Protect persons who are LGBTQ+

Walking into a store or restaurant, most people wouldn’t even consider the possibility that they might be denied service. Even those people not wearing a shirt or shoes would move forward with confidence in procuring what they need. This isn’t the case for the LGBTQ+ population across the country. For this community, the reality is that they may live in a state where businesses and organizations are within their rights to deny them service. A 2015 study found that 63% of people who identify as LGBTQ+ have experienced some form of public accommodation discrimination. Most of these cases pass by with little to none media attention. This, however, wasn’t the case in the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission complaint.

In 2012, a recently married gay couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, requested a wedding cake be designed and baked by the Masterpiece Cakeshop where they lived in Colorado. The bakery, owned by Jack Phillips and run as an LLC, refused that service to the couple based on his belief that their marriage was a sin and that it violated his religious beliefs. The bakery did offer to sell the couple an already baked cake but would not design what the couple specifically wanted. The couple filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (CCRC) and the commission determined that the complaint was founded. The case would end up in front of the Supreme Court who, unfortunately, never got to the real issue of the case but focused on the response of the CCRC. In avoiding to address the issue of the discrimination, the Supreme Court inadvertently gave support to this type of behavior. 

There are debates happening at every level of government about the right for LGBTQ+ people to be treated equally in businesses and public places. Let that sit there for a minute…not to be given special rights or to offer extra protections but to be treated the same as everyone else. Public accommodation policies typically reference places that people visit outside of their home environment. Those include restaurants, retail stores, specialty shops and gyms but can also include public transportation, state offices like the DMV, and churches and healthcare facilities. The most well-known public accommodation law is the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations based on race, color, and national origin. These laws are particularly important for the members of this community who are homeless or food insecure. Discrimination in shelters and social service organizations increase the individuals’ risk significantly by creating an environment in which community members feel unsafe. However, in the US today, men and women are still being discriminated against based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. According to the Movement Advancement Project’s (MAP) LGBT Policy Spotlight: Public Accommodations Nondiscrimination Laws:

Laws protecting people from discrimination in public accommodations based on sexual orientation and gender identity exist in only 19 states and the District of Columbia. And there are no federal nondiscrimination protections in public accommodations for any of these characteristics. As a result, just over half of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ+) people in the United States live in a state where businesses could refuse to serve them because of who they are.

Simply put, that means that they can be denied service based on who they love or how they identify in relation to their gender. Transgender people report a significant amount of discrimination; “According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey of nearly 28,000 people, transgender respondents reported being denied equal treatment or service, verbally harassed, or physically attacked at many places of public accommodation.”  (MAP, 2018, p. 2)  

Interestingly, the majority of Americans support the broadening of discrimination laws. The Civil Rights Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act cover a majority of the population that needs to be protected, and most Americans feel that the LGBTQ+ community should simply be added to those laws already in place. Based on a study done in 2015, 72% of the people polled believed that adding protections for this group was essential while only 23% oppose these types of laws. Similarly, half of Americans polled do not support laws that require that transgender people only use the bathroom that corresponds with the sex they were born with whole 38% favor such laws. (MAP, 2018) 

With the patchwork of state laws in place and the lack of a federal non-discrimination law, it is important more now than ever, that the rights of the LGBTQ+ community are forefront and addressed. Local and state lawmakers need to work to shore up current laws and ensure that all vulnerable populations are included. Those states, like Arizona, Florida, Michigan and Indiana, need to move to write and sign into law clear non-discrimination policies that cover all public accommodations. The federal government needs to work to update the protections already in place to include this community. Businesses need to ensure that they are serving everyone in their community and customers need to frequent the businesses that exhibit non-discriminatory practices. 

It can be shocking to realize that this type of discrimination is still occurring and is somehow considered to be acceptable. The need for these laws at all, laws that make clear that treating people unfairly is not ok, seems unimaginable. Advocating for these communities, demanding fair treatment from the businesses that people support, voting for laws and politicians who respect these communities are the steps that need to be taken in order to ensure equality and fairness for the LGBTQ+ community.

Movement Advancement Project. January 2018. LGBT Policy Spotlight: Public Accommodations Nondiscrimination Laws. https://www.lgbtmap.org/policy-spotlight-public-accommodations.

Please support universal free lunches

Citizens of Springfield,

I am writing this letter as a citizen that truly and deeply cares about the children in our community. It is of utmost importance that we take care of our children because they will one day be the lifeblood of our society. As children, we were all helpless in the face of our environments, which basically means we had no control where and what environment we grew up in. If we were born into privilege, we could not control that, just like we could not control if we were born into poverty. We were voiceless and incapable of truly taking care of ourselves. That is why it is our responsibility to be the voice of our children and do everything in our power to advocate and fight for their rights. 

Free Universal School Lunch will provide all children in our community with adequate school meals, both breakfast and lunch, which is sadly a luxury for too many children in Springfield. Many of you are already aware of the free and reduced school lunch system already in place, but may not know just how inefficient this system truly is. One major issue is the fact that there are many children that “fall through the cracks” because of the intensity and lengthiness of the paperwork needed to be filled out in order to qualify for free/reduced lunch. This is even more evident in families where English is not the primary language. No child should be left behind just because the paperwork is not accommodating. This also goes along with the strict qualifications families must meet in order to receive free/reduced lunches. Some families badly need free/reduced lunches for their children, but they barely miss the qualifications, so they are forced to pay for meals for their children (and oftentimes have large negative balances). Creating a system where all children are given free lunch would not only help these families out tremendously, but it would also save the school staff members a lot of time and trouble dealing with the paperwork and trying to get families to pay their negative balances. Another issue with this system already in place, is that it creates a breeding ground for humiliation and bullying because schools are oftentimes guilty of separating the children who need these accommodations from the ones who do not. This is an issue I was forced to experience firsthand.

Growing up with a single mother was very tough, and we struggled heavily to make ends meet. My mom always did everything she could to give us the happiest and most stable life possible, where we would not be looked down on because we did not have as much money as our peers. She did an incredible job and I am grateful that I was always given the best things my mom could give me. Since we lived in a lower-class household, we qualified for free lunches, which lifted the burden off of my mom from having to pay for one more thing for us. This is true, but my school did a horrible job of covering the fact that I got free lunch, so all my peers knew. This was humiliating for me because I tried my best to hide my family’s struggles from my classmates. My school, for reasons unbeknownst to me, decided to put all of the kids that got free or reduced lunches at the back of the line. I am unsure if they somehow needed to do this to make it more organized, or because they were somehow punishing us for being poor by making us get our lunch last, but either way, it was a humiliation I dealt with every single day for years. I know that if my school did something as ridiculous as this, that other schools (not all but some) are doing the same thing. I never want any child to have to experience that kind of purposeful embarrassment, and that is why free lunches would eliminate this problem altogether.

It is our job to be a voice for the voiceless and to be a friend to the friendless. Some of these children feel like they have nobody on their side, but if we come together to advocate for Free Universal School Lunch, they will finally have someone be their voice. The burden of scrambling to pull money together to pay for these school lunches is unnecessary and only adds stress to families that are already beyond stressed. Please join me in petitioning to create a bill that allows every child in Springfield to receive free lunches. It is the least we can do. Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation

On March 5, 2020 a new bill was introduced in the Senate titled “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2020” or the “EARN IT Act of 2020.” This bill was brought forth to try and establish a National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation Prevention, and for other purposes. The purpose of this Commission is to decide what practices the providers of interactive technology may use to implement prevention, reduction, and response to online sexual exploitation of children. This Commission will include nineteen members, which will be composed of: The Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (or any of these leaders’ representatives). The remaining sixteen members are appointed by the Senate and House of Representatives. All these members will meet certain qualifications that make them fit for the job, including experience with such matters. Sexual abuse is a serious issue these days for both adults and children. A child, however, may not know that such an event is taking place therefore, it is not generally reported. It is important to minimize the possibility of this abuse happening and establishing a Commission to help stop it from happening online is a great start.  

Let’s talk about child sexual abuse. It’s a tough subject, but one that we must address. Only about one-third of child sexual abuse cases are identified, and even fewer are reported. Although it has been shown that internet and commercial sexual exploitation are a relatively small segment of total sexual abuse cases, this is still significant to the overall problem. Over 90% of children that have been commercially sexually exploited have also experienced sexual abuse in the past. One of the most gut-wrenching facts though, is that “About 75% of child pornography victims are living at home when they are photographed. Parents are often responsible.” Perhaps with this bill getting passed and consequent formation of the Commission, these children can be saved from their abusers, often their own parents. 

If these children are not saved now, there are many consequences that often result for persons who experience sexual abuse. These include academic problems, emotional and mental health problems, substance abuse at a young age, higher risk of teen pregnancy, etc. Everyone knows someone that is under the age of eighteen. Whether it is a relative or not, would you want the chance of electronic sexual exploitation happen to them? Hopefully the answer is “No.” You know how people say “Kids are brutally honest?” Why would any of that change now? Many of the victims of sexual abuse are not believed because usually the abuser is a family member or someone they are close with, and almost always the perpetrator is someone they know. “It is estimated that only 4 to 8% of child sexual abuse reports are fabricated. Most of the fabricated reports are made by adults involved in custody disputes or by adolescents.” Kids, especially at a young age, usually do not have much sexual knowledge, and when they do show knowledge in such a subject, it should raise awareness that something bad might be going on. This should be one of the signs to acknowledge that a child has been sexually abused. Whether the statement the child has made is true or not, it should most definitely be reported and investigated.  

Just take a moment and think about how much exploitation is out there commercially and on the internet for literally everyone to see. There are pornographic web pages out there on the internet that have no censorship or any safety measures taken as to who has access to such websites. If this type of material is out there for anyone to see, there is also child exploitation out there that people can get their hands on. Just keep in mind, the reader of this article knows someone under the age of eighteen. Would you want that individual exploited all over the web and other places? Hopefully you readers keep that in your mind when thinking of wanting to push this bill further into legislature, possibly making it a law and creating a Commission to help put an end to all of this abuse against children.  Please join me in letting your senators and your U.S. House Representative know that you care about the EARN IT Act and want to see it passed into law.    

Website for Statistics: 

Child Sexual Abuse Statistics (2015). Darkness to Light. http://www.d2l.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/all_statistics_20150619.pdf   

Source for Bill Information: 

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/3398/text   

Please Support the Older Americans Act

As individuals grow older they often become less and less independent and have to rely on family members, aids, or services to help them through day to day living. Losing independence and having to rely on others can be quite depressing for the elderly population. The Older Americans Act (OAA) is an amazing resource for the elderly population. The OAA funds programs and services that work to enable the elderly population to enjoy healthy productive and independent lives in their homes and communities (National Association of Social Workers issue brief about the Older Americans Act). Some examples of services offered through this program are family caregiver support, long-term care ombudsman, nutrition programs, transportation, and programs to prevent and address elder abuse, neglect and exploitation (NASW letter supporting the Older Americans Act). If these policies are easily accessible, the elderly population’s mental health and well-being will benefit from the services listed. These services and programs work to still give elderly individuals a sense of being independent and capable of things they believed they never would be able to be capable of achieving again upon “losing independence.”

Funding is crucial and for the OAA increasing funding is absolutely necessary. Increasing funding is necessary for a couple different reasons. One reason is changing demographics within the US Population and another reason is because of new challenges that will be endured.

Changing demographics relates to the US population as a whole aging and the baby boom generation aging. Proactive policies and approaches are essential to ensure that older adults thrive and remain engaged with their families communities, and the broader society. New challenges that will need addressed as longevity increases and the population ages are the need for housing, economic security, health care, transportation, advocacy, and additional support services (Richard J. Fiesta’s consensus recommendations, 2019). Funding through OAA is crucial to ensure that as the elderly population continues to grow the necessary resources can be provided to the elderly individuals in need.

DCFS should place siblings together in foster care

According to a Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) training titled “Keeping Children Connected to Their Brothers and Sisters,” when my mother received a sibling group of three in [date omitted to protect privacy], she should have been asked to take in the fourth sibling, who was an infant at the time. Additionally, when siblings are separated in foster care, they should have two sibling visits per month in addition to visits with the biological parent(s). Not only was this not facilitated, but any attempts to request the contact information of the foster parents of the fourth sibling were denied. It even says on the DCFS website that children in foster care will be told where their siblings are living and how to contact them. Also, if only one sibling from a sibling group is adopted, then the caseworker is supposed to speak with all parties involved about a continued contact plan or visits between the children.

This was not the only time DCFS neglected to follow through on their own policies. The sibling group of three was moved [about a year after initial placement with this student’s mother] because parental rights were being terminated, but my mother was still not able to contact the foster parents of the youngest sibling. We were told that they would be placed in a home five minutes away from the youngest, so my mother felt comfortable that they would be able to see each other. Following this removal, one of the children that was with my mother went to live with the youngest, and the other two children went to live in the household that was five minutes away. Later, the two that stayed together were moved because they were being abused. 

Throughout all the placements, the two sibling visits each month did not happen; they only saw each other during the parental meetings. The two siblings, who suffered through two placements and two school districts, came back to my mother [about seven months after being moved out of the student’s household when parental rights were terminated]. Finally, in [recent days], DCFS is getting around to moving the third child back into my mother’s care, which should have happened within 60 days of the other two returning to my mother’s house back [approximately nine months earlier], as explained in the training. Through foster parent support groups, my mother and I personally know of foster parents in similar situations. Foster parents are being denied the opportunity to keep siblings together; DCFS is failing to comply with their own policy.

We were not aware of this until my mother mistakenly took a staff training through Virtual Training Center (VTC), which shows that caseworkers should already have a working knowledge of the policy and are failing to implement it. Both caseworkers and foster parents should be aware of the information in this training, especially so siblings can stay together or stay in contact when that’s not possible. Foster children are negatively impacted when a rule like this is not enforced. Please contact your local DCFS office and urge them to consistently follow this policy.

For evidence of the importance of sibling foster care placement, see:

Washington, K. (2007). Sibling placement in foster care: a review of the evidence. Child & Family Social Work. 2007;12(4):426-433. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2206.2006.00467.x.

Student favors abortion rights

All women should have the right to do what is best for them when it comes to their body. According to the National Abortion Federation (Dudley, 2003), “Each year almost half of all pregnancies among American women are unintended. About half of these unplanned pregnancies, 1.3 million each year, are ended by abortions” (para 1). Some women who decided to abort the baby may not be in a mental place to provide for a baby. 

Young adolescent girls between the ages of 15 and 19 make up 19% of all abortions; women between 20 and 24 make up 33%; about 25% are women age of 30 or older (Dudley, 2003).  If you were a young single adolescent girl who had sex and became pregnant, you might feel that your best option would be to get an abortion because you’re not capable of caring for a child. Society may then make you feel less of a person; or worse, may call you a “murderer” because you decided abortion was the best option for you. 

The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, section 1 states:

 All persons born or national laws in the United States are subject to jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. 

It is the woman’s right to make the decision to end her pregnancy if she chooses; it is not society's right to criticize her on the decision she made. Abortion is one of those issues where equal protection is difficult to understand, because men and women have different experiences when it comes to pregnancies. Choosing to end her pregnancy does not make her any less of a person than the next woman. 

Also, when the statesmen were writing the Constitution and arguing for its passage, they all understood that privacy was a natural right. This was something that had been a topic in English philosophy and common law already for a century or more, and the fact that there was no part of the Bill or Rights that specifically mentioned privacy tells cannot be used to suggest that we privacy rights are not included. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution reserve unenumerated rights to the people and the states, and it seems likely that every single person at the Constitutional Convention understood that privacy was one of the unenumerated rights that citizens would posses.  So, it makes sense that doctors and their patients should have privacy about reproductive decisions, and the government should not legislate matters that are private decisions between doctors and their patients. The government has a right to legislate against dangerous and harmful procedures, but abortion is usually safer than childbirth. 

Please don’t believe the myth, that abortion is a form of birth control. “If abortion were used as a primary method of birth control a typical woman would have at least two or three pregnancy per year — 30 or more [abortions] during her lifetime” (Dudley, 2003, para 10). So, abortion ought to be an option that women and their doctors can consider. It can be a wise decision to have an abortion if a woman faces a risk of death if she carries a child to term, and it may be a humanitarian choice, even late in a pregnancy, if the baby has a problem that would give them only minutes or hours of life at birth, and those moments of life would be hellishly painful. We therefore ought to fund abortions so that all women, no matter their financial ability, can feel in charge of their own body. Society has no place interfering. If abortion is morally wrong, a woman can answer to God, but considering that 12% (in young women) to 75% (for women in their late 40s) of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion (miscarriages) anyway (Rice, 2018), God does not seem to be overly concerned with the well-being of blastulas and embryos.

 Instead of shaming women for controlling their reproductive power, let’s fund and make sure that the women can get proper healthcare, contraceptive education, as sexual education as early as high school. Maybe that could be start a positive start to helping cut down a number of abortions.

References

Dudley, Susan. (2003). Abortion Facts. National Abortion Federation. http://prochoice.org/wp-content/uploads/women_who_have_abortions.pdf 

Rice, W. R. (2018). The high abortion cost of human reproduction. bioRxiv (July 2018) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326485445_The_high_abortion_cost_of_human_reproduction 

 14 Amendment of the Constitution

Please advocate for the ALS Disability Insurance Access Act

The ALS Disability Insurance Access Act (H.R. 1407) is a bill that is being proposed to congress asking them to remove the five-month waiting period that ALS patients must wait to receive their Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). ALS patients currently start receiving their SSDI benefits five months after diagnosis of ALS. However, they need it immediately after diagnosis as so many who are diagnosed with ALS do not live long enough to receive the benefits available to them five months after diagnosis. Many people with ALS are diagnosed long after the disease has been affecting their bodies, and therefore they may not live long after being officially diagnosed. This is the reasoning behind the ALS Disability Insurance Act; to allow more people diagnosed with ALS to receive the benefits from their disability insurance when they really need it. 

ALS is a very gruesome disease that slowly takes over the body by taking away bodily control from a person, such as the ability to move one’s arms, ability to speak, and eventually the ability for one to breath. ALS is such a complicated disease to diagnose that it is most often the case that those who do get diagnosed are already a year or two, at minimum, into their journey with ALS. This is a large reason why so many people die with in a few weeks or months of their diagnosis, often times before five months have elapsed since their diagnosis. In general, most ALS patients only live between two and five years after getting their official diagnosis, but many do not even make it this long. This fact makes the need for support of this ALS Disability Insurance Act even more crucial. 

Victims of ALS and their families need lots of support medically, physically, and emotionally in order to deal with this disease in the time that the patient has left. In order for these patients and their families to afford and/or receive these supports, they must be able to receive their SSDI benefits from the time that they are diagnosed. As a result of the urgency and importance of this bill, I am asking you, the reader, to please pledge your support for this bill and to ask your friends and family to pledge their support for it. You and your family and friends can show your support for this bill by informing others about it and/or writing to your congressional representatives and senators asking them to vote for it. This may seem like a simple task, however, if we work together as a state and a country to raise support for this, then it will become something significant.