It’s been a rough month for everyone who supports people’s right to control their own bodies and make reproductive choices for themselves. With conservatives passing laws in Georgia, Ohio, Alabama, and Missouri that amount to nearly complete bans on abortion in those states, people with uteruses have fewer rights than corpses when it comes to […]
News
News
Senator Amanda Chase Got Ratioed. Again.
Poor GOP state Senator Amanda Chase is having a rough time of it on Twitter lately. It seems no matter what she tweets, the internet is there to ratio her. Not familiar with the term? Urban Dictionary helpfully defines it as “being revealed as an idiot on twitter by having a high ratio of comments […]
News
Thoughts and Prayers Don’t Heal Bullet Wounds
During the past weekend, we experienced the 150th mass shooting of the year right here in Virginia. When asked about her reaction to the massacre at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center, local resident Nora Schaefer said to me, “Although people say a shooting can happen anywhere when it does happen in your city it changes […]
News
One Year Ago We Expanded Medicaid–Now Go Vote!
It seems like yesterday we achieved a major victory here in Virginia. After years of debate and roadblocks, the Virginia state Senate voted on May 30, 2018 to expand access to affordable healthcare to 400,000 Virginians. It took six years of tireless advocacy from activists, community members, unions, and grassroots organizations, but on that day […]
News
Conservatives In Virginia Are Coming For Abortion Access
In order for our communities to thrive, one of the most basic things we need is the ability to decide for ourselves whether, how, and when to start a family. Everyone needs the basic autonomy to decide what happens with their bodies and the right to choose how many children they do or do not […]
News
Things I’m Over: Stigma Around Abortion
Spoiler Alert: This blog contains spoilers from season 3 of “The Bold Type”. On last Tuesday’s episode of “The Bold Type”, a show on Freeform profiling millennial women in the workplace, one of the main characters considered running for office. She was excited about her possible campaign, but became hesitant at the prospect of people […]
News
New Trump Immigration Czar Compared Immigrants to Rats
Washington, DC—Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, widely reported as Donald Trump’s pick as immigration czar, compared immigrants to rats in 2012 and appeared to endorse family separation policies. Speaking on a D.C. radio program, Cuccinelli said “It is worse than our immigration policy. You can’t break up rat families…and you can’t even kill ‘em.” “It is […]
News
It’s Time for a A New Earth Day
by Taneasha White and LaTwyla Mathias The recent occasion of Earth Day got us thinking about the environment, the movement to save the environment, and the state of our country in 2019. We need a new approach to environmental issues, including Earth Day, and here’s why. Growing up, we were taught in school to love […]
News
Who Counts in the 2020 Census? | How an Undercount Could Impact Virginia Communities
This blog post is the final installation of a three-part series “Who Counts in the 2020 Census?” where we interviewed local leaders spearheading the fight in their communities to obtain a fair and accurate count of everyone who lives in Virginia. The Census is a pretty big deal. The data collected from the Census is […]
News
“Us” and the Marginalization of People of Color in Virginia
⚠️Caution⚠️ Several “Us” spoilers ahead! Seeing Us on opening weekend, I was surprised by the themes throughout the movie that relate directly to the socio-political climate in Virginia. Here’s a brief overview of Jordan Peele’s new box-office hit Us: a family goes on vacation, and during their stay the mother seems to be haunted by […]