Progressive Club to hold monthly meeting
The Progressive Club of the Islands will hold its virtual monthly meeting on May 18 at 4 p.m.
The guest speaker will be Howard Simon, who retired in 2018 after serving for 21 years as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. Prior to that, he served as executive director of the Michigan ACLU for 23 years. He will speak on “Resisting the Slide toward Authoritarianism.”
The program will focus on the need to understand the long-term threat to the democratic values of freedom of speech, voting rights, and women’s rights, with emphasis on the revolution in constitutional interpretation being imposed by the Judiciary. Simon will also suggest strategies to resist growing authoritarianism.
During his 44 years with the ACLU, he worked on a number of high-profile issues, including school vouchers, the Terry Schiavo case, abortion rights, barring doctors from talking to patients about the safe storage of guns in the home, school and library censorships, and the right of gay men and lesbians to adopt children and marry.
Simon’s work for voting rights began in 1965 as a college student working as an assistant to the Rev. Andrew Young during the Selma to Montgomery march for passage of the Voting Rights Act. His other work has included: drafting the 2018 constitutional amendment to restore voting rights for former felons; working to replace electronic voting in Florida with a system that uses paper-based ballots and optical scan readers; challenging Legislature’s restrictions on voter registration and early and Sunday voting; and helping secure passage of the Fair Districts Amendments to curb partisan gerrymandering.
After his retirement, Simon founded the Clean Okeechobee Waters Foundation to work with medical researchers who linked toxins in blue-green algae to neurodegenerative diseases. His work has involved public education about the threat to public health and policy changes to mitigate the pollution of the state’s fresh waters that create harmful algal blooms.
Simon is a board member of the Calusa Waterkeeper and the Florida Policy Institute. He has been a contributing columnist for the Island Reporter, Palm Beach Post, and other newspapers in Florida.
It is an interactive meeting with time provided for questions. To attend the Zoom meeting, email pcisancap@gmail.com to receive the link or watch online at www.facebook.com/pcisancap.
Annual dues for the Progressive Club are $35 for an individual or $70 for a couple. To renew a membership or join, mail a check payable to PCI to: PCI, P.O. Box 898, Sanibel, FL 33957.
For more information, visit https://pcislands.org or contact 239-994-3175 or pcisancap@gmail.com.