The club meeting on September 17 will feature Dr. Martha Neff-Smith of Hospice of the Piedmont. She will speak on end of life options, including hospice care.
Martha is a graduate of the University of Michigan and has held academic positions in the US and several other countries. Her training is in nursing, epidemiology, and bioethics. She is an active retiree who is currently the Director of the Speakers Bureau at Hospice of the Piedmont. She serves on several boards and volunteers for several local and state agencies.
The meeting will take place at 1:30 p.m. in the LOW Community Center.
The club’s July 4 Bash on July 11 was a great success. Democrats love to get together and eat good food and talk politics. See a slide show by following the link below.
Keep the red-white-and-blue flying after the Fourth of July by attending The Lake of the Woods Democratic Club’s annual Independence Day Bash.
The event will take place from 5 to 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 11 at the air-conditioned comfort of the LOW Community Center. There will be catered fried chicken and homemade side dishes, desserts and beverages provided by club members.
Door prizes and a Blue Donkey raffle will give attendees the opportunity to go home with something more than full tummies and smiles on their faces. The “Demettes,” will perform some of their traditional political satire for your entertainment.
Tickets are $7 per person and are available at the door. Youngsters under the age of 12 will be admitted without charge. Everyone is welcome, without regard to political affiliation.
The Lake of the Woods Democratic club will sponsor a reception June 18 to allow voters to meet Ned Gallaway, candidate for the 17th District seat in the Virginia Senate.
Gallaway, who serves as chair of the Albemarle County School Board, is seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination to the seat currently held by Bryce Reeves, a first-term Republican.
The event will take place from 5 to 6:30 p.m. June 18 in the LOW Community Center. Hors d’oeuvres and beverages will be served.
The candidate will make brief remarks and will be available for questions. As at all club events, visitors are welcome regardless of political affiliation.
Gallaway grew up in Wheeling, W.Va., where his father was a beer delivery man and his mother worked at a plastics factory. After graduation from Ohio University, he taught high school for six years and earned a doctorate in education from the University of Virginia.
In addition to serving on the school board, Gallaway is also the sales manager at a local business in Charlottesville. Ned and his wife Julie, a pediatric intensive care nurse, have three children who attend Albemarle County Public Schools.
Virginia’s 17th Senate District consists of Orange County; the city of Fredericksburg; and parts of Spotsylvania County, Louisa County, Culpeper County and Albemarle County.
Eileen Davis of Richmond, an advocate for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing gender equality, will speak to the Lake of the Woods Democratic Club on May 21.
Davis will describe efforts to gain ratification of the ERA in Virginia, one of only three additional states required to make the amendment part of the nation’s fundamental law.
The meeting will take place at 1:30 p.m. May 21 in the LOW Community Center. The public is welcome to attend, regardless of political affiliation.
Ms. Davis, a long-time activist for equality and social justice, is co-founder of Women Matter Use Your Power (women-matter.org).
She is a member of the coordination team advocating for ratification of the stalled Equal Rights Amendment in Virginia.
Ms. Davis is also part of the advocacy team visiting U.S. senators and representatives to secure passage of bills calling for removal of the deadline on the stalled bill, allowing for debate of this important civil rights legislation.
The Equal Rights Amendment states simply: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
The ERA was written in 1923 by Alice Paul, suffragist leader and founder of the National Woman’s Party. After women’s right to vote was guaranteed by the 19th Amendment in 1920, she proposed the ERA as the next step in confirming “equal justice under law” for all citizens. The ERA was introduced into every Congress between 1923 and 1972, when it was passed and sent to the states for ratification. The original seven-year time limit in the ERA’s proposing clause was extended by Congress to June 30, 1982, but at that deadline, the ERA had been ratified by 35 states, three states short of the 38 required to put it into the Constitution.
The ERA has been introduced into every Congress since 1982. Beginning in 1994 with introduction of the first three-state strategy bill in Congress, ERA advocates have been pursuing two different routes to ratification:
the traditional process outlined in Article V of the Constitution, requiring passage by a two-thirds majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives, followed by ratification by legislatures in three-quarters (38) of the 50 states, and
ratification in three more of the 15 state legislatures that did not ratify the ERA during the 1972-82 ratification campaign, based on legal analysis that when three more states vote yes, this non-traditional process could withstand legal challenge and put the ERA into the Constitution.
