— Sydney

January 20, 1999 Petition Update

Over 16,000 names have now been added to the master petition. And yes, I have taken your suggestion to sent it to the two Judiciary committees. The AllRunique mail box will remain open until the Hate Crimes Prevention Act passes. Which hopefully, will not be long now. The message against hate is being heard... The following comes from President Clinton's State of the Union Address last night:

"Since 1997, our Initiative on Race has sought to bridge the divides between and among our people. In its report last fall, the Initiative's Advisory Board found that Americans really do want to bring our people together across racial lines. We know it's been a long journey. For some it goes back to before the beginning of our republic, for others back since the Civil War, for others throughout the 20th century. But for most of us alive today, in a very real sense this journey began 43 years ago when a woman named Rosa Parks sat down on a bus in Alabama and wouldn't get up. She's sitting down with the first lady tonight, and she may get up or not, as she chooses.

We know that our continuing racial problems are aggravated, as the presidential initiative said, by opportunity gaps. The initiative I have outlined tonight will help to close them. But we know that the discrimination gap has not been fully closed, either.

Discrimination or violence because of race or religion, ancestry or gender, disability or sexual orientation is wrong and it ought to be illegal. Therefore, I ask Congress to make the Employment Nondiscrimination Act and the Hate Crimes Prevention Act the law of the land."

The Human Rights Action Center makes sending messages to members of congress fast and easy. http://www.hrc.org/actncntr/index.html

Thank you,

— Leslie Palmer

(Member of the Jacksonville Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville, Florida and The Unitarian Universalists of the Cumberland Valley, Pennsylvania)