Speaking to the bill on the Senate floor, Senator Surovell said, “Virginia is one of 22 states that currently has gender equality in our Constitution. Section 11, Article 1 of the Constitution of Virginia currently says that, ‘all people have the right to be free from government discrimination on the basis of religious conviction, race, color, sex, or national origin.’ So equal rights have been codified in our Constitution since 1971. This is something that isn’t new to Virginia. It is a Virginia value.”
After the vote, Senator Mamie Locke (D-Hampton) said, “This is something that we have been fighting to advance for decades. True gender equality is not going to be achieved until we amend the U.S. Constitution, and the only way to amend the U.S. Constitution is to ratify the ERA at the state level. We are moving in the right direction. I implore my colleagues in the House to now take this up and do the right thing.”
Senator Barbara Favola (D-Arlington) said, “Gender equality has been in the Virginia Constitution for 40 years, but the same cannot be said at the federal level. Various sitting Supreme Court Justices have in fact maintained that equal treatment on the basis of gender is not included in the Fourteenth Amendment. This is something that is long overdue in Virginia and nationwide.”
The Virginia Senate has repeatedly moved to ratify the federal Equal Rights Amendment, approving SJ 216 in 2015, SJ 78 in 2014, SJ 130 in 2012 and SJ 537 in 2011. Each of these proposals died in the House.
Link to original article from The Augusta Free Press
ACLU Blueprints Offer Vision to Cut US Incarceration Rate in Half by Prioritizing 'People Over Prisons' 
"These disasters drag into the light exactly who is already being thrown away," notes Naomi Klein 
How about some good news? Kansas Democratic Representative advances bill for Native Peoples. 
What mattered was that he showed up — that he put himself in front of the people whose opinions on
In an interview with Reuters conducted a month after he took office, Donald Trump asserted that the U.S. had “fallen
Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned the sweeping criminal charging policy of former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. and directed
On Tuesday the Virginia Supreme Court heard arguments in a suit challenging Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s (D) April order that restored
When Larry Harmon tried to vote on a marijuana initiative in November in his hometown of Kent, Ohio, the 59-year-old
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe signed an order on Friday restoring the voting rights of more than 200,000 convicted felons who