The celebration of the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. takes place this year amidst political chaos. In particular, it is occurring in the middle a weeks-long government shutdown that has pitted President Donald Trump, the leader of a party that is 90 percent white, against the most diverse Congress in American history over an idea that has been derided as racist and xenophobic.

Praise for Dr. King’s legacy will emerge from this partisan rancor. Rather than invoke unity, however, such praise exposes a difficult truth: King's legacy has become as segregated as the country he tried to heal.

Actress and radio performer Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar in 1940, for her supporting role as Mammy in 'Gone With the Wind.'

Now that the U.S. government is threatening to define gender as only male or female, we need to fight more than ever for transgender rights. But the idea there should be no gender categories and we should live in a label-free world, as some have argued, is a utopian dream.

Pioneering scholar Dennis Altman spoke for many gay and lesbian activists at the beginning of the modern queer rights movement in 1971 when he suggested the battle for acceptance of human and legal rights for gay and lesbian people had only one goal: the eradication of the need for any such rights at all.

According to Altman, categories of sexuality were a necessary evil, but in an ideal world they would be replaced by “a new human who is no longer imprisoned by limitations of sexuality and compassion….”

Cultural theorists Daniel Harris and Bert Archer continue to embrace Altman’s original utopian vision. Harris gleefully announced the death of both gay culture and straight oppression in his 1997 book, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture:

What social power does music have? Where does that power come from?

Mariachi musicians Carlos Samaniego and Natalia Melendez found out the hard way—first through discrimination, ridicule and professional blackballing among their musician peers, then via the challenging path of advocating for the acceptance of gay, lesbian and transgender people in the mariachi world.

“What is wrong with white women?” Moira Donegan asked at the Guardian after last week’s midterm elections.

“Why do half of them so consistently vote for Republicans, even as the Republican party morphs into a monstrously ugly organization that is increasingly indistinguishable from a hate group?”

Questions about white women’s allegiances came to the fore again this week, when news broke that a white woman senator facing a runoff in Mississippi had made a joke on the campaign trail about attending a “public hanging.”

Progressives sometimes expect white women, as a group, to support the interests of people of color of all genders — after all, women know what discrimination feels like.

“Most of us continue to see white women through the lens of gender,” explained Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, a history professor at UC Berkeley and the author of the forthcoming book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. “This allows for us to be optimistic about the possibility that their gendered oppression will allow for them to find common cause with other dispossessed groups.”

But that common cause has been elusive.

Korean boy band BTS have been criticized by a Jewish human rights group for posing in headgear featuring a Nazi-style symbol.

In a statement posted on its website, the Simon Wiesenthal Center alleged that the popular K-pop group had posed in hats displaying the Death's-Head symbol of the SS -- the organization that oversaw the Nazi concentration camps.

Noting that the group were dropped last week from a planned Japanese TV appearance after one of its members wore a T-shirt that appeared to celebrate the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki, the center's associate dean and director of global social action, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said that the group owed both the "people of Japan and the victims of the Nazism an apology."

Stan Lee, the comic-book mastermind who helped create some of pop culture’s most enduring and popular characters—including Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, the X-Men, and more—has died at the age of 95, TMZ reported Monday. The Marvel founder had suffered from ill health over the past year or so, including pneumonia; according to The Hollywood Reporter, he died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Giuliani had defended his business relationships, claiming that he had "friends all over the world."

"This is not a new thing for me," he told the Times. "When you become the mayor, you become interested in foreign policy. When I left, my major work was legal and security around the world."

During his trip to Armenia, Giuliani tweeted messages of support for Trump, claiming that "people here in Armenia think President Trump has once again restored America's leadership position."

"Many ARMENIANS want me to tell Americans that they love President Trump's dedication to making America Great Again," Giuliani said. "This will lead the world to peace and respect for human achievement and freedom."

On August 22, 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer went before the Democratic National Committee to insist that the Mississippi Freedom Party, an organization she started to help African-Americans register to vote, be seated to integrate the all-White Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention.

Then President Lyndon B. Johnson tried to silence Hamer. His aides and allies pressured her not to speak, and in a final effort to keep her from being heard, President Johnson called an impromptu press conference so her words would not be televised.

Fortunately, his plan to distract reporters backfired: Hamer’s 13-minute testimony detailing the inequities visited upon Black people who just wanted to vote in the land they called home was aired later that evening on prime time.

Hamer was a political force who would not be ignored. A local leader who thought globally, she knew she could not afford to sit back and let the injustices of her time go unchallenged and unchecked.

President Donald Trump tweeted a new ad that is almost too racist to believe on Wednesday.

The ad from Trump’s campaign, which accuses Democrats of allowing Mexicans and Central Americans to murder Americans, is the latest escalation in Republicans’ very obvious attempts to stoke fear about brown people and distract from unpopular conservative policies. The president’s party is widely expected to lose control of one chamber of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

While smearing immigrants is a time-honored tradition for many on the right, the president’s efforts to make a major campaign issue out of a migrant caravan traveling north from Central America (and currently 1,000 miles away from the U.S. border) has been echoed by prominent Republicans, Fox News, and numerous other propagandists in conservative media.

But don’t just take our word for it. Let’s dig into the data to show why Republicans’ recent cherry-picking has no basis in reality.

There are few gigs in modern TV more fraught with the potential to out yourself as a massive asshole than hosting Saturday Night Live. Pretty much every factor—the rush, the pressure, the presence of the live camera—is almost guaranteed to bring out the worst in people, whether it’s deciding to bust out their “funny” Jamaican accent for some godforsaken reason, doing whatever the hell it was Justin Bieber did to piss Bill Hader off so much, or just being all-around bad human being Steven Seagal.

A declassified profile of Adolf Hitler said that he was “both homosexual and hetero-sexual.”

The document, compiled by the Office of Strategic Services in 1942, is a long profile of the personal life of the Nazi dictator. The 70-page document was declassified in 2000, but the British tabloid Daily Star just reported on the references to Hitler’s sexuality in it.

California’s Diocese of San Bernardino this week released 34 names of the Catholic priests it says have had credible allegations of child sexual abuse made against them since 1978. On Twitter, the church said it was “an action of transparency intended to promote healing.”

Some of the alleged incidents described next to the priests’ names date back to the 1960s. Many of the men have been permanently banned from ministry in the diocese or are deceased. Some priests were arrested or suspended, while others were reported to the religious order.

On a warm, June Sunday in St. Louis I wandered with an old friend through the church where, earlier that morning, my children had been baptized. We came to the baptismal font, around which our family had gathered for the ceremony during the regular Sunday service. It was about four feet high, just low enough for my daughter to reach up and fiddle her fingers in the water and watch the droplets dribble back into its shallow pool. My friend, who had grown up in a secular upper-class home in Tito’s Yugoslavia, had little knowledge of fonts and baptism and the goings-on that morning. So he asked, what does it mean, baptism?

The question gave me pause. When you baptize a baby, it is a kind of naming ceremony, like those found in many societies. When you are baptized, like I was, on the eve of puberty, it is a coming-of-age ceremony, a rite de passage—again, a common practice across cultures. Sometimes, though rarely, an adult is baptized. Then it signals a religious conversion, the culmination of a profound personal transformation. I rambled. “But what do you think it means?” he asked. It was a fair question. I had just seen my own children baptized.

“It means,” I said, “you’re a child of God.”

“So you’re saved?” No. That’s not what I meant. That is what most people assume it means. That is what most people think the Christian religion is all about: salvation. But that is not really it. Earlier that morning the minister had used words from an ancient, nearly forgotten credo once associated with baptism. “You are children of God,” she said. “There is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male and female.” The words were from a letter of Paul the Apostle, who had taken them, in turn, from an ancient baptismal creed he had come to know through the Jesus movement. That is what it’s about—being a child of God. Ethnicity (no Jew or Greek), class (no slave or free), and gender (no male and female) count neither for you nor against you. We are all children of God. He was skeptical. An early Christian creed about race, class, and gender? Unbelievable.

These days, and especially since the deadly rally in Charlottesville, Va., last August, it has become clear to many Americans that the specter of Nazism in their country is not resigned to 1930s history. But until very recently, even that part of the story was less well known than it is today.

In fact, when Bradley W. Hart first started researching the history of Nazi sympathy in the United States a few years ago, he was largely driven by the absence of attention to the topic. Hart’s new book Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States argues that the threat of Nazism in the United States before World War II was greater than we generally remember today, and that those forces offer valuable lessons decades later — and not just because part of that story is the history of the “America First” idea, born of pre-WWII isolationism and later reborn as a slogan for now-President Donald Trump.