ELCA Advocacy has provided their June 2019 update, with advocacy action updates from: U.N. | California | Colorado | Kansas | Minnesota | Nevada (news from LEAN!) | New Mexico | Ohio | Pennsylvania | Washington| Wisconsin
William Ledford, Lutheran Engagement and Advocacy in Nevada (LEAN) writes:
LEAN has been very active this month given that our legislature only meets for a few months every two years and that we are currently at the end of the last month of the session. We are continually engaging one-on-one with legislators, as well as testifying in committees as much as we can for bills related to justice, education, equality, and hunger/poverty issues. We are involved with a bill increasing our abysmal minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2024. We wish it was more aggressively paced than that but at least it is something. We also saw a victory in a bill being signed that protects the LGBTQ+ community by making the “gay panic” and “trans panic” defenses no longer valid arguments in court. We also saw a significant victory in our primary concern this session: the regulations protecting against predatory payday loan practices. One bill was withdrawn but will come back around as a ballot measure and historically across the country those have done well. The other was creating a system that would prevent people from being able to take out a payday loan if they already have one, protecting people from the “cycle of debt” that many fall in to. This is my first session in this position, and I am pleased at how well it went.