Category: American Society

  • “To understand military sexual assault, let alone know how to stop it, we must focus on the perpetrators.” Helen Benedict on why soldiers rape. “To us sofa slouchers, these teen Olympians are heroes. But they have the nation’s pediatricians on edge.” A Baltimore Sun op-ed by Mark Hyman about young athletes. Also check out Hyman…

  • East German shot putter Heidi Krieger thought she was taking vitamins, but later discovered, as her body began to masculinize, that she was being given the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol, a drug that, according to the article, “changed a woman into a man.” As Krieger continued on the steroids, she noted changes not only in her…

  • Equality is a core value in Massachusetts. More than two weeks have passed since our Massachusetts borders fell to the further expansion of equality. When Governor Deval Patrick signed the repeal of the 1913 law that prohibited out-of-state same-sex couples from coming to our state to marry, our state borders became more permeable and we…

  • Not that long ago, I spent some time in the principal’s office – about 45 minutes in a hardback chair, if I recall correctly. I’ve been thinking about that visit and about the principal of Windsor Mill Middle School outside Baltimore, Debbie Phelps. Debbie will be in Beijing for the next two weeks for the…

  • I’ve been doing some research on the Supreme Court during the 1930s, and have run across some interesting comments from Justice Harlan Fiske Stone on dissenting. Stone was a progressive Republican appointed to the Court by Calvin Coolidge. He served as an Associate Justice under Chief Justices William Howard Taft and then Charles Evans Hughes,…

  • Another homosexual brouhaha is brewing. Psychologist Trayce L. Hansen has reviewed nine studies that examined the sexual orientation of children raised by same-sex parents and has concluded that children raised by same-sex parents “have a 4 to 10 times greater likelihood of developing a non-heterosexual preference than other children.”

  • Should we think that our current problems as a nation—the falling value of the dollar, a perilous dependence upon overseas products, an administration that favors the wealthy over the ordinary man, and an edgy attitude towards women in politics—are unique to 2008, they also worried a nearly forgotten Founding Mother over two hundred and twenty…

  • The end of the Supreme Court’s term gives me a chance to reflect on some of the dissents that the justices wrote. The question I want to explore – which I deal with in some of the essays accompanying the opinions I’ve reprinted in I Dissent – is this: Why bother to dissent, especially at…

  • Roughly a month ago, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in United States v. Williams that upheld the consitutionality of the Prosecutorial Remedies and other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act of 2003 (The PROTECT Act). The 7-2 decision is the latest in a disturbing line of Congressional actions…

  • For Pride Month, Beacon Broadside invited Pat Griffin, director of It Takes A Team! Education Campaign for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Issues in Sport, to discuss the issue of homophobia in sports. Dr. Griffin is the author of Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbian and Homophobia in Sports and co-editor of Teaching for Diversity and Social…