When President Obama told a press conference in Turkey in April that, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation,” the usual suspects reacted in the expected ways. Those of us who value the ideal of our people’s civil rights and privileges not tied to
The student in my office was really convinced that as a male he was going to get a raw deal all around. He’d been accused by a female student in my largest class of stealing her I-Pod, and she had reported it to the police.
I hope by the time this appears, everyone in the LGBT community will have taken deep, cleansing breaths and realized that the blame for the success of California’s Proposition 8 does not belong to the African American community. I hope they’ve paid attention to the
“Day Without a Gay” on December 10, 2008 was a predictable flop. Beginning somewhere as a last-minute protest against California’s Proposition 8, people were asked to call their employers to tell them that they’d miss work because they’re gay. Then, the theory went, everyone would
“Are you excited about Connecticut?” While waiting to enter a radio studio for an hour of give-and-take on hot political issues affecting the LGBT community, it was a question another panelist found central. It was certainly of interest to the program’s listeners. But, surprisingly, I
I don’t care if Barack Obama changes the name of Bush’s “White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives” to a “Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.” I think most of the thirty evangelical leaders he sat down with in a private downtown Chicago meeting
When 59-year-old Jim Adkisson stormed into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church on July 27 as an angry unemployed engineer, fatally shooting two adults, most of us were shocked. When 51-year-old Timothy Dale Johnson, fearing he’d been canned by Target, barged into the Arkansas Democratic Headquarters
Even those of us who were disappointed with Hillary Clinton’s campaign can agree with CBS News anchor, Katie Couric: “Like her or not, one of the great lessons of that campaign is the continued and accepted role of sexism in American life, particularly
We have accepted the dominant line if we believe that only when Barack Obama talks is race an issue or that only when Hillary Clinton speaks is gender involved. We’re not supposed to ask how whiteness is behind what Clinton or John McCain say or
In February it was a mass shooting at another university by a “gentle, warm, sensitive” young man whom acquaintances described as a student who didn’t fit the profile of a killer. Yet, he was a male in American culture, and therefore the likely gender for