate's Degree and works to keep at-risk youth in the New York City metropolitan area out of jail. Oh, and when I say "convicted of arson," I don't mean he actually did the deed! His court case excluded witnesses and evidence that could have exonerated him, and when a police officer guarding the arson victim's home got murdered, the folks convicted of that murder actually got less time than Mr. Webster did. So Gov. Hochul can deliver justice here, however delayed that justice may be.
Finally, Color of Change helps you tell the Sullivan County (TN) School Board to reinstate teacher Matthew Hawn, fired for the unconscionable crime of teaching about racism in the classroom! Right-wingers whine about "censorship" and "cancel culture" when they are the chief practitioners of censorship and cancel culture! Right-wingers talk about how "weak" liberals are but can't stand any criticism, on any grounds, ever! Yeah, you know these things, just as you know pointing out hypocrisy is never enough -- right-wingers induce rage in other folks solely to give them the illusion of control over chaos, knowing that this illusion will keep them coming back again and again for more rage-inducing evil. So let's not have good teachers like Mr. Hawn be collateral damage in this stratagem.
Comments