05/11/2021
Read it & weep, & pray! We can fix this if you register to vote and show up at the polls when it's time to vote! We can turn NC blue!
Excerpt: If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider some of the bills that state legislative leaders have been prioritizing in the spring of 2021 – a moment of ongoing crisis in which hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians continue to suffer mightily from the devastating effects of deep and unprecedented health and economic crises:
Abortion restrictions – House Bill 453 constitutes a cynical effort to create new, burdensome and potentially dangerous roadblocks to reproductive health care by to forcing physicians to interrogate their patients about the reasons they are choosing to obtain an abortion. Not only does the bill require doctors to certify that the reasons are not on a proscribed list, but it also actually tries to block a patient’s constitutionally protected right to care.
Meanwhile, in a rehash of an ill-conceived bill vetoed by Gov. Cooper in 2019, the Senate has also advanced a measure with the preposterous title “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.”
Monitoring and micromanaging teachers – As if North Carolina public school teachers weren’t already overwhelmed by the pandemic, low pay, frequently crumbling facilities, burdensome paperwork, incessant testing requirements and overcrowded classrooms, far right, conspiracy-obsessed lawmakers are now pushing a “big brother” bill that would force each teacher to post all textbooks and other reading materials as well as videos, digital materials and other applications used in classrooms on school websites. The irony here, of course, is that if there is any teacher group in the state whose curricula ought to be monitored, it’s those who teach in the state’s unaccountable, GOP-championed voucher schools, where students are frequently subjected to fundamentalist religion masquerading as science and history.
Anti- “riot” legislation – House Speaker Tim Moore’s tin-eared response to the social unrest that gripped the nation last year in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd during the early, tumultuous months of the pandemic has been to promote a bill that would further toughen criminal penalties for “rioting.” The ACLU of North Carolina has rightfully blasted the bill as “dangerous idea that undermines the very foundation of participatory democracy.”
And the list goes on. At last check, lawmakers were advancing bills to, among other things:
make it harder to vote,
expand discriminatory and unaccountable school vouchers,
force county sheriffs to aid in immigration enforcement against their will,
erect roadblocks to more widespread COVID-19 vaccinations,
make it even easier to expel and arrest students for in-school behavior,
allow fi****ms to be even more easily obtained and concealed in more locations,
make it harder to regulate polluters and predatory lenders, and
make it harder for employees to sue their employers for retaliation against protected activity.
Meanwhile, Medicaid expansion remains a pipe dream and pro-discrimination bills targeting transgender North Carolinians were almost certainly only pulled from the 2021 agenda after intervention by Apple Computer in recent weeks as a condition of the giant company’s agreement to bring a new campus to Wake County.
North Carolina General Assembly continues to advance an agenda that reflects the valeus and policies of Donald Trump
