Ultraviolet Shedding Light on Women's Rights
Note -- for more information about Ultraviolet, visit this website: http://www.weareultraviolet.org/campaigns/
Ultraviolet Shedding Light on Womens Rights
By Constance Spruill
August 20, 2014.
Ultraviolet is shedding light on several issues related to women’s rights via billboards placed in airports and designed to inform the public. The group, composed of men and women from all over the U.S., seeks to fight injustice against women and to educate the public about policies that support inequality and sexism. In its latest campaign, the group has placed billboards in airports in several states including North Carolina, Texas, Louisiana and Ohio.
The billboards are tailored specifically to bring attention to the issues in each state that Ultraviolet believes are unfair and even harmful to women. Some of the issues include equal pay, abortion rights and maternity leave. In states like Ohio, for instance, the group is fighting against laws that would allow men who father children as a result of sexual assault to have parental rights such as custody and visitation. Although other states, 30 in fact, have similar laws on the books, the issue came to light in Ohio during the trial of Ariel Castro. Castro, while on trial for holding three women captive in his Cleveland, Ohio, home where he repeatedly raped them for over 10 years, asked permission to see the six-year-old child he fathered with one of the victims.
In other states like North Carolina, Ultraviolet is shedding light on issues that affect the rights of women such as childcare and equal pay. In the Tar Heel state, the bulletin board says that more than one-fourth of women live below the poverty level, and the cost of college tuition is substantially less than the cost of daycare. The billboard in the Louisiana airport claims that a recent survey ranked Louisiana as the worst state for women. Ultraviolet’s activities, however, are not just geared towards states.
The group was successful in convincing several big companies, including Reebok, to sever endorsement contracts with rapper Rick Ross after his single in which he glorified drugging and raping a female was released. Ultraviolet was also responsible for getting funding pulled from Russ Limbaugh’s radio show. Limbaugh was under fire for referring, several times on air, to a young college student as a “slut” because she voiced her position about insurance companies covering contraceptives....
Read more at http://guardianlv.com/2014/08/ultraviolet-shedding-light-on-womens-rights/#6f6fZOXLxZoD7IRK.99
= new reply since forum marked as read
This is a continuation of the DU thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/11384585
Cleveland.com
Women's pay, women's rights highlighted on Ohio 'tourism' billboards
By Jackie Borchardt, Northeast Ohio Media Group
August 21, 2014, updated August 22, 2014
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Visitors to three Ohio cities in the next few weeks will be welcomed by billboards drawing attention to the fact Ohio doesn't guarantee paid maternity leave and nearly one in five Ohio women live in poverty.
UltraViolet, a national women's rights group, bought the billboard space near airports in Cleveland and Dayton and near Interstate-270 in Columbus. The Cleveland billboard is scheduled to go up Monday on Berea Freeway near Brookpark Road and run for four weeks.
The ads also will appear on travelers' mobile phones while inside the airports...
...On the billboards:
•Women are paid 77 cents for every dollar a man earns
•18 percent of Ohio women live in poverty
•Ohio doesn't guarantee any paid maternity or sick leave
•Ohio's new abortion restrictions closed five clinics in 2013
•Many Ohio politicians opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
MORE (plus a pic of the billboard) at http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2014/08/womens_rights_billboards_go_up.html