Welcome to the Action Center Weekly Update. Each week, we will provide a brief analysis of critical issues in this political moment, share immediate actions you can take, and provide helpful resources to deepen knowledge and practice of our collective work to side with love.
Nothing is inevitable. All justice movements are powered by ordinary people who come together to defeat oppression and build a loving world. You are not alone. We have power. Together we can practice and win a just and loving world where all of us thrive.
Remember we build strong movements when we take action together. Organize teams and networks that can take these actions together. For support on practical organizing skills and support check out our Organizing School and Skill Up resources.
Democracy
We are witnessing the consolidation of power in the hands of the few instead of the many. Democracy is a process and practice grounded in our values of interdependence that affirms the inherent worth and dignity of all. We are the majority, but it will take organizing our communities to harness our power to defeat authoritarianism and build a truly multiracial democracy.
The Update:
SCOTUS Update: This past week has laid bare the urgency of our collective action to defend democracy, dignity, and the rights of all people.
The 2025 U.S. Supreme Court session handed down decisions that expand executive power and shrink civil rights protections. As the UUA and UUSJ stated in our joint response: “The U.S. Supreme Court has sharpened the points on the Faux King’s crown in ways inconceivable a mere session or two ago.” As people of faith, we say: we will not be moved.
Reconciliation Bill Update: The Senate has passed the reconciliation bill, which poses a generational threat to democracy, public health, and community safety. It slashes health care and nutrition support for millions—especially children, immigrants, and communities of color—while funneling $150 billion into unchecked immigration enforcement, family separations, and expanded detention of children. If enacted, it would deepen poverty, supercharge state violence, and erode the constitutional protections that hold our democracy together. Stay tuned for action opportunities from our partner, Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice (UUSJ).
Act:
Call your Senators today. Demand they defend democracy and fund health care and families not detention centers and ICE.
Read:
Read the full UUA and UUSJ joint statement here.
Join:
Join the Good Trouble Lives On mobilization.
Good Trouble Lives On Mobilization—July 17: Mark your calendars
On Wednesday, July 17, join Side With Love and our partners for the Good Trouble Lives On Mobilization in Washington, D.C.
We’re taking action to:
Defend birthright citizenship and reproductive freedom
Protect Black and brown communities from authoritarian overreach
Demand real democracy—not rule by billionaires, bigots, and faux kings
This is a moment to show up, rooted in our values, in the spirit of John Lewis and generations of faith-fueled freedom fighters.
Gender & LGBTQ Justice
Every body is sacred. Side With Love unapologetically affirms that trans people are divine, that abortion is a blessing, and that no one is disposable. Attacks on identity is a part of a divide and conquer tactic that relies on the belief that one group’s safety comes at the expense of another group’s safety. Solidarity is the moral and strategic mandate of our time, and we must rise to challenge these attacks and build communities of care and safety for all.
The Update:
Recent conversations around the U.S. Supreme Court's Skrmetti decision—which upheld a state ban on gender-affirming care for minors—highlight that while the ruling was troubling, it was not as far-reaching as it may appear, and the trans rights movement should not be blamed. In parallel, critics like Lexi McMenamin continue to call out mainstream media for perpetuating transphobic narratives, urging accountability in public discourse. Sam Ames emphasizes resilience beyond hope as a necessary foundation for advocacy in uncertain times, while Rev. Angela Tyler Williams reflects on the faith-rooted, love-centered resistance to ongoing attacks on bodily autonomy. Upcoming events like Faithful Futures aim to empower faith communities to support reproductive justice, while resources like ReproAction’s video on immigration and reproductive justice reveal the deep intersections of these struggles and the importance of unified, compassionate resistance.
Read: What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About SCOTUS’s Trans Rights Ruling
“The Skrmetti decision to uphold a state ban on gender-affirming care for minors was not as sweeping as it seems—nor is the trans rights movement to blame for it.”
The New York Times, The Atlantic, More Keep Publishing Transphobia. Why?
In this op-ed, News & Politics Editor Lexi McMenamin criticizes mainstream media outlets for normalizing anti-trans rhetoric.
Read “What Skrmetti Did, What it Didn’t Do, and What it Can Never Do,” by Sam Ames, Esq. “We cannot predicate fighting on winning. We’re going to lose a lot in the days to come, and if we’re going to make it through the nights we need to find something to fuel us that runs deeper than hope.” In the wake of the U.S. c. Skrmetti decision, many of us may have questions about what access to gender-affirming care, especially for our LGBTQ+ youth, will look like in the days to come. Sam Ames’ analysis provides a clarity and grounding that meets us in our uncertainty and offers us places to look for resilience beyond hope.
Read “On the Anniversary of the Dobbs Decision: Three Things I’ve Learned,” from SACReD Co-Executive Director Rev. Angela Tyler Williams. As a faith that holds love at the center of our values, we know that the work of love is often demanding. Rev. Angela from SACReD offers three essential teachings from how people of faith have centered love in the midst of ongoing attack to our bodily autonomy, and how these teachings can continue to shape and strengthen our work.
Join:
Register for the Faithful Futures: Empowering Action for Reproductive Justice series this August & September. Facilitated by the Renewed Clergy Consultation Service, this series offers examples and strategies for how various communities of faith are already showing up to ensure reproductive care exists for those most impacted by the attacks on bodily autonomy. All sessions are free of charge and take place Tuesdays at 7pmET.
Watch/Listen:
Watch “Immigration Justice is Still Reproductive Justice” from ReproAction. As we face attacks on our civil rights, bodily autonomy, and humanity, understanding how our struggles intersect will help us combine our power to care for one another across identities and borders.
Decriminalization:
Criminalization and dehumanization are a political and spiritual project. We must dismantle the false idea that safety for some must come at the expense of safety for others. As people of faith, we cannot affirm the worth and dignity of all while privileging the well-being of a chosen few. We proclaim a future where care and safety are abundant because our relationships are cultivated through mutuality, not domination.
Migrant detention and deportation. The school to prison network and mass incarceration. Unceasing police violence toward Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities. Bills making protest and resistance movements illegal. Laws criminalizing poverty, gender identity and expression, sex work, abortion, accessing and providing health care. All of these forms of criminalization are used by the state to disrupt, disempower, and dehumanize our communities.
The Update:
In good news, Mahmoud Khalil is free and reunited with his family—and we celebrate this powerful win. At the same time, we remain committed to the fight to have his case fully dropped.
Every individual case matters deeply. But we also must zoom out to confront the larger system of criminalization that enables such injustices. Recently, the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) was among 215 organizations that received a letter from Congress demanding information about their use of federal funds—a chilling move in an increasingly authoritarian climate.
As Interrupting Criminalization powerfully states:
“Current narratives of resistance focused on who the ’real criminals’ are — instead of the process of criminalization by which certain people, groups, and actions will always be framed as violent threats while enabling others to engage in extreme forms of violence with absolute impunity — are counterproductive to resisting fascism and authoritarianism. These frameworks require criminalized people, groups, and actions to prove their value to racial capital — or at least an absence of threat to it — to justify their existence or avoid violence, even as the fascism we are fighting is designed to deliver them violence and eliminate their existence. That’s why challenging criminalization rather than participating in it is essential to effective resistance. In other words: criminalization got us here, criminalization is keeping us here, and criminalization is definitely not going to get us out of here.”
This moment demands courage and clarity. Celebrating the freedom of one must always be accompanied by a commitment to dismantle the systems that threaten the freedom of all.
Act:
Support organizers in Los Angeles—where communities continue to resist widespread deployment of ICE, raids, and violent abductions of family and community members from their homes, workplaces, streets, and outside hospitals and health care facilities, only to be met with violent repression, rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, and heavily armed, masked ICE agents brandishing loaded weapons. Share and contribute to local rapid response, mutual aid, and bail funds, including:
Organizations that make up Ground Game LA’s Raid Support network
Read:
“Los Angeles Protests & Military Escalation: What You Should Know” by Muslims for Just Futures
All of Us: Disrupters spark the moment, but it takes an entire ecosystem to sustain a movement. by Deepa Iyer
Learn:
Muslims for Just Futures (MJF) and UndocuBlack Network (UBN) offers this 2025 Travel Ban Toolkit to help us deepen our analysis and organize against the ban and other anti-immigrant policies simultaneously.
“Seven years ago, the Supreme Court decided to allow the Muslim and African Ban to go into effect. This year, as we grapple with another Trump administration that has made mass deportations, surveillance and targeting of our communities key policy priorities, we have continued to show up: sharing multi-lingual resources, developing key analyses, and canvassing with our people on the ground.”
Learn more about denaturalization and support anyone in your community who is targeted!
Join:
Watch/Listen:
Host Ejeris Dixon is joined by lifelong educator and organizer, Lumumba Bandele to unpack what fascism looks like through the lived experiences of Black communities in the U.S.—and why we must recognize its current and historic manifestations.
Climate Justice:
A just and loving world is a flourishing world. If we are to realize a world with no fossil fuels, where clean energy is a human right, and all beings thrive, we need new systems, norms, approaches, and ways of being to bring that world into existence.
The Update:
The heat dome across the United States has officially passed, but the extreme heat is not over after a week of relentless heat across most of the continent and northern hemisphere. The built environment across the United States has been “buckling” under the extreme heat—in particular, with the roads, and in some cases, while people are present. Across the United States, people have been suffering from health emergencies and some people have died—all due to the latest heatwave and its impact on the existing built environments, along with their built-in inequities. The infrastructure crumbling under the heat happens when the mostly concrete-based impervious structures begin to melt and expand under high heat temperatures. The results have been roads caving in under the pressure of a vehicle, swing bridges and drawbridges becoming inoperable, rail tracks warping, and electric circuits short fusing. Climate scientists of a recent study that works with data from the last 70 years concluded that “stalled atmospheric patterns have tripled,” explaining the latest sweeping and stagnant heatwave as a likely more common occurrence. In addition, the authors claim that “while climate models predict that these patterns would occur more frequently with the climate crisis, their study is the first to demonstrate that it is already happening - and will probably intensify as the planet continues to warm.” Climate Central scientist Zachary Labe told Bloomberg: “One of the easiest ways to see climate change’s impact is in how it’s increasing the chance these types of heatwaves will occur. By the middle of this century, these types of heat waves will be normal. The extremes will be even higher.”
Act:
Use this source from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction to explore heat (in)equity and vulnerability in your community.
Explore the Y-Adapt tool with youth and young adults in your congregation to stir creative and problem-solving thinking around climate adaptation.
Read:
Learn:
Learn more about the first climate justice class-action lawsuit against Trump’s EPA defunding environmental justice. Here is the news coverage reporting the lawsuit.