Month: August 2012

Because disenfranchising black voters isn’t sufficiently racist, two Republican National Convention attendees decided to make their party’s racism more explicit by throwing nuts at an African American CNN camera woman and saying, “This is how we feed animals.” The incident was first reported via twitter by David Shuster and has been confirmed by Talking Points Memo. CNN told TPM it could confirm  “there was an incident directed at an employee inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum earlier this afternoon. CNN worked with convention officials to address this matter and will have no further comment.” […]

Read more at Feministing

“Everyone thinks that Norway is a paradise, and of course it is in many ways — if you compare it with India or Guatemala…. But you cannot say that a country has no human rights problems if women suffer from violence and you are not protecting them.” This is what motivated photo-journalist Walter Estrada to point his camera at the violence against women that occurs in Norway. Estrada has documented this epidemic in countries like Guatemala, India, Congo, but showing violence against women in a country that is not war-torn, in conflict, or notorious for its mistreatment of women highlights how pervasive violence against women really is. […]

Read more at Feministing

On Friday,  Judge Marina Syrova convicted three members of Pussy Riot the women of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,  sentencing them to ”two years deprivation of liberty in a penal colony.” This is one year less than the three-year sentence sought by prosecutors. Syrova said the punk prayerPussy Riot had performed in a Moscow cathedral had ”crudely undermined social order.” She stated that  ”These three plus others… plotted together to undermine civil order, motivated by religious hatred.” Syrova justified her sentence, saying, “Considering the nature and degree of the danger posed by what was done, the defendants’ correction is possible only through an actual punishment.”

Lawyers representing Pussy Riot anticipated the guilty verdict and plan to appeal the sentence through the courts, rather than to Putin. The  sentencing sparked protests around the world, some of which are captured in this photo gallery from The Guardian.

Read more at Feministing

Vanessa recently wrote a great post on why Paul Ryan is bad for women and basically every person on the planet (besides the vested interests he serves and represents). UltraViolet has put out this great infographic, which you can share, on why Ryan is terrible for women specifically.

read more at Feministing

Matthew Vines describes himself as  ”an advocate for the acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people within Christian communities and in society at large.” And advocate he does! What’s so great about this speech that he delivered at the church in his hometown, is that he challenges the hijacking of Christianity by using… Christianity. After all, he did grow up in a conservative church in Kansas. Vines makes me want to give up my agnosticism and become religious… almost.

Read more at Feministing

The iconic Olympics rings are everywhere we look. But what happens when we look at them a different way. That’s what artist Gustavo Souza did in his project Oceaniaeuropeamericaasiaafrica. Souza explains, “The rings represent healthy competition and union, but we know the world isn’t perfect. Maybe understanding the differences is the first step to try to make things more equal.” So Souza uses the colors of the continents and plays with the size of the rings, so they illustrate the differences and disparities among the world’s regions.

Read more at Feministing

This is really adorable. And important. And moving. As Upworthy‘s Rollie Williams writes, “These two children belong to feuding Malaysian ethnic groups. The little boy, Tan Hong Ming, is Malaysian Chinese while the girl he loves is Malaysian Malay.” See what happens!

Read more at Feministing

The eight-day trialagainst three members of the feminist punk rock band Pussy Riot, charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred after they performed a punk prayer in an Orthodox church, asking  the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of President Vladimir Putin, wrapped up Wednesday. The prosecutors have asked for a three-year sentence and the verdict will be announced Friday August 17th.

The trial was a major miscalculation for the Russian Government. It has shed light on a struggle between  a repressive regime of censorship  on the one hand and martyrs for freedom, free speech and artistic expression, on the other. The defendants themselves linked their persecution to that of Soviet-era writers in their closing statements.  Standing in front of a slit in their glass and metal cage, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said, ”I, like [writer Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn, believe that words will crush concrete… We sit in a cage, but we didn’t lose. And the dissidents didn’t lose. Disappearing in psychiatric wards and jails, they convicted the regime.”  She also stated, “this is a trial of the whole government system of Russia, which so likes to show its harshness toward the individual, its indifference to his honour and dignity….If this political system throws itself against three girls … it shows this political system is afraid of truth.”  Another member, Maria Alyokhina, said, ”I am not afraid of you. You can take away my ‘so-called’ freedom, but you can never take my inner freedom.”

Read more at Feministing