Dear friends,
Sometimes, it’s hard to feel anything but outrage and we lose all sense of proportion. And sometimes, it is important to recognize when we have arrived somewhere new.
Jennifer Rubin’s “Let’s throw out the term ‘culture wars.’ This is religious tyranny” is explicit about the fact that our outrage and sense of scale, where the Supreme Court and the right wing are concerned, are insufficient because what is at stake right now is so enormous: our deeply held values of privacy and bodily autonomy.
It is a catastrophic irony that we have had to defend masking and vaccine mandates to promote public health while the religious right seeks to
expand governmental power into every nook and cranny of life — from a doctor’s office in Texas treating a transgender child, to intimate relations in a bedroom in Georgia, to a pharmacy counter in Ohio.
Not to mention the forced birth arrangements that the leaked decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will create. In her recent piece about Alito’s draft, Jessica Winter notes that Alito ignores the body in favor of ‘the womb’.
Who does your body belong to? Who is in possession of you, of your self, at any given moment in your life? Is it you? Is it your parent, is it your spouse or sexual partner, is it a physician, is it a police officer or prison warden, is it a state legislature, is it the God you pray to? Is it Samuel Alito?
Alito somehow ignores maternal mortality rates, child poverty, and the lack of childcare subsidies. Death, hunger, and care are whole body issues.
Support SisterSong’s organizing for reproductive justice, to mobilize a large base of women of color and allies in rapid-response online and in-person action.
Religious tyranny takes many forms. Because I used to attend Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) meetings, I became aware of disgraceful educational neglect in Yeshivas in NYS. The insularity of ultra-Orthodox communities has concealed and prolonged the problem.
Many Yeshivas offer little to no instruction in secular subjects, leaving their students unprepared for the world, with few opportunities for further schooling or employment. This has continued because the schools have not been held accountable to meaningful standards.
Submit a comment to the NYS Department of Education urging them to pass and enforce regulations to require nonpublic schools to offer adequate secular education. This 30-second action is from YAFFED.
Since we’re owning our outrage today, we may as well talk about Big Oil’s profits.
“Fossil fuel companies made bumper profits while people froze this winter, and instead of investing in renewables they've kept on driving the climate crisis and making their shareholders richer,” says Murray Worthy, gas campaign leader at Global Witness.
“They absolutely cannot be trusted to do the right thing, we urgently need a windfall tax to fund a massive wave of renewables and insulation.”
Windfall taxes are imposed when a sector of the economy takes huge profits resulting from a situation over which it has no influence. In the present case, the Russian war in Ukraine, coupled with the demand created by the recovery from the pandemic recession, has driven prices up, leading to record profits. Italy and France imposed windfall taxes on energy companies prior to the outbreak of war.
High gas prices are burdening American families and measures like NY State’s gas tax holiday do nothing to address price gouging.
A Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax would extract funds from those most able to pay them.
Send this ready-made letter from Fossil Free Media to your Congressional delegation in support of a Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax!
Yesterday, a cyclist was struck and killed in Sunset Park by a private waste hauler who left the scene. The driver has not yet been identified.
Because the NYPD has been ineffective at handling crash investigations, legislation was passed last year to create a crash analysis and safety unit within the Department of Transportation. But 14 of 29 positions in the unit have not been filled. Meanwhile traffic fatalities are at the highest level in years.
[T]hose who once celebrated the bill’s passage now question whether the Adams administration had lost sight of its initial goal of de-emphasizing the role of the NYPD in crash investigations.
Just a week ago, there was a hearing of the Council’s Sanitation Committee hearing about the progress toward compliance with 2019 legislation to create commercial waste zones to limit the number of carters operating in an area. The law was intended to reduce emissions by creating shorter routes and improve street safety by reducing criss-crossing truck routes.
But the Department of Sanitation granted a three-month extension (until July 15, 2022) for compliance with the law.
commercial waste zone reform can not come fast enough.
Contact the Mayor and other elected officials to call for prompt and effective action to prevent traffic fatalities and injuries. The actions are ready-made.
I’m sure these actions will not exorcise your outrage. Still, you should feel better for having taken action.
Have a good weekend!
with love,
L