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Richmond Craft Mafia Handmade Holiday Craft Show- Art 180 needs volunteers!
On Saturday December 8th, from 11am-5pm, at Art Works (320 Hull Street, Richmond VA), the Richmond Craft Mafia is holding their annual Handmade Holiday Craft Show.
Art 180, an art organization for youth in troubled circumstances, needs volunteers to help sell their goods and promote the organization. There are two shifts, and they need two volunteers per shift: (includes set-up and training) or 1:45pm-5:15pm (includes training and breakdown). Contact michael@art180.org to volunteer.
Looks like HB 1, the Fetal Personhood Bill, is not going through this season.
According to this article in the Washington Examiner, Virginia Republicans don’t have sufficient votes to advance HB 1, the bill that would declare fertilized eggs as having full personhood. If they can’t get it out of committee and into the General Assembly, it won’t be a problem this year. It will have ‘died in committee’, by legislative parlance.
The cutoff date for the advancement vote is November 29th, this Thursday. We’ll know by then if the personhood bill is going to be part of the 2013 fight.
For more info on bills going to legislature, here are bills in the areas of: Elections, Education, Employment and Public Benefits, Taxes and Finance, Prisoners and Crime, LGBTQ Concerns, and Reproductive Rights and Related Issues.
Virginia General Assembly 2013: Legislation Regarding Abortion, Contraception Coverage, Rape
HB 1: The Fetal Personhood Bill, back again for another round. Establishes “personhood” as beginning at conception, outlawing all abortion and processes that could interfere with a fertilized egg.
HB 1285: Bans and criminalizes abortions after 20 weeks gestation, except in narrow cases of medical threat to the mother, under the assumption that at this level of development, unborn children can feel pain. Depending upon what penalties are incurred, who determines what severity of medical threat merits a termination, and the impact of “methods most likely to allow the survival of the child” on the mother’s health, this could be an inconsequential bill or a negative one.
HB 1316: Establishes sex-selective abortions as a felony, requires women seeking abortions to sign a statement acknowledging this. Sex-selective abortion is not a widespread or even observed problem in Virginia; this bill was generated to support the anti-abortion talking point that it is, and to provide another avenue of prosecuting doctors who perform abortions.
HB 1112: Eliminates the HPV vaccine requirement for girls entering public school. The driving motivation of this bill is the colloquial belief that protecting girls from Human Papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted infection that can cause cervical cancer, will cause them to become promiscuous. This has potentially wide-reaching public health implications, and is based on a misconception.
SB 277: Prohibits and criminalizes forced abortion. At face value this appears positive- nobody should be forced to have an abortion against their will. However, it was introduced by the same senator, Ralph K. Smith (R), who introduced the anti-sex-selective abortion bill, and appears to be merely another way to enter fetuses at all levels of development into law as “unborn children”. Supports the anti-abortion meme that abortion doctors force women into abortions.
SB 21: Broadens the definition of rape to remove the requirement of force. “Any person who has sexual intercourse with a complaining witness, accomplished against the complaining witness’s will by coercion, is guilty of rape. Currently such an offense must be accomplished by force, threat, or intimidation.”
HB 1315: A Conscience Clause exempting employers from covering contraception, sterilization, and abortificant drugs in their employee insurance plan, for any reason.
HB 1314: Requires that all insurers offering policies to employers offer a policy that does not include contraception, sterilization, and abortificant drug coverage, in order to furnish employers who are taking advantage of the Conscience Clause outlined in HB 1315.
Buckle up, looks like it’s going to be an interesting season yet again.
Top 10 Bills to Oppose in the Virginia 2013 General Assembly
I combed through the submitted legislation to be heard at the Virginia 2013 General Assembly, and found significant bills in the areas of: Elections, Education, Employment and Public Benefits, Taxes and Finance, Prisoners and Crime, LGBTQ Concerns, and Reproductive Rights and Related Issues.
Here are the worst that I saw, which will require strong opposition during the upcoming legislative season:
1. HB 1: The Fetal Personhood Bill, back again for another round. Establishes “personhood” as beginning at conception, outlawing all abortion and processes that could interfere with a fertilized egg.
2. SJ 17: A proposal to amend the state constitution to allow the Virginia Board of Education to establish charter schools. Meaning, to establish private schools with public monies. This is yet another attack on public education by privatization interests.
3. SJ 25, HJ 536: Proposes a constitutional amendment to disallow union-only shops. Establishes Virginia as a “Right to Work” state. This was conceived not to protect workers from exorbitant dues or to provide for employee choice regarding professional associations, but instead to prevent unions from becoming large enough to effectively bargain collectively. Declares unions that have achieved “an employment monopoly in any enterprise” to be a criminal conspiracy.
4. HB 487: Proposes that convicted prisoners should be charged for their transport to a jail or prison. This would be yet another charge- in addition to rent, fees for medical attention, cost of stationary, stamps, sanitary materials, and additional food- incurred by a population that tends to come from poverty, and that rarely makes even close to minimum wage while working in prison.
5. HB 567: Eliminates the continuing contract for teachers who have not achieved contracted status by the 2013-2014 school year. Instead, contracts will be meted out in three year periods, and to be eligible for a contract, a new teacher must first teach for five years. This bill is a major threat to educators, who will now be in a position of even less job stability than they currently have. This will also make it harder for teachers to oppose administrators and advocate for the needs of themselves and their students. Here is the Virginia Education Association’s fact sheet on continuing contracts and why they’re necessary for quality education.
6. SB 692, HB 248: Eliminates corporate income tax, effective 2014. This would exempt corporate entities from paying into the public funds that provide things like infrastructure, education for their workers, copyright protections, industrial subsidies, and, in the case of minimum-wage employers like Walmart, the public assistance that keeps their underpaid employees alive. As this report from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission shows, Virginia depends on the revenue generated by corporate income tax, but already has a very low rate, and is conservative in which corporations are eligible to be taxed.
7. HB 1001: Calls the state police to publish an explicit agreement with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s policies regarding undocumented immigrants, and to “perform federal immigration law-enforcement functions in the Commonwealth after arrest of an alien.” Meaning, to adopt a policy of beginning the deportation process upon arrest, regardless of if the arrested party is guilty of a crime.
8. HB 1112: Eliminates the HPV vaccine requirement for girls entering public school. The driving motivation of this bill is the colloquial belief that protecting girls from Human Papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted infection that can cause cervical cancer, will cause them to become promiscuous. This has potentially wide-reaching public health implications, and is based on a misconception.
9. HB 1315: A Conscience Clause exempting employers from covering contraception, sterilization, and abortificant drugs in their employee insurance plan, for any reason. This bill operates in tandem with HB 1314, which requires insurance companies offering employee policies to offer policies that omit contraception coverage, so that employers may deny their employees that kind of reproductive care. This puts the personal, private medical decisions of employees- mostly women- in the hands of their employers.
10. Open space for any late-submitted travesties that may arise. Stay tuned!
Interested in eradicating sexual injustice? Post or message me to get involved in our screening of the film 12th and Delaware. We also need help organizing educational sessions on campus. Our goal is to educate women (and men) about the truths of Crisis Pregnancy Centers and they way they misrepresent themselves to women experiencing unintended pregnancies. We don’t care whether you’re prochoice or antichoice - we can all agree that misleading women is wrong. #TruthFail at VCU
I was at the #M3 “Speak Loudly With Silence” women’s rights rally in Richmond, VA
I figured some of my followers might be interested in more information from someone who was at the protest/rally this past Saturday, March 3rd, 2012. I was also at the silent protest at the Capitol on Monday, February 20th.
I posted (shaky, unedited) videos of the arrests and other police actions on my YouTube channel. I was not one of those who stayed on the Capitol steps, so I was not arrested, but I saw most of the arrests as they occurred. Here are two videos that are much prettier than mine.
I reblogged it earlier, but my friend, who was also at the protest, wrote an excellent account of the treatment of the arrestees on her own blog. You can read it here.
The local newspaper addressed the treatment of prisoners in an article today, but the one that appears on its website is different and has less detail than the one I read in the actual paper this morning. Nevertheless, it contains more information. The newspaper also posted a story on Saturday, the day of the protest.
I really like these photos; they are much better than any that I took.
I may edit this post later once I am not so busy, but we shall see.
Kativist RVA: The police's treatment of those arrested at the Silence is Deafening M3 Protest
Trigger warnings: non-gratuitous discussion of arrests, police weaponry, imprisonment, unsanitary/humiliating bathroom arrangements, zip-tying, extended confinement.
Yesterday, more than a thousand people gathered at Virginia’s capital at the Silence Is Deafening women’s rights protest, to…
Are Virginia's New Abortion Rules the Worst Yet? || Mother Jones
On Friday evening, Virginia’s Department of Health issued a strict new set of rules for abortion clinics—and women’s health advocates fear that facilities that can’t comply could be shuttered.
The regulations require Virginia’s 22 clinics to meet strict new physical standards; pre-op rooms, for example, must measure at least 80 square feet, and operating rooms must measure 250 square feet. Hallways must be at least five feet wide. The requirements are based on the state’s 2010 guidelines for new outpatient surgical facilities.
There is a damn good chance that most, if not all, of Virginia’s abortion clinics will be closed. Retro-fits are likely to be prohibitively expensive, and most clinics weren’t built with these standards in mind.
Tarina Keene, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia, told Mother Jones on Monday that the new rules may actually be the most strict regulations in the United States. “It would be challenging for the majority of our facilities to continue offering first-trimester care,” Keene said. “These are designed to really cease first-trimester abortion services in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
The president of Washington, D.C.’s Planned Parenthood chapter has already told theWashington Post that she doesn’t believe that a clinic in Falls Church, Virginia, will be able to meet all of those requirements. Keene said that many other clinics in the state won’t be able to meet them, either—which she thinks is exactly the reason the Department of Health wrote them that way. “There’s no doubt in my mind that this is an attack on Roe,” said Keene. “You can ban abortion by making it inaccessible.”
Supporters of these new regulations suggest that the regulations are necessary to keep women safe (who can argue with safety?), but 1st trimester abortions are safe. This is a political attempt to subvert Roe v. Wade. Period.
Virginia isn’t the first to release a set of rules like this. Abortion rights advocates often refer to them as TRAP (“targeted regulation of abortion providers”) laws. Kansas got a got a good deal of attention in June when it released new rules that would have shut down all but one clinic in the state. A judge blocked those rules from taking effect, but the court battle over them continues.
Abortion rights advocates argue that the rules aren’t necessary; first-trimester abortions can and are performed safely in doctors’ offices like other outpatient services (for example, vasectomies). “These laws have nothing to do with improving patient outcomes and everything to do with making it more difficult to provide abortion services,” said Elizabeth Nash, a public policy associate with the Guttmacher Institute.
The Virginia rules come after the state legislature passed a law back in February that reclassified abortion clinics as hospitals. The law directed the state board of health to establish new rules specifically for abortion clinics, and because it was passed as “emergency” legislation, the state was expected to have them put in place within 280 days.
The rules released on Friday are the draft version; the board is slated to vote on the rules at a public meeting on September 15. After that, Gov. Bob McDonnell must sign them into law, which he is expected to do before the end of the year. Since these are emergency regulations, the board would then have to draft the permanent regulations, a process expected to take 12 to 18 months. Abortion rights advocates worry, though, that the emergency regulations could force clinics to shut down in the interim.
Again, if you’re in Virginia, or know people in Virginia, visit The Virginia Coalition to Protect Women’s Health website to learn how to get involved.
I am so ashamed to be a Virginian. Unfortunately, I will be out of the country when the awesome Virginia Coalition to Protect Women’s Health has a protest planned in Richmond.
As Irene Devastates, Ron Paul Says We Need to "Come to Our Senses" and Abolish FEMA
We are still without power here in Richmond, and it could be a week before it’s restored. Trees and debris litter the streets, and 18 people are dead along the East Coast, according to the last NPR report I read. But Ron Paul wants us to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and soldier on without federal assistance in a state that has experienced both a near unprecedented earthquake and a major hurricane in a single week. Presumably he believes the invisible hand of the free market will help us rebuild. To this I say “Fuck you, Ron Paul, you absolute ass.”
O, what the earthquake hath wrought!
