Long story short: tell Honduras to sign a bill allowing rape victims to access emergency contraceptives, tell Chile to start regulating the clothing industry, tell New York's Governor to extend clemency to Robert Webster, tell President Biden to end offshore drilling, tell our IRS to simplify free tax filing, and tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for the January 6 attempted coup. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.
Avaaz helps you tell Honduran President Xiomara Castro (Honduras's first female President) to sign a bill that would repeal Honduras's ban on emergency contraception. She's under a lot of pressure not to sign the bill, and you can guess how that pressure reveals itself: "this is too risky a move for a President not even a month into her term," "the first female President shouldn't appear to be too friendly to women," "don't you know we only outlawed the killing of women in 2013 and we barely prosecute it?" But right is right and wrong is wrong, and you know what's wrong? Raping 12-year-old girls and demanding they carry any resulting pregnancies to term, that's what. And that happens in Honduras all the time. Good Hondurans bear the primary responsibility for getting their President to do their will, but nothing prevents us from helping out.
Sum of Us helps you tell Chilean President Gabriel Boric to stop allowing big clothing corporations to use Chile as a dumping ground. You've heard of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a massive floating island of plastic trash now three times as large as France floating in the Pacific? Now acquaint yourself with the mountain of clothes growing in the Atacama Desert, made up of clothes manufactured largely in Asia, unsold in Europe and America, and dumped as trash in Chile. Ugly, to be sure, but you may not be convinced that this is a big deal, particularly for a new President who, having declared that "(n)eoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die," might be looking for bigger fish. But nobody wants their country used as someone else's trashcan. Indeed, Mr. Boric may owe his election to that sentiment.
Change.org helps you tell New York Gov. Hochul to free Robert Webster, currently serving a 50-year sentence for arson. You'll recognize most of this story -- a conviction based entirely on witness testimony, exculpating evidence not fully explored at trial, a judge failing to account for Mr. Websters' status as a minor during sentencing -- but you may also be wondering: half a century for arson? The arson's aftermath involved a police officer's murder, which may have induced a longer sentence for Mr. Webster -- a much longer sentence than the one given for the police officer's murder, if you can believe it. Has Mr. Webster been even better than a model prisoner despite spending two-thirds of his life in prison? Yes, he has. So let's help him out.
The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. The Administration has just started leasing a million acres off Alaska's Cook Inlet for gas and oil drilling, and I've recited the problems with Arctic drilling enough over the years -- oh, hell, one more time: oil spills are even harder to clean up in the Arctic's frigid waters, we know little enough about the Arctic ecosystem that we don't know all the harm drilling would do, and fishing is a big industry in Alaska that would be endangered by the inevitable oil spill. A federal court stopped the Biden Administration's big Gulf of Mexico leasing plan, but the Administration ought to see the writing on the wall by now, not just in court, but in a warming world where other, more renewable technologies can shoulder more of our energy burden.
Public Citizen helps you tell our IRS to implement free tax filing for good Americans who have relatively easy tax filing to do, which is most of us. Our laws already authorize our IRS to do this! And if you have relatively straightforward tax issues, our IRS already has all the information it needs to fill our your damn tax return for you! I suppose the objection would be that "tax-filing is a big business in America," but if a big chunk of that business doesn't need it, does that business deserve to be so big? Of course not! That business will have plenty of work for folks with complex investments and the like. But charging folks hundreds of dollars every year for doing work they don't need to do? That's profoundly wasteful, and our economy shouldn't churn money from waste.
Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for his actions leading up to the January 6 attempted coup. We have lately learned that Mr. Trump was already preparing to fight a 2020 election loss in court three months before Election Day, and while I'm sure his votaries call that "being prepared," it also means folks like John Eastman (who wrote the infamous memo laying out how Mike Pence could have invalidated 2020 election results on January 6) and Cleta Mitchell (who participated in Mr. Trump's infamous "find 11,780 votes" call to Georgia's Secretary of State) might have more to tell, since they advised these legal efforts from the start. And look, we all know he would have done anything to win; now we need only know what laws he might have broken.
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