For each of us, civic participation is a habit that it takes time to build.
This is why voting participation is usually lower when people are younger, but tends to become more reliable with age. It’s not the age, per se, but that older people have made voting a habit.
Contacting your legislators is another habit it takes time to build.
At first, you may be a little nervous. After you’ve done it a few times, it seems normal. After you’ve written them a few emails, making a call doesn’t sound too hard.
After you’ve made a call, or a few, to your legislators’ offices, you know their staff are just regular people.
Maybe an office visit doesn’t sound so hard now? It’s only going to meet one of the nice people who wrote down your opinion when you called the last time.
Maybe your legislator is having a town hall—not now, but they’ll start up again eventually—and now it doesn’t seem scary at all to just ask a question, since you’ve been in touch with their office a few times.
After all of that, you probably have a fluent understanding of how to talk about your issue(s), and how to get your point across clearly.
Now you’re confident enough in your grasp of the facts that you might think about speaking up at a legislative hearing.
If you’ve been working with an organization or group of activists through some of this process, you’ll more likely hear about topics you may want to take action on, and that network will be more effective because they’ve already got contact information for engage people like you.
When a major policy change is underway, the most effective advocacy is generally done by people, networks, and organizations, that have been working on an issue maybe for years.
Then all of that preparation and habit-building comes together for maximum impact.
Which is a long way of saying that being able to take effective political action requires a lot of preparation and groundwork, which may not yield immediate results.
But you can’t skip that part, then hope it all comes together in a crisis. You need to put in the work first.
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New poll results reveal overwhelming bipartisan rejection of "gender identity" policies in West Virginia, such as those that would go into effect with the passage of the #EqualityAct. @Sen_JoeManchin@SenCapito
The results found wide, cross-partisan, agreement that men should not be allowed in women’s intimate spaces such as changing rooms or homeless shelters, even if they identify as women.
86 percent of WV voters agreed that male domestic abusers and sex offenders should not be allowed to serve their sentence in a women’s prison regardless of their claimed “gender identity,” including 78 percent of registered democrats.
1. A “petition for rulemaking” is a request to an agency that they issue, amend, or repeal a specific regulation. Since Biden’s EO directed them to adjust their regulations for "gender identity," we want to force them to consider our petition first. womensliberationfront.org/news/president…
2. If the petition is rejected, the decision may be subject to judicial review and the agency must provide “an appropriately reasoned statement of the grounds for denial.”
In a few years the bar moved from saying that children weren’t undergoing irreversible procedures, to arguing in The New Yorker that children should get to sterilize themselves for life without regard to the “arbitrary historical boundaries of childhood.”
Among those of us with left-of-center political ideals, it’s only radical feminists who will now stand up and say that it’s wrong to sterilize children because they’re different, or unhappy. It’s only conservatives who will platform us to say it.
Where are the other organizations that claim to represent lesbian and bisexual women, saying that these girls don’t need mastectomies? Where are the gay men’s groups standing up for the wholeness of these boys? Why are they abandoning their responsibilities?
This Department of Education memo, from the Office for Civil Rights, is a well-reasoned rejoinder to the Bostock decision, taking the justices at their word and protecting sex-based Title IX rights. www2.ed.gov/about/offices/…
“Title IX, for example, contains numerous exceptions authorizing or allowing sex-separate activities and intimate facilities to be provided separately on the basis of biological sex or for members of each biological sex.”
“[The] Department’s longstanding construction of the term “sex” in Title IX to mean biological sex, male or female, is the only construction consistent with the ordinary public meaning of “sex” at the time of Title IX’s enactment.”
There are legitimate worries about where a (now) politically expedient set of actions, regarding a longstanding problem, is going to end. And there are many reasons to think that the people charged with making decisions about this are going to overreach, as they have done before.
Here’s how the gender identity influence game works. If you don’t agree that men can be women if they say so, the ACLU will sue you, and monster you as a threat to “all women.” By which they also mean men.
All of these “women’s rights groups,” who’ve signed on to ACLU’s war on women’s rights, including sports, would be turned on and destroyed by ‘progressive’ MRAs like the ACLU crowd. They’d be vilified to donors, politicians, and the public, as violent, evil bigots.