Arkansas Equality

Tomorrow I will be attending the Senate Public Health, Welfare and Labor committe meeting were SB959 is on the agenda. My sincere hope is that this hateful bill will die an unceremonious death in committee. That being said, it is imperative that the GLBTQ community organize an effective means to combat legislation like this in the future. For those of you who do not know, a Yahoo Group (and a myspace page) has been created to form Arkansas Equality.

From the Ark Equlity Yahoo group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ArkEquality/ )...

"We should stive to be truly STATEWIDE, NON-PARTISAN, ANTI-RACIST, ANTI-CLASIST, SMART, STRATEGIC, and FOCUSED ON LGBT RIGHTS. This yahoo group was started in hopes that queer and allied Arkansans will join together to form a lasting organization to push for equality of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Arkansans. Arkansas deserves to have a strong group that is committed ACHIEVING measurable progress towards fairness. To bring Arkansas organizing and activism in line with other states (many successful at passing pro-LGBT laws!), we should strive to have a non-profit organization with (someday) 3 arms to do the work of equality: the c3(non-profit, tax deductible, does education and outreach work), the c4(non-profit, not tax deductible, does political work like direct lobbying and getting citizens to ask their representative to vote fairly), and PAC(would have the goal of electing fair-minded candidates to office). We should stive to be truly STATEWIDE, NON-PARTISAN, ANTI-RACIST, ANTI-CLASIST, SMART, STRATEGIC, and FOCUSED ON LGBT RIGHTS. "


Let's give this group our support as we demand our place at the table and tell the Womacks of this state that we will no longer be their whipping boys/girls or let them designate us as second-class citizens of this state. I, for one, will NOT sit quietly on the sidelines and have my rights denied because some hate-monger wants to energize his conservative base.