FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts:
CJ Frogozo, CJ@FitzGibbonMedia.com, 310 570 2622
Kayla Keller, Kayla@FitzGibbonMedia.com, 281 682 6212
New York, NY — While in Chicago for the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) 40th Annual Meeting last week, ColorOfChange learned that despite the rash of bad publicity hitting ALEC for its work on so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s shooting death last year, Yelp! decided to join ALEC as recently as six weeks ago. The San Francisco-based tech company joined ALEC on June 28, five days into George Zimmerman’s second-degree murder trial; Zimmerman was ultimately acquitted of all criminal charges and is likely immune from civil wrongful death suit thanks to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” — also known as “Shoot First” — law.
Despite ALEC’s recent attempts to publicly disassociate itself from the years it spent working to spread Shoot First nationwide, the group invited Governor Jeb Bush, who signed Florida’s NRA-written law, to keynote its Chicago convention. Although ALEC publicly purports to have “no affiliation with the NRA,” and told ColorOfChange privately that it split from the NRA in June 2012, the NRA was a highly-visible fixture of ALEC’s July 2012 meeting in Salt Lake City as well as last week’s gathering in Chicago.
ALEC has made no effort to repeal existing Shoot First laws that remain on the books, nor to dissuade its legislative members from continuing to (re-)introduce Shoot First legislation. The Center for Media and Democracy has found that 10 Shoot First laws were introduced in 10 states so far in 2013, and two passed. Although membership in ALEC is a tightly-guarded secret, many of these bills were (re-)introduced by known ALEC legislators.
Rashad Robinson, Executive Director of ColorOfChange, said, “It’s thanks to ALEC that Shoot First is the law of the land in 26 states, including two that actually doubled down on this deadly policy in the wake of public outcry around Trayvon Martin’s death and passed Shoot First in 2013.”
Robinson continued, “The fact that Yelp! would choose to join ALEC now speaks volumes about the respect that the company has for its members, a substantial majority of whom are young Black people and other people of color of the Trayvon Martin generation, who have made themselves heard loud and clear that they won’t stand for ALEC’s attacks on our safety and fundamental rights.”
Yelp! has joined ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force, which carries additional costs beyond ALEC’s substantial, multi-tiered private sector membership fees. Yelp! is paying ALEC a minimum of $10,000 to ensure it has an equal vote with elected legislators on which ALEC “model legislation” will be replicated in state legislatures across the country, with no disclosure of that legislation’s ALEC ties or corporate authorship.
In partnership with the Center for Media and Democracy, Common Cause, ProgressNow, CREDO Action and others, ColorOfChange has successfully urged over 50 major corporations and other private sector members to stop funding ALEC, including Yelp!’s Bay Area neighbors HP, Intuit, Symantec and Wells Fargo.
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With more than 850,000 members, ColorOfChange.org is the nation’s largest online civil rights organization