I read Enders Game when it came out during high school and really enjoyed it. I mean, what young person wouldn’t – it is the story of a kid, selected from everyone else for specialized training because he was smart, who survives school bullying and goes on to save the planet! All the special little snowflakes who didn’t really fit in at school, found a bit of wish fulfillment in those pages that we, too, would be plucked from obscurity and become someone who can make a difference to the world.

Before I could get hooked on any of Orson Scott Card’s other books, though, he started making offensive remarks about people like me. Here is one of the first I ever heard:

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used…

What’s worse than cutting the amount of food stamp funding from the farm bill? Eliminating them entirely. And that’s what the GOP House members did this afternoon in a 216-208 vote—no Democrats for the bill and 12 Republicans voting against it. The farm will has always been a total package: subsidies and benefits to farmers and nutritional programs such as SNAP to the poor, but House GOP leaders hope that separating them will entirely get rid of this help for hungry people.

Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) pointed out that the bad policy ignored the bipartisan policy of the House Agriculture Committee. The farm bill that the House passed is for five years, but the food stamps would be on an annual basis if it could even pass, which is most unlikely. The biggest cuts to food stamps in history came in 1996 when then Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed turning the…

“If you think that rapes only happen at Notre Dame or in India or in Steubenville, you are wrong. A person is sexually assaulted in the United States every two minutes, and many of these are in small towns, including where you live. For every 100 rapes, only three lead to jail time for the rapist.”

I wrote this on January 23, 2013 in Nel’s New Day. Since then, the Portland (OR) chief of police, Mike Reece, has shown that his ignorance may promote the culture of rape in this Northwestern city. The media is forcing Reece to rethink his personnel decisions,  but without the prevalence of newspaper articles about his indifference to—or ignorance about—what constitutes sexual contact, a demoted police officer might have continued to direct detectives who investigate sexual assault and human trafficking in this city of over 2 million people.

Reece’s problem went public last summer after…

Today is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the decision that affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to legal abortion. As an activist for reproductive justice, I have celebrated this day for several years.

But something has changed since this photograph was taken on a previous Roe anniversary: I’m pregnant. To be exact, I’m 21 weeks pregnant. I’m starting to show. And as I’ve written about, pregnancy has made me more committed to realizing the promise of reproductive justice – a world where the human right has been secured to prevent pregnancy, to end pregnancy, to pursue pregnancy, to get prenatal care, to be respected and supported adopting or bearing children regardless of race, sexual orientation or socioeconomic status, to health care and accurate education provided freely on the basis of science and medicine, to celebrate sexuality as a source for joy and humanity rather than shame and restriction in…

Today is the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade that protects a woman’s right to have an abortion within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy. Because this right is being threatened across the United States, a coalition of over 50 organizations,  The Trust Women/Silver Ribbon Campaign, is working to keep this family-planning ability.

Almost half of all pregnancies are unplanned, and at least one-third of all U.S. women have an abortion sometime during their lives. Without legalized abortion, women live in shame and pain—and sometimes don’t live at all because illegal abortions kill.

According to Ellen Shaffer, abortion continues to be stigmatized by the well-funded minority movement, many of whom promote violent acts to stop women from seeking their legal rights. Every clinic in the U.S. that provides abortions has experienced systematic harassment, and doctors who perform abortions have been targeted and murdered. In 2009…