While the Christian right has been making a case against Planned Parenthood, a healthcare provider, on the basis of its “affront to ‘Christian values,” some see room to defend the organization on religious grounds. Mara Willard, “Can There Be a Religious Response to Planned Parenthood’s Critics,” looks at the way this defense is being made. [...]
Tag archives for history
Who Created the Voter-Fraud Myth?
Imagine this: “You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector…” Writing for the New Yorker (10/29/12), Jane Meyer tells about the man behind the myth that American elections are threatened by fraudulent voters. Many election experts say that Hans von Spakovsky, a conservative Republican lawyer who served [...]
category: Things Critical, Things Rhetorical
Pilgrims’s (near)Progress
White people love to talk about politics around the dinner table, which might explain the continuing popularity of the Thanksgiving holiday. More than any other day or time on the American calendar or schedule (which are typically governed by all manner of rules and directives about “polite company” and social taboos), Thanksgiving is the day when white [...]
category: Things Critical
On the media and its discontents
The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media Gladstone, Brooke. W. W. Norton & Company: 2011
category: Bookmarks
on Talking Back via Identity Politics
Deedee Garcia Blase (R-AZ) forms the National Tequila Party in the hopes of motivating would-be Latino voters to get out to the polls in 2012 in response to the anti-immigration rhetoric of the Tea Party. Note that Garcia Blase is Republican, and note that National Tequila Party doesn’t overtly identify with either the Left or [...]
category: Things General, Things Rhetorical
tags: civil rights, class, discourse, ethnicity, history, immigration, latino/a, national identity, race
Bartering for Citizenship
A few weeks ago I wrote about the possible (read: likely) effects of employing certain rhetoric when advocating for same-sex marriage (namely that which aligns homosexuality with heteronormativity…homonormativity?). Historically, civil rights discourses have pitted minority groups against the dominant group in a sort of “tit-for-tat”; if you want this, then you have to give this [...]
category: Things Critical, Things Rhetorical
Industriousness + Productivity = The American Way!
Linton’s Week’s long-ish article on NPR, “Lazy In America: An Incomplete Social History” (1 July 2011), does a nice job of demonstrating how the tension between being productive and industrious versus having leisure time (or how one spends his/her leisure time) has continuously been used to promulgate the idea of one type of American over [...]
category: Things Critical
tags: history, national identity
I swear I’m straight…except for the gay sex part
New York state is the latest–and largest–state to recognize the right of gays and lesbians to marry. By all means, this is good news as everyone who wishes to marry should be allowed to, and in every state in the U.S. However, the manner by which proponents of gay marriage have gone about gaining greater [...]
category: Things Critical, Things Rhetorical
On the Persistence of Race in the U.S.
How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon Roediger, David R. Verso: 2008
category: Things General
On the Social Construction of Whiteness
The History of White People Painter, Nell Irvin. Norton: 2011
category: Things General