Progressive Voices
We looked to the Supreme Court to protect our rights; now, it is taking them away
The United States of America is no longer a free country. Women are no longer full citizens with equal rights. The theocracy also known as the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that our bodies don’t belong to us. Anyone who is or can become pregnant will be a ward of the state, captive of a misogynist minority.
Snake oil salesmen have nothing on Congress as it tries to sell gun control to America
Whatever the National Rifle Association is paying for the votes in the U.S. Senate, it’s not enough. They’re getting one heck of a deal. And no organization should be more excited to support the measures that the Senate is contemplating than the NRA. It’s a bill that is all hype, no substance and won’t affect gun owners, gun safety or the NRA’s silent but co-equal partner, the gun manufacturers, in any meaningful way.
If competition would kill Amazon Prime, maybe it’s not that great
Amazon and its lobbyists are claiming that passing Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s Big Tech bill would lead to the end of Prime, or at the very least, significantly impair the service. This is such an absurd, desperate lie. What the bill actually does is force Amazon to compete in ways that will benefit consumers and small businesses.
George Floyd’s NC family members are working to keep his memory and the struggle for social reform alive
Two years after his death, efforts to raise funds for a memorial center in Raleigh continue A neighbor remarked last week that the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas had quickly pushed the grocery store killings in Buffalo, New York off the front pages of most newspapers. He concluded that the mass shooting at a Tops Friendly Markets store in Buffalo, which resulted in 10 deaths, has already been forgotten...
Celia Rivenbark: My abortion
We had been married a little over a year when I had an abortion. Put down your rocks and torches. If I had not had the abortion, I might well have died. Not so simple now, is it? If I had been your wife, your daughter, your sister, your friend.
Some 68 years after Brown v. Board, similar foes continue stubbornly fighting progress
During a 2014 symposium marking the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision, a statement from one of the plaintiffs offered what today feels like prescient insight. Many of the Virginia plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, feared integration and would have preferred separate and actually equal.
Pandora’s Box: Overturning Roe is only the beginning of the threats to women
Sexual violence survivor details some of the horrors that await if the Supreme Court ends abortion rights When I was raped in 2016, one of my attackers reached inside me and pulled out my NuvaRring, an internal birth control device, and asked me what it was. When I told him, he cast it aside where it was lost until police retrieved it a couple days later.
There’s a path for John Roberts to save Roe. He should take it
A step taken by a former chief justice 50 years ago provides the model In 1972, not long after the decision in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to determine whether the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment.
Inflation: some facts you should know, and some steps policymakers should take
An economist explains why investments in childcare and eldercare could aid the U.S. economy Inflation is by far the biggest economic concern facing the U.S. economy today. While job growth is historically rapid and survey evidence indicates that workers think now is the best time in years to find a good job, the inflation surge has kept this labor market strength from translating into higher wages and incomes for most households.
Automatic or the people? The rapidly changing nature of work
Automation is already here: What is our responsibility to the people and communities left behind? Somewhere on Minnesota's Iron Range a railroad engineer noses an 85-car train under the load-out chute at a taconite plant. One by one, each car fills with almost 100 tons of iron ore. The contents of this train will be worth several hundred thousand dollars to the company.
NC’s behavioral health system puts children with complex needs – and their parents – in impossible situations
Earlier this month, a North Carolina father contemplated an unthinkable decision: should he bring his 12-year-old son home from his group home without the services necessary to keep his son and the rest of his family safe, or abandon his son by not picking him up at discharge? In considering giving up his child, this father risks judgments and assumptions, though none of them would be accurate. The reality? He loves his son unequivocally. It is because he loves his son that he is pondering this horrific choice.
The tragicomedy of the U.S. immigration debate
The debate about the elimination of Title 42, a public health measure that expels migrants attempting to seek asylum, with certain exceptions, is just another chapter in the sad saga that is the migration discussion in this country, which is not based on solutions, but exploiting the issue for political-partisan ends. It’s the same tired […]