January priorities embrace recovering from the vacations and implementing new resolutions. This month additionally marks the implementation of latest legal guidelines each state and federal.
In 2022 the California Legislature handed practically 1,200 payments. All however a pair hundred turn into legislation with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature.
Some laws tweaks earlier legal guidelines to stability surprising negative effects. Others sundown outdated legal guidelines or shall be phased sooner or later years. However some might have an effect on your each day life in methods it’s possible you’ll discover compelling, annoying, beneficiant, costly, simply, or pointless.
Fairly a couple of mirror belated efforts to incorporate Native People, Black People, and immigrants of each race, faith and gender within the invitation to really feel belonging in our society.
Curious among the many new gender fairness legal guidelines is the “pink tax” legislation. Shops can no lengthy cost totally different costs for merchandise primarily based on gender. Now maybe I’ll try the deodorant within the girls’s aisle within the pharmacy after utilizing males’s deodorant for years.
Extra consequentially, Senate Invoice 375 will give certified nurse practitioners and authorized nurse midwives the power to carry out first-trimester abortions in California with out the supervision of a doctor. The brand new legislation is authored by Senate Professional Tem Toni Atkins, who explains that it clarifies current legal guidelines and permits for extra educated nurse practitioners in high-need areas to carry out surgical abortions.
The California Indian Education Act, AB-1703 establishes job forces desiring to slim the achievement hole and undertake new curriculum primarily based on a fuller understanding of historical past.
The act encourages faculty districts, county places of work of training, and constitution colleges to work with native tribes to debate problems with mutual concern.
Associated to AB-1703, a brand new vacation to be celebrated on the fourth Friday of September is Native American Day. Its goal is to honor those that have been part of the American custom even earlier than our nation’s founding.
Three different new state holidays additional acknowledge the broad variety of People, their life experiences, and historical past.
Genocide Remembrance Day (April 24) shall be “a day for all to mirror on previous and current genocides, however particularly those who have felt the impression of those atrocities and teams which have discovered refuge in California …” based on the governor’s workplace.
The brand new Juneteenth (June 19) vacation displays on the continued reason for freedom for Black People. In is well known on June 19, the day in 1865 when Union General Gordon Granger and his troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to ship the federal proclamation that each one slaves have been free.
Lunar New Year will now be acknowledged as a vacation on the second or third new moon following the Winter Solstice. Sacramento State’s Dr. Chao Vang calls the vacation, “… an affirmation of the contribution that Asian People have had on California.”
Vang sees it as “a step in the proper route” given the rise in anti-Asian racism and discrimination in the course of the pandemic.
Assembly Bill 2282 additionally addresses racism and hate crimes. This new legislation will increase penalties for hate crimes when perpetrators use hateful symbols, equivalent to swastikas, nooses, and desecrated crosses. Hate symbols are legally restricted in expanded places together with Ok-12 colleges and schools.
Final within the gallop of latest legal guidelines that caught my eye are nods to those that try to spend a part of their lives outdoors their vehicles.
For some years, California drivers have been required to take care of a slim three-foot security cushion from bicycles. Now automobiles are required to maneuver into one other lane “with due regard for security and site visitors situations, if practicable and never prohibited by legislation.”
One other new legislation permits pedestrians to jaywalk (cross a road at a non-designated space) except “a reasonably careful person would realize there is an immediate danger of a collision.”
Might all of us resolve to reside safer, kinder lives in 2023.
