Some positive stuff on this list, but I'm really fucked up at the relaxation of rules against police engaging reckless high-speed chases, and the new "parental bill of rights."
> Beginning Thursday, officers can pursue someone if they have reasonable suspicion a person has violated any law.
To my deeply non-lawyer eyes, this reads very badly? It sounds like this law allows parents to forcibly out their kids with an administrative filing to their schools?
I'd be happy to be wrong about all of the above, to simply not have understood the legal text well enough to form a reasonable reaction. I can only go off my layfemme understanding, limited as it is, which points to the above bill as being very fucked indeed.
I don't know quite how I missed this news until now... I somehow missed it in newsletters tracking anti-queer bills in various states, in local Seattle papers, on here or on cohost.
(It may well have been in some of those papers, but I personally missed it if so.)
This is a good point for me to do some reflection on what else I need to be reading so that I can call senators ahead of time, and in general just more active.
On that note, if anyone has any suggestions as to good resources for keeping on top of anti-queer politics in Washington state, I'd be very appreciative!
@glyph Oh, absolutely agreed. I am very upset that something like that didn't get a single nay vote — not even one. It shouldn't take citizens being hypervigilant, that initiative should have been dead on arrival.
@glyph Yeah, especially compared to many parts of the country, it feels like it should be relatively easy for a senator representing parts of Seattle to vote nay and to defend it. Easy or not, though, campaigning and defending their votes is part of the job too — that includes fighting off bad faith attacks like those caltrops (which I agree are far too frequent).
I am very glad that QLaw, ACLU WA, and Legal Voice are challenging I-2081 in court.
Hopefully there will be movement towards an initiative that explicitly recognizes student rights instead of framing everything in incredibly toxic "parental rights" language.
Thank this asshole, by the way, for attacking queer children, trying to prevent income tax, trying to repeal what modest capital gains taxes we have, making police even more dangerous, and walking back our already too-small climate commitments.
Trump indeed did encounter a different criminal justice system: namely, one that works broadly like it does in the textbooks, and that is mostly fair in the ways that we are told to believe it is fair.
That is not the criminal justice system that most of the rest of us would likely encounter.
@glyph Ah, that's a really good point, yeah. I'm sure there's some who are genuinely apathetic, but you're quite right to call out the need for systemic reform there as well.