Looking for Plan B: An open letter to girls

To a 16-year-old girl who wants to buy Plan B-One over the counter: Someone in the Obama administration you’ve probably never even heard of made an unprecedented decision concerning you last week. U.S. Health and Human Services Department Secretary Kathleen Sebelius decided that Plan B One-Step, which you probably know as the “morning after pill,” [...]

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Pick your paternalism poison

In his column, “America’s obsession with missing white women,” Miami Herald writer Leonard Pitts asserts that the incessant news coverage of the latest young, pretty missing white woman is a “back-handed compliment” and the latest form of a “certain condescending paternalism” that casts white women as helpless damsels in need of rescue or of protection. I [...]

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Baby do or baby don’t?

Story #1: Educated, career-oriented American women falsely assume they can easily conceive children when they’re in their 40s.   Story #2: An unemployed, probably uneducated and possibly bipolar American woman easily conceives and bares 15 children with 3 different men and then demands that the state take care of them.   I read, listened to [...]

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Let the hate show

When I read yesterday that Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church, a church in my lovely state of Kentucky, voted to ban interracial couples from its congregation, I thought, “So much for post-racial America.”  While I was appalled, shook my head, and joined in with the “And they call themselves Christians,” chorus, I felt some vindication for [...]

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