I got to thinking about what else the President’s decision portends. The essence of successful politicians like, say, Margaret Hamburg and Kathleen Sebelius, is three-fold. What starts all over every morning is the (political) big leagues ballgame. What starts over every day in these big leagues, just like the baseball ones, is a game that is played only one way: the hardball way.
Mike Huckabee cannot resist the presidential stage even though he chose not to run this year to maintain his FOX News contract. Next month he brings an anti-choice propaganda documentary to 2012 election central.
Whether President Obama was compelled to weave the bubble gum narrative for political gain or because it truly reflects his thinking, the result is the same. Complex sexual health issues get overly simplified, society focuses on stigma more than solution, and young people are left with policy decisions that don't begin to match the weight of their lived experiences nor keep them "safe."
A critique of reproductive politics written in the 1970s about events in the ‘20s and ‘30s is remarkably relevant to today’s leading reproductive controversy: the Obama Administration’s overruling of the FDA decision to allow over-the-counter status of Plan B emergency contraception for young women under the age of seventeen.
As a society, the way we think about most social phenomena—including sexual assault—is influenced by both facts and morals. But in the United States, the way we think about rape has, for decades, been operating with an outdated version of both.
A new project from GLSEN asks young people and adults to pledge to put an end to bullying. Over 96,000 people have taken the pledge, but we have to do so much more.