Much of the conversation around abortion rights inevitably morphs into a discussion about birth control, and without fail swarms of people in congress (and on Twitter) decide to take it upon themselves to explain why access to certain types (or all types) of birth control should be restricted. This has always baffled me, since abortion medication and birth control are not the same thing, and access to affordable birth control has been proven to reduce abortion rates. Apparently the high of rummaging through people’s medicine cabinets makes that information seem irrelevant.
... Some women suffer terrible side effects from birth control, yes. Being on birth control for a long period of time can be harmful. Preventing unwanted pregnancies, and therefore reducing abortion rates, should not fall solely on women. We can agree to all of that. But if we start promoting the idea that birth control isn’t an ideal option, or that people shouldn’t be using birth control at all, we run the risk of stigmatizing it’s usage altogether. Read More on Medium or Vocal
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“There is no fashion designer that dictates what we wear anymore. Christian Dior dictated what women wore in the 50s, Balenciaga in the 60s, Calvin Klein and Ralph and Donna decided in the 80s. Now what’s embraced is being yourself.”
The Academy Awards this year proved that point more than ever. No one felt confined to a satin gown or a classic Armani tux. Read More on Medium I’ve written a lot of heavy pieces as of late, but today I just want to talk about clothes. Everyone needs a surface-level respite now and then.
Having spent the past five years working in fashion retail, my closet has been a revolving door of high-quality, beautiful pieces that I’ve been lucky enough to get at a discount. The good thing about this is I never have to worry about not having the right thing to wear for pretty much any occasion. The bad thing is I have a little too much of a good thing. Read More on Medium or Vocal This piece was also edited and picked up by Highlark Magazine! If you find yourself within Christian circles, you have likely heard about the sexual misconduct allegations against Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in northern Illinois and one of the most influential evangelical leaders in the country.
I attend a church in a neighboring suburb to Willow Creek. Bill Hybels was the pastor to my pastor. Our church was, at one time, part of the Willow Creek Association of Churches. When the news first broke about Hybels this past March, the first reaction from most of my friends was disbelief. It was my first instinct, too. None of us wanted to hear that someone who has been a spiritual leader and guiding figure would do the things he was accused of. Read More on Medium People have disliked the media since the creation of the media, and why not? It’s much easier to blame the people holding authority accountable instead of the authority itself. It’s much easier to blame the people bringing unpopular truths to light than to acknowledge what’s actually true. The media has been a safe scapegoat for generations, and likely will be for generations to come.
That being said, an alarming shift has taken place over the past few years; instead of journalists being passively blamed for all of life’s problems, they have been more actively threatened. It’s not just the media’s fault — the media needs to pay for their faults. The marker of when this shift took place is painfully clear. I noticed it as a journalism student. No one thought twice about my college major until 2015. Suddenly, my career path was a problem. Suddenly, I needed to “rethink” my choice of joining a “dishonest” industry. 2015 was the year Donald Trump’s campaign took off. He sounded off at the media constantly, dubbing them “fake news” and regularly calling journalists “the enemy of the people.” He tweeted cartoons that depicted violence against reporters. Naturally, he was unapologetic about all of it. Read More on Medium In the 2018 presidential election, Donald Trump earned 81 percent of the evangelical Christian vote. Nearly two years later, he still holds a very favorable 75 percent of support by white evangelicals.
Surprisingly, Christians have been put in a state of distress over Trump’s zero-tolerance policy against migrants crossing the border, which has caused nearly 2,000 children to be forcibly separated from their parents in six weeks alone. . . . Why, then, is this immigration policy so abhorrent? It is completely consistent with Trump’s attitude toward immigrants since day one of his campaign, which his Christian supporters have demonstrated no problem with. It’s difficult to claim ignorance to this attitude, since “build a wall” was a primary hallmark of his candidacy. Walls are generally built to divide, not to create a welcoming environment for those seeking refuge. Anyone with a TV or access to the internet in 2015 could have easily seen this coming. Read More on Medium I’m pretty sure every girl goes through a “horse phase” at one point or another. Maybe it’s because we’re peddled Marguerite Henry, C.W. Anderson, and Walter Farley books early on in our youth. Maybe it’s just because horses are pretty. Whatever the reason, I and all my friends played with Breyer horses, drew pictures of horses, and ran around the school playground pretending were were jockeys.
Watching the Triple Crown races with my mom was a large part of my “horse phase.” She told me stories about picking her favorite horse with her sisters during the post parade during her childhood, and she and I did the same together. Admittedly, after 20 years of watching a Triple Crown drought I got a little jaded toward this tradition. I still enjoyed watching, I still picked a favorite, but my inexperienced heart had been broken too many times by spoiler horses to expect anything of greatness. By the time American Pharoah rolled around, I was barely paying attention. Read More on Medium Roseanne Barr said something racist and her show got cancelled. There’s no need to spend a lot of time re-hashing what was said or why; Barr has a long history of racist vitriol, and it was only a matter of time before ABC decided she wasn’t worth keeping on their payroll.
The aftermath of Roseanne’s cancellation resulted in more than simple backlash from her fans. Her show was regarded as the sitcom for Trump supporters, so a comment from the Trump administration was certain. The result was a nearly two-minute speech from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in which she began the “but what about MY apology” circuit. Read More on Medium For several years I have volunteered for an organization that partners with internationals attending our local university. By picking them up from the airport, helping them buy winter coats, hosting a weekly community dinner, and connecting them to neighborhood resources, the goal is to ensure that international students and their families are made to feel welcomed and loved.
Welcoming and loving foreigners is a distant concept to much of America today. Americans voted in 2016 based on “cultural anxiety.” Attacks against people of color in the form of white supremacist rallies and police shootings have been exposed. A country that prides itself in aligning with “Christian” morality has come to a point where Christians are the least likely to accept responsibility for refugees. Most recently, immigrants have been indefinitely separated from their children, and thousands of undocumented children have been subsequently lost. Read More on Medium February 14, 2008, I was at after-school rehearsal for my high school’s spring play when a classmate looked at her phone and exclaimed to us all that there had been a shooting at Northern Illinois University, the college just up the road.
This was before widespread cell phone access among teens, and there certainly were no smart phones. The rest of us without phones had no way of getting in touch with our parents and no way to look up exactly where and when the shooting took place. This was particularly alarming for me because my dad worked for NIU. For all I knew, my dad had been shot. Read More on Medium |
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