What gets me most about Occupy Wall Street are the dispatches from Occupy everywhere. I love that people are willing to swim upstream wherever they live. I love that people stand up for the America they believe in, right there in the America they live in.
Over on our Facebook page, Sara Ator Wilcox posts something from the We Do campaign in North Carolina. This fall, voters there will get the same question that has been a slam-dunk at the polls for nearly a decade now -- banning marriage rights for the LGBT crowd. Up against it, the We Do campaign has sent same-sex couples into the clerk's office to get rejected for marriage licenses. The point is partly to show that same-sex marriage is already banned in the state, just not as a constitutional amendment. But more broadly, if they do lose this one, they'll have at least spent the campaign showing voters that banning equality causes real suffering for the second-class citizens and the officials forced by law to keep them that way.
In Mississippi, Cristen Hemmins put up this sign for people driving to the Ole Miss/Alabama game. It's against November's referendum 26, which would grant personhood to any fertilized egg. The measure would immediately make abortion a crime, along with any form of birth control that prevents an egg from attaching and mostly likely IVF since that involves freezing fertilized eggs. The campaign hasn't got much money, so handmade signs are a lot of it.
Mississippi has another referendum, question 27, which would require voters to show ID they've never had to show before in order to cast a ballot. Together, the two questions amount to bigger government and a smaller democracy.
(Send stuff from where you live and what you're doing. We can make a list.)
