It's Tuesday! DO SOMETHING!

Yes, I'm actually starting a feature! A "segment," if you will. Every Tuesday (hopefully), I'll be posting a few ideas of things you can do to help the world. Some will be letter-writing campaigns or donation opportunities and some will be little things that you can do at home to try to step a bit more lightly.

Here's the list for this week:

• Call on the International Community to Help Protect the People of the Democratic Republic of Congo
  The situation in Congo is dire--send a message to the international community that the time to act is now. You need to sign up as a member of Amnesty International to send the letter, but AI is a wonderful source of information globally and well worth joining. The call to action has recipients named from the previous administration here in the US, but it will actually get to the proper people. (And don't worry, AI won't send you a million emails--or indeed, any at all if that's your wish.)
• Do Something Useful with Those Empty Bottles
  If you do have empty water bottles around (try not to, but if you do), there's a great way to reuse them that doesn't involve washing them and drinking out of them again (which may or may not cause more chemicals to leak out of them). Fill them with cold water and stick them in the back of your fridge. Air in a fridge rushes out when you open the door, and the warm air that replaces it has to be chilled all over again, using energy. Cold things, on the other hand, stay cold when you open the door (if you don't leave the door open all day). The more stuff in your fridge, the less air in your fridge, the less your fridge has to work.
• Help Improve Education through Small-Scale Donation
  Because of the lack of public school funding in the US, teachers often end up spending a distressing percentage of their incomes buying simple yet needed supplies for their classrooms. Donors Choose is a website designed to provide targeted funds to targeted classrooms. Teachers write up grant proposals and donors choose which program to give their money to. It's a fantastic way to give a gift to a friend, by the way. My best friend got a donation made in her name to a school in her area, which made it both very personal and very conscious. No gift wrapping, no fuss, no overhead. Just a teacher who now has the books she needed to help further her students' educations.

That's all for today! Have a good one--and do something!

Full Disclosure! Unless I think that's a bad idea.

Here's a little political/legal/human rights news to go with your fair trade Sunday morning coffee.

So, Prop 8, as you know, was a proposition brought before the Californian public in 2008 to add an amendment to the state constitution to read "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." No more gay marriage.

The public went to the polls, they voted as is both their right and their responsibility, and a slim majority of them chose to vote yes and restrict legal marriage in the state to that between a man and a woman. This sucks, is unfair to a minority in our country, and is, unfortunately, now law. California is not the first state to do this, and I am tragically sure it will not be the last.

However, California's significant and very vocal gay population and its supporters have chosen to exercise their constitutional right to take part in boycotts, pickets, and protests against companies and societies who donated to the Yes on Prop 8 campaigns. The information about who gave money to those campaigns (and to the No on 8 campaigns for that matter) are a matter of public record under the California state campaign-finance disclosure act.

Which, you can imagine, has made gay marriage opponents a little bit nervous.

So the Prop 8 guys called in their lawyers to protest the disclosure law, stating that if donors were to be publicly named, they would be subject to "harassment" from gay rights groups.

(In case you're wondering? Yes, you are legally allowed to picket, boycott, and peacefully assemble against any person or entity in the United States of America. And in California, too.)

This past week, I was pleased to hear that the district judge hearing the case in Sacramento dismissed it, commenting that donors' requests for anonymity should not trump California's authority to require "full and fair disclosure of everyone who's involved in these political campaigns." [HRC article and San Francisco Chronicle article]

I'm amused by this ruling because, as the HRC article states, it is kind of funny that the Prop 8 proponents (P8Ps?) are crying foul because they're being "harassed" by the very people whose rights they've just helped to take away.

And this, my friends, is why I both love and hate democracy. I love that we all have a chance to have our say (let's pretend that there really is fair access to voting in this country for a moment), but I hate that that sometimes means there will be more people who disagree with my vote than agree.

I now return you to your Super Bowl Sunday.