Reading Time: 9 minutes On Thursday, April 27, Senate Republicans blocked a measure that would have allowed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to be added to the US Constitution as its 28th Amendment. The action reveals how far the US has shifted into a discourse shaped centrally by Christian nationalism. It did not have to be this way.
Transgender Rights
Posted inIdentity
Litter box hoax comes to Ireland
Reading Time: 4 minutes When I grew up in Ireland in the 1980s, it would take months for a movie to go from general release in America into my local cinema. Nowadays, everything is everywhere all at once. Apparently, anti-trans propaganda is following the 1980s protocol. You might have heard a story. It’s always the same. It comes from […]
Posted inEducation
Want to protect secular democracy? Speak up at school board meetings
Reading Time: 3 minutes You don’t have to run for Congress to help protect our secular democracy. It’s at the level of your local school board that the Christian nationalist agenda is making its most influential stand. So it’s at public meetings of those school boards that our voices are most desperately needed.
Posted inPolitics
Congress, Oklahoma, and Jan 6: A difficult start for US politics in 2023
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s called the “Millstone Act of 2023”, which should tell US citizens everything they need to know about the ongoing struggle with far right Christian extremism. Named after Luke 17:1-2, a passage in which Christ advocates that it’s better for a person to have a millstone tied around their neck and be drowned, than that […]
Posted inLGBTQ
Is it transphobic to believe trans female athletes have an advantage?
Reading Time: 9 minutes I hate to admit it because it sounds so reactionary in the 21st century, but I believe some male-to-female transgender athletes, without mitigating intervention, may have an unfair advantage in women’s sports. I say this knowing that trans female athletes are a tiny minority in sports. But this is not about fear of hordes of […]
Posted inLGBTQ News
Don’t send my anti-trans, anti-abortion mom to Congress, says gay daughter
Reading Time: 4 minutes Florida State Senator Kelli Stargel is one of the least thoughtful, cruelest politicians in the country. The Republican lawmaker spearheaded the state’s 15-week abortion ban, pushed to ban trans girls from playing on the appropriate school sports teams, and was a reliable rubber stamp for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ awful COVID policies. Now she’s running for Congress, […]
Posted inLGBTQ
The UK will outlaw conversion therapy for gays, but not trans people
Reading Time: 3 minutes When the government refers to “talking therapies” it is, in effect, referring to prayer. So its exclusion of trans people from a conversion therapy ban it announced last week can only be interpreted as capitulation to pressure from religious groups who have been working flat-out to retain all “pray-away-the-gay” interventions. In announcing the ban in […]
Posted inLGBTQ News
Well, Boris Johnson, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten us into!
Reading Time: 4 minutes From Brexit through to the Partygate scandal, Britain’s posturing prat of a prime minister managed to turn the UK into an international laughing stock—and he’s now landed the country in another pickle over the cancellation of an international LGBT+ conference his own administration organized. Last year, the Conservative government called on businesses and individuals to […]
Posted inSex & Gender
The secular humanist’s guide to trans advocacy
Reading Time: 16 minutes I really didn’t want to have to write this piece. Amid pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine, along with famines, the ravages of climate change, and other global conflicts, did the U.S. really need to exacerbate human trauma by introducing so much harmful legislation lately? Gosh. Even writing that, it’s hard to pin down which […]
Posted inLGBTQ
Richard Dawkins Urges People to Sign ‘Declaration’ Opposing Trans Rights
Reading Time: 3 minutes I regret to inform you that Richard Dawkins is at it again. On Monday, the well-known atheist author urged his nearly 3 million Twitter followers to sign the “Declaration on Women’s Sex-based Rights,” a document that effectively aims to deny civil rights to transgender women. (It’s always trans women who are the problems for this […]