The new Congress hasn’t taken office yet, but the writing already is on the wall. Efforts to advance women’s equality will be relegated to the back burner, or worse, actively torched. Today we witnessed conservatives in the Senate block the Paycheck Fairness Act, denying women a significant step toward finally closing the gender wage gap.
Millions of women will be pushed into poverty and out of the middle class if preliminary recommendations for cutting Social Security benefits made by the National Commission for Fiscal Responsibility and Reform are adopted, says NOW President Terry O’Neill.
President Obama signed the Tribal Law and Order Act into law. This landmark bill is a tribute to the years of hard work by Native women all across the country urging Congress to address violent crime and sexual assault on Indian lands. The law creates a new standard of more equitable law enforcement on Indian reservations that will discourage criminal activity, elevate public safety, and greatly improve the daily lives of Indian people and their neighbors. The Act will enhance the criminal justice system by improving and measuring the federal law enforcement response and will enhance coordination and communication between federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies.
The National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest organization of feminist activists in the United States, joins the Arizona chapter of NOW in supporting the public protest against Arizona’s controversial new immigration law, SB 1070, which makes it a state crime for a person to be undocumented. The law, as it stands, will take effect on July 29 unless the courts intervene.
“For years, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arapaio has been terrorizing this community by profiling, arresting and deporting the undocumented. This law codifies Sheriff Arapaio’s vigilante justice and gives a green light to the politics of racial division, fear and discrimination,” says NOW President Terry O’Neill.
NOW is incensed that President Barack Obama agreed today to issue an executive order designed to appease a handful of anti-choice Democrats who have held up health care reform in an effort to restrict women’s access to abortion. Through this order, the president has announced he will lend the weight of his office and the entire executive branch to the anti-abortion measures included in the Senate bill, which the House is now prepared to pass.
Tell the Senate to vote No on the SAVE America Act.