Beacon Broadside

recent posts

about

Category: Politics and Current Events

  • Who’s Afraid of the “Big Bad” Identity Politics?

    By Christian Coleman | Do you want to play a game? No, not the one in the Saw movie franchise. Let’s play the word association game. Come now. It’ll be fun! Peanut : Butter. Instagram : Celebrity. Identity politics : Divisive. Wait. Let’s back up. Divisive? That word has been coming up lately when presidential…

  • Waking up to the Sunrise Movement

    By Adam Eichen | “You can love two children at once,” a colleague once told me. He meant that advocates for a single issue can integrate other reform efforts into their agenda without being subsumed—and are often more powerful for it. In my work promoting democracy reform I’ve repeated this message hundreds of times across…

  • Respect the Innovative Hustle that Drove Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Campaign

    By S. Craig Watkins | For more than a year Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had been waiting for this precise moment: 8:59 p.m., June 26, 2018. That was when the polls in her Democratic Party primary contest against incumbent Joe Crowley in New York’s Fourteenth District would start to close and the final votes would be tallied.…

  • “Unplanned” Seeks to Terrify, Adds Nothing to Our Discussion About Abortion

    By Rebecca Todd Peters | On Saturday, a close friend walked out of her local Catholic church with her family in protest of the priest’s blatantly propagandistic pro-life homily. Apparently, he was praising the story of Abby Johnson’s conversion from Planned Parenthood clinic director to pro-life activist and the new film Unplanned, which tells her…

  • These 7 Startups and Companies Are Empowering the World’s Poorest People in the New Culture of Charity

    As a child in India, Devex founding president and editor in chief Raj Kumar witnessed desperate poverty, an experience that has fed his interest in how the global aid industry can better meet the needs of the world’s nearly eight hundred million ultrapoor children and adults. Today, with a wave of billionaire philanthropy and the…

  • Trying to Find Answers in Sri Lanka

    By Adele Barker | I still crush garlic with the back of a wooden spoon. And once a month, I look up at the moon and say to myself, “it’s a poya,” the Sinhalese word for ‘full moon.’ I carry the island inside me, though it has been years since we lived there. I haven’t…

  • Worker Strikes as Liberation—Way Back Then, and Today

    By Jonathan Rosenblum | In this season of commemorating the Exodus, the first general strike in recorded history, let us praise the return of the strike weapon to the American political landscape. Workers in 2019 are showing greater readiness to flex the strike muscle. Just look at the 31,000 Stop and Shop supermarket workers in…

  • Abortion Policy as the Public Abuse of Women

    By Rebecca Todd Peters | Imagine a society with widespread stillbirths, miscarriages, and genetic deformities linked to sabotage and accidents at nuclear facilities, chemical and biological toxins leaking into the water supply, and the uncontrolled use of chemical insecticides and herbicides. Imagine now that in addition to dropping birth rates from this environmental apocalypse, a…

  • For the Binghamton Mass Shooting Victims, Michael Klein’s “The Talking Day”

    By Michael Klein | Some lunatic with a gun killed some people at an immigration center in Binghamton, New York. Liz Rosenberg and her family live up there and David, her husband, teaches in the middle school which is close to all the action (the way, in any smallish town, everything is close to all…

  • These Three States Took Banning Assault Weapons into Their Own Hands

    By Dennis A. Henigan | Gun control forces also have an impressive list of victories in the states. Since 1989, they have succeeded in passing Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws in eighteen states. These laws hold gun owners criminally responsible for leaving guns accessible to children. During that same period, the NRA also suffered key…