All Posts Tagged as 'Exclusivity'

The memories come to her in fragments. The bed creaking late at night after one of her brothers snuck into her room and pulled her to the edge of her mattress. Her underwear shoved to the side as his body hovered over hers, one of his feet still on the floor.

Her ripped dresses, the clothespins that bent apart on her apron as another brother grabbed her at dusk by the hogpen after they finished feeding the pigs. Sometimes she’d pry herself free and sprint toward the house, but “they were bigger and stronger,” she says. They usually got what they wanted.

As a child, Sadie* was carefully shielded from outside influences, never allowed to watch TV or listen to pop music or get her learner’s permit. Instead, she attended a one-room Amish schoolhouse and rode a horse and buggy to church—a life designed to be humble and disciplined and godly.

Rapper Kanye West announced he will appear at Awaken2020, a stadium-sized prayer rally hosted by some of the nation’s most anti-LGBTQ religious conservatives. After West’s announcement so many people rushed online to get free tickets to the event, the group’s website crashed.

West, who’s erratic behavior has seen him suddenly becoming a rightwing Christian and devout worshipper of Donald Trump, has been pushing his new gospel album recently. One of the songs is an ode to Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain most frequently identified with religious controversy over LGBTQ rights.

A Christian school in Louisville expelled a student last week after her family said school officials discovered the girl had celebrated her birthday with a rainbow-themed cake.

Activist conservative group One Million Moms is taking aim at Burger King for using what it calls the "d-word" in a commercial promoting the non-meat Impossible Whopper.

In the ad, a group of people taste-test the plant-based patty that has been a hit for the fast-food company. With a mouthful of food, one man says...

A lawyer for the students, who attend Longwood High School on Long Island, filed a notice of claim, the first step to filing a lawsuit, on Tuesday. He later announced in a news conference that the group would sue their school district for $12 million.

The notice, which has been reviewed by Insider, said that a teacher took a photo of four black students, aged 16 to 18, standing behind one another during a field trip to the Bronx Zoo in November 2019

The notice alleges that the teacher later included the photo in a slideshow shown in class with the caption "monkey do," alongside a photo of a gorilla.

Indiana Republicans are introducing two bills targeting the transgender and non-binary communities.

Senate Bill 74, authored by Sen. Jim Tomes, would eliminate the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles’ proposal to create gender-neutral driver’s licenses, and House Bill 1088 (The Fair Play for Female Athletes Act), authored by Rep. Christy Stutzman, would prevent anyone assigned male at birth from competing in female sporting events.

Last November, a student at Fuller Theological Seminary — the nation's largest interdenominational seminary — sued the school for discrimination after she was expelled for marrying another woman. Now, another former student is joining the lawsuit.

In the amended complaint filed Tuesday, Nathan Brittsan, an American Baptist Churches USA pastor, joined Joanna Maxon in requesting the school award them more than $1 million each to compensate for damages, Christianity Today reported.

Paul Southwick, the attorney representing Maxon and Brittsan, is arguing that Fuller is required to comply with Title IX, which bars federally funded educational programs from discriminating based on sex. However, religiously affiliated schools are often granted exceptions from Title IX regulations in order to accommodate for religious freedom.

"It's a very important case at this time in our nation's history," Southwick said, according to Christianity Today. "This case could set an important legal precedent that if an educational institution receives federal funding, even if it's religiously-affiliated, even if it's a seminary, that it's required to comply with Title IX prohibitions on sex discrimination as applied to LGBT individuals."

LGBTQ inclusion in the policy and practices of UMC has been a long contentious and exhausting battle – both nationally and globally. The proposed schism to be voted on in May at General Conference in Minneapolis will divide the nation’s third-largest denomination worldwide.

While the current UMC will allow LGBTQ marriages and clergy, the impending split will create a new “traditionalist Methodist” denomination, allowing outright discrimination and denunciation of LGBTQ people in the name of God.

A woman who allegedly snatched a hijab from the head of a Saudi Arabian college student and tried to choke her with it has been charged with hate crimes, authorities in Portland, Oregon, said.

The Supreme Court announced on Wednesday that it would hear a pair of cases concerning the “ministerial exemption” to employment discrimination laws. Broadly speaking, the “ministerial exemption” provides that religious “ministers” are not protected by civil rights laws in their workplace — so a church could, for example, fire its preacher because the preacher is black.

A woman from Des Moines, Iowa, has been charged with attempted murder after telling authorities that she drove over a teenager because the girl was Hispanic, according to court records.

“There is no comprehensive data on the extent of criminal justice debt owed by poor people, but experts estimate that these fines amount to billions of dollars,” the report found. “These fines, if unpaid, can result in incarceration, even though so-called debtor’s prisons have been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

It’s a financial loss for cities, too, the report argued. Studies in multiple municipalities have found that governments save money when they help house homeless people instead of spending money to incarcerate them or hospitalize them with conditions linked to living unsheltered.

Who killed the sex symbol?

It's no mystery that in the era of #MeToo, the rules of combat have changed on the sexual battlefield. Women will no longer tolerate condescending or degrading treatment that was once business as usual in the workplace or dating arena. But in this long overdue push-back against sexual coercion and exploitation, has something valuable been lost?

The sex symbol was arguably Hollywood's most brilliant artifact, propelling the young movie industry to world impact from the moment that Theda Bara flashed her coiled-snake brassiere in Cleopatra (1917). Sex was great box office. With its impudent populism, Hollywood crashed through stuffy proprieties lingering from the Victorian age and stationed itself at the bold forefront of the modern liberalization of sex. Movies were in sync with the radical new spirit of American women, who won the right to vote in 1920 and kicked up their heels throughout the flapper decade of the Roaring Twenties.

The great sex symbols of Hollywood were manufactured beings, engineered by trial and error, with the mass audience as their ultimate judge and jury. Decade by decade, the movie industry rediscovered primal archetypes that have animated myths around the world since the Stone Age. Major male sex symbols like Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Sidney Poitier have a mesmerizing natural authority onscreen, a supranormal power of personality and density of being that transcend their roles. Like their antecedents in ancient hero sagas, they inhabit and explore physical space, whose frustrations and dangers they endure but ultimately defeat.

The female sex symbol, however, commands emotional or psychological space. Her sensual beauty is an alluring mirage, hypnotizing and sometimes paralyzing. Never entirely present, she is attuned to another reality, an extrasensory dimension to which we have no access. There is an unsettling aura of the uncanny around the major female sex symbols, who channel shadowy powers above or below the social realm.

Jason Derulo can’t believe Instagram took down his steamy viral photo.

On Tuesday, the “Talk Dirty” singer, 30, shared a screenshot of the notice he received from the social media platform, which claimed the content went against Instagram’s guidelines.

Derulo also took the opportunity to protest the removal by reposting the particular photo, which went viral last month after fans couldn’t help but notice the visible outline of the star’s crotch under his bottoms — a trending topic Derulo himself enjoyed participating in online.

Activists in Evansville, Ind., caught a school board member on video appearing to dismiss their concerns about safety for LGBTQ kids.

This week, ten members of the Tri-State Alliance — a social service and educational organization serving LGBTQ communities in southeastern Illinois, southwestern Indiana, and western Kentucky — attended a board meeting of the Evansville-Vanderburgh County School Corporation to ask for greater protections for queer students.

After the meeting, the activists confronted school board members, according to posts on the group’s Facebook page.

The Tri-State Alliance says board member Ann Ennis claimed there was no support on the board for addressing suicide concerns among trans students.

On a video posted to the group’s Facebook page, Tri-State Alliance President Wally Paynter can be heard calling Ennis transphobic.