Bill of Rights Defense Campaign

BILL OF RIGHTS Defense Committee - Working with communities to uphold the Bill of RightsWe the People
Working with communities to uphold the Bill of Rights
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State Resolution Toolkit

Use a Petition as an Organizing Tool

A petition can be a way of accomplishing many parts of your campaign at once:

  1. Outreach into the community to draw people together who have a similar grievance

  2. A way for individuals in the Bill of Rights Defense group to learn how to speak about the Patriot Act with others

  3. A measure of your affect on the community – a healthy number of signatures can be impressive to elected officials.

  • Use petitions collected in various communities to contact people who will be supportive of your cause. Create a phone tree, and begin to call supporters. If you don’t have petitions, maybe you could start a statewide petition drive. Create a basic message. You may not have your resolution written yet, but you can ask people to sign a simple petition like this:

    We, the undersigned (your state) voters, strongly support the passage of a statewide resolution opposing the USA PATRIOT Act and post 9/11 Executive and Department of Justice Orders, detailed in the attached resolution. We ask our Legislators to quickly pass this resolution, putting our state on record defending our United States and our state Constitutions, including our Bill of Rights. We also urge our Governor to enact the Executive Orders necessary to strengthen this statement of your state’s commitment to protect its residents from the excess of our federal government.
  • If your group decides not to do a petition drive, then either each community can be responsible for spreading the word in their own area – or the statewide group can figure out how to cover other areas of the state.