Progressive Media Advocates
Carl Matthes: Society has learned that the force which drives sexually-based assault and abuse is not easily categorized, understood or rooted out. What is understood is that this force is not driven by sexual need; men turn their physical and manipulative powers into a destructive force.
Zili Danto: It’s way past time the US and UN were out of Haiti. Haitians are not at war; this occupation is racist, about false benevolence, forced assimilation and Western tyranny.
Brian McAfee: The men and the occasional women who participate in the abuse and victimization of children are unconscionable people whether serving as their rapists, pimps or enablers.
Thomas A. Foster: The conversations about homophobia in the black church or about Bishop Long’s hypocrisy confuse the issue at hand. This is not the story of a closeted gay man who simply needed sexual release. Sexual abuse – in all its forms – is about power, not sex.
Rev. Irene Monroe: When you have a pope more invested in doctrinal debates than personal suffering, and more invested in exerting his ecclesiastical power in defrocking dissident theologians than his priestly flock of sex predators, then it’s easy to comprehend why the decades-long pleas and petitions from Catholic parishioners – worldwide – to Pope Benedict XVI to do something never made anything happen.
Charley James: For how long will the Pope and Tiger Woods and John Ensign and Mark Foley and scores of other hypocritical politicians, and damn near every celebrity, real and pretend, think they can keep saying “Whoops, sorry! Didn’t mean it.” to make all well with the world again?
Sikivu Hutchinson: Black Skeptics Los Angeles spearheaded its First in the Family Humanist Scholarship initiative, which focuses on providing resources to undocumented, foster care, homeless and LGBTQ youth who will be the first in their families to go to college.
Carl Matthes: Despite the much-heralded 2008 success of Prop 8 in California to stop same-sex marriage, that vote, and it’s subsequent ramifications, provided not only 18,000 lesbian and gay couples with legal marriages, but the accelerant for the Prop 8 case currently being decided by SCOTUS.
Randy Shaw: Obama could regain young people’s support by lowering student loan rates, enacting immigration reform and rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, but time—and his political capital—is running out.
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Sexual Harassment Law Murker Than You Think
Marian Wang: In some cases, a person may be able to show that advances were unwelcome even though he or she didn’t protest or say so at the time. “Consensual” isn’t the same thing as ”welcome,” experts say.