July 2023 President’s Message

Hello League Members,

Your local League has been busy! We started June at the League of Women Voters of Florida State Convention, and ended the month with our first all-member meeting of the year, which included a presentation about the history of the Gas Plant District and Tropicana Field by author Sarah-Jane Vatelot.

During June we also had a spruce up the rain garden event, we showed up at the LGBTQ+ Youth Pride & Family Day and the Pride Festival to collect abortion-ballot petitions and inform people about their voting rights, and we hosted a new-member orientation. I joined two other League leaders for the local NAACP’s Legislative Debrief, where we discussed what bills the Florida legislature passed this session and presented calls to action based on those bills.

I am especially proud of our Taking it to the Streets event that focused on how to combat structural racism locally and was hosted by our Social Justice Team, The Center for Health Equity, and local historian Gwendolyn Reese.

Despite these exciting events locally, I can’t help but feel solemn as I write this letter to you. The Supreme Court of the United States has issued a number of decisions lately that are destructive to reaching full equity in this country. The Supreme Court gutted affirmative action and has given businesses that create “expressive” items the permission to discriminate. Our Supreme Court has changed the law as we understood it in this country for decades, and the Court’s opinions make clear that it is indifferent to the harm that discrimination has done in this country and continues to do. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said in her dissent in the University of North Carolina affirmative action case, “deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

All of this to say, we cannot depend on our nation’s courts to fix our society’s problems. We must take this work into our own hands at the local level. Whether that be through gathering petitions for the abortion ballot initiative, informing people about their voting rights, or studying the impact of Tropicana Field on the residents of St. Petersburg, your League of Women Voters of the St. Petersburg Area continues to work on the most important issues in our community and in our State. We are more inspired than ever to concentrate our efforts locally on social justice, sustainability, voting rights, and reproductive rights. We remain dedicated to working on these issues with an eye toward equity for all. We hope you will join us.

Let’s keep defending democracy together, 

Jackie Azis