Opinion

[People of color] are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. —Audre Lorde

America loves teachable moments, those real-life Very Special Episodes of supposed cross-cultural exchange and transracial learning.

They are terrible candidates for the Republicans to pick if the goal is to recruit the constituency they so desperately need to stay relevant

Ashley Diamond, a transgender inmate who was denied medically necessary hormones by the Georgia correctional system, was raped seven times, called a “he-she thing”, and thrown into solitary confinement for “pretending” to be a woman.

A new insurance commercial shows comedian Mindy Kaling embracing what it means to be invisible: As Kaling walks down the grocery aisle messily eating ice cream, she uses her “cloak” of invisibility to feel up the muscles of a handsome basketball player.

For the last few years, I’ve hovered above the refreshments table at art events, guzzling free wine like a peasant and stuffing napkins full of bread and cheese into my purse. Usually the art is mediocre, I am alone covering an exhibition, and making small talk is excruciating without the encouragement of alcohol.

Since Ted Cruz first announced his candidacy, much has been made of his chances of winning, his arrogance and his extreme conservative views. But most of the controversy over his candidacy centers on his lying.

If I'm such an open-minded atheist -- if I really am an atheist because I think the God hypothesis is unsupported by the evidence -- what evidence for God would I accept? What would it take to change my mind?

In June 2011, I competed in a figure/bodybuilding competition as a form of embodied research. This photograph shows me standing onstage during the Northern Alberta Bodybuilding Championships, wearing a tiny blue velvet bikini and high heeled plastic shoes while covered in tanning dye.

The following is not snark. It's an honest and practical inquiry: How will merchants in Indiana determine which customers can now be refused service under the state's new "religious liberty" law?

Why do the same people who fight against abortion argue that parents should have the right to beat their children and deny them medical care or education, as some conservative Republicans have done recently? How can someone oppose family planning because a pill or IUD might have the rare and unintended consequence of interfering with implantation, and then endorse beating a child, which might have the rare and unintended consequence of battering her to death?

Imagine that the elected leader of a foreign country did this to a democratically elected ally:

The man who hovered over my intoxicated body one humid May night in my senior year of college, liquor and lust staining his breath as he laughed that my “no” really meant “yes”, is still on campus. He is the kind of man women whisper to each other about when they think he is not looking, whose transgressions against our bodies are cataloged in hushed tones and quick, ominous shakes of the head.

As long as the extreme Christian right exists, there are going to be closed-minded, Bible-thumping homophobes who trumpet scriptural passages "proving" that gays are going to spend eternity in hell. Need we remind these religious zealots that it’s the year 2015?