Check out this headine: “N.Y. Catholics: Dems Trying to Bankrupt Church.” Sounds pretty bad, right? I mean, I’m not a huge fan of some of the Church hierarchy’s decisions, but I have no hate for the Church itself or the people who benefit from its services or the people who f...

We are cross posting this for a Tacoma activist that is working hard for our schools Crossposted at Washington Woman I am deep in the throes of campaigning for a local school bond election.  Every year or two our school district has to undertake this ritual, the legacy of a state constitutional...

Author’s Note: This post at Feministe–about the Catholic Church’s excommunication of the mother of a nine-year-old girl who became pregnant with twins, apparently after having been raped by her step-father, and the doctors who performed the abortion that ended the girl’s preg...

This is an interesting piece, but one part in particular stands out: I asked my colleague Elizabeth Tenety, producer of Divine Impulses and our former “Campus Catholic” blogger, to explain [why the Church targets Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, but not those who favor t...

Edited to add: Author’s Preface: I see each post in this series as one section of a single piece of writing, not as a discrete essay unto itself. As a result, while each section may contain its own argument, it is not really possible to know whether an issue that you feel is important will or will...

In Brazil, there is a horrific story of a 9-year-old girl who was raped and impregnated (h/t Falloch’s comment).  It’s believed that the rape was committed by her step-father.  The girl was not only pregnant at that young age, but also pregnant with twins.  And so, as makes perfect se...

One of the ways of starkly illustrating an aspect of the gender divide is DeBecker’s quote: “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.” I think there’s a class and mothering parallel here: Middle-class women are afra...

Yeah, I know. It's been a few days. But with Bush out of the White House and not producing a new outrage every couple of days, there seems to be less immediacy to the Ranting©. Then, OTOH, there are the "Still Bushed" scandals to "Scrub. Rinse. Repeat.", to quote Keith and Rachel. Such as the recen...

I don't do New Year's resolutions.  Why set myself up for one big failure just once a year when instead every day is a fresh chance to set unrealistic goals for myself, and have dozens of little failures every year? The flip side on, well, the flip side... It also means that I can't think maybe...

Forgiven wrote a well-intentioned post on My Left Wing called America is Cool Again. In it he posited the idea that the "coolness" of the Obamas and company rivaled that of the Kennedys and that being the case, we were once again somehow in the catbird seat as far as the rest of the world is concern...