Last night a truly hateful video appeared on my Facebook timeline. It was originally posted by something called “Highways and Hedges Ministries”, and it is a rant about the evils of transgender restrooms. The man in the video makes several sweeping statements about members of the LGBT community. They are perverts. They are sinners. They…
If you’ve spent any amount of time on Facebook over the last few months, you might have seen something called the Black Dot Campaign. The concept is simple: if you see a woman with a black dot in the palm of her hand, she is a victim of ongoing domestic violence and needs to be…
When Bruce Jenner became Caitlin Jenner earlier this year, Facebook erupted with judgmental posts. No surprise there – after all, Facebook has been the venue of many battles, including the Vaccine Wars, the Gay Marriage Wars, the Breastfeeding In Public Wars, and many more. People say all kinds of things from the safety of their…
A few days ago, an eighteen-year-old woman named Sanet – the sister of one of my friends – was brutally assaulted in Cape Town. She got into a taxi to get home after a night out with friends, and the taxi driver and another man pinned her down, kicked her and beat her. She was…
Last week, Wal-Mart announced that by 2016, all of their employees in the United States will be earning a minimum of $10 per hour – up from their current minimum wage of $9 per hour. While this is more than the federally mandated minimum wage, it’s really not enough for someone to live on. In…
When I was a teenager in the 1980’s, a journalist came to my school one year to give the keynote speech at our annual Prizegiving night. Prizegiving was a big deal in my school, and the keynote speaker was always selected with a great deal of care. The fact that a journalist made the cut…