Gender and reproductive justice are central to our work.

Our member leaders–predominantly womxn, trans, non-binary, and queer folx–recognize abortion restrictions as a primary means of gender oppression in our state and nation. We see the intersections gender oppression has with race, sexuality, class, and the environment.

Because of this analysis, our folx were ready to be out front on the issue of abortion, even as we engage in broader forms of cultural organizing around gender and reproductive justice in rural and often deeply conservative spaces.
Hometown Action members believe that in order to shift the way our state legislates on reproductive justice, we have to change the way that we hold space together in our communities.

We need to not only protect abortion access, we also need to keep our people emotionally and spiritually safe and cared for. Make a donation today to help us bring our healing and organizing power to protect our communities and our rights.

Thank you for all that you do,

Justin and everyone at Hometown Action and People’s Action

U.S. government spending has been moved so heavily to militarism, and away from everything else, that groups and individuals who haven’t objected to it before are finally doing so.
A huge coalition is demanding that at least $200 billion be moved out of the Pentagon’s budget and into human and environmental needs. We’re taking this demand to Congress and to presidential candidates. While we’ve successfully brought similar demands to city councils and to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, this is a new and bigger opportunity to move it toward reality, with a larger multi-issue coalition advancing this demand.

U.S. military spending across numerous agencies is now at $1.25 trillion per year1, or roughly as much as the rest of the world combined, with much of that rest of the world being U.S. allies and weapons customers.2

Trump’s proposed 2020 budget makes militarism 57% of discretionary spending, leaving 43% for everything else.3

Military spending endangers us and generates terrorism.4 Reducing it makes us safer.5

Military spending is immoral6, threatens our environment7, erodes our liberties8, and fuels bigotry9.

Fractions of the $200 billion we are proposing to move could provide free, top-quality education from pre-school through college10, end hunger and starvation on earth11, provide clean drinking water everywhere it’s needed on the planet12, build fast trains between major U.S. cities13, and double non-military U.S. foreign aid.

The fact is that the United States dominates world military spending, pushes allies to spend more, and drives an arms race that it could easily choose to reverse.

Forward this email to everyone you can to help push this movement past a tipping point!

Defending the immoral funding of the criminal (can you name a recent war that didn’t violate the UN Charter?), counterproductive, catastrophic war enterprise as a “jobs program” is obscene, but it’s also false. Economists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have documented that military spending is an economic drain.14

P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others.

Footnotes:
1. TomDispatch: Making Sense of the $1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget
2. World BEYOND War: Militarism Mapped
3. National Priorities Project: Trump’s FY2020 Budget Request Bloats Militarized Spending—and Slashes Actual Human Needs
4. Consortium News: How the West’s War in Libya Spurred Terrorism in 14 Countries
5. World BEYOND War: War Endangers Us
6. World BEYOND War: War Is Immoral
7. World BEYOND War: War Threatens Our Environment
8. World BEYOND War: War Erodes Our Liberties
9. World BEYOND War: War Promotes Bigotry
10. The Washington Post: Free College: We Can Afford It
11. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: The World Only Needs 30 Billion Dollars a Year to Eradicate the Scourge of Hunger
12. UN Environment Program: Clean Water for a Healthy World
13. The World Bank: Cost of High Speed Rail in China One Third Lower than in Other Countries
14. Political Economy Research Institute: The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities: 2011 Update

http://www.RootsAction.org

John Scopes is best known as the Tennessee educator found guilty of breaking the law for teaching evolution in his class room.

Synopsis
Born in Kentucky in 1900, John Scopes was a teacher in Tennessee who became famous for going on trial for teaching evolution. Scopes was part of an American Civil Liberties Union attempt to challenge a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Scopes’s trial became a national sensation, with celebrity lawyers like Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan involved in the case. Scopes was found guilty, but his story remains famous as the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” dramatized in the 1960 film Inherit the Wind starring Spencer Tracy.

Early Life
A high school science teacher, John Scopes found himself at the center of one of the 20th century’s most famous court battles. He served as the defendant in a case meant to challenge a state law against teaching Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution in public schools.

Born on August 3, 1900, in Paducah, Kentucky, Scopes was the youngest of five children born to railroad worker Thomas Scopes and his wife, Mary. The couple’s only son, he spent his early years in Kentucky before moving to Illinois as a teenager. There, he graduated from high school in 1919. After one year at the University of Illinois, Scopes transferred to the University of Kentucky. He had to drop out for a time for medical reasons, but he eventually earned a degree in law.

Evolution on Trial

In the fall of 1924, Scopes joined the faculty of Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee, where he taught algebra, chemistry and physics. At the time, there was a national debate about whether evolution should be taught in schools. British naturalist Charles Darwin championed the theories of evolution, espousing that all modern animal and plant life had descended from a common ancestor. Darwin’s theories, however, directly contradicted the Bible’s teachings on the beginning of life. Across the United States, Christian fundamentalists moved to bar any discussion of evolution from the nation’s classrooms.

Tennessee passed their own law against the teaching of evolution in March 1925. The Butler Act made it illegal for any teacher in a publicly funded school “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wanted to challenge the Butler Act in court. While he was not a biology teacher, Scopes volunteered to be tried under the new law. He admitted he had used a textbook that supported evolution while serving as a substitute biology teacher. That was enough to get him charged under the new law.

biography.com

1997 – Newt Gingrich was fined as the U.S. House of Representatives voted for first time in history to discipline its leader for ethical misconduct.