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Author Archives: s.e. smith

Tiger Beats: What We’re Up To

It’s been a while since we did a roundup updating y’all on our fabulous doings, so, here we go! Emily just made an international move and she’s settling in, but she still had time to write a great piece about the turn towards austerity in Australia. Flavia co-founded Space Invaders, ‘a collective that seeks to […]

Rape and selective outrage in the feminist community

Content note: This post discusses sexual assault committed against disabled people. People have repeatedly asked me to write about a case from Connecticut involving a rape conviction that was overturned on the grounds that ‘No reasonable jury could have concluded that [the victim] was physically helpless.’ And I get why you want me to write […]

Breaking human trafficking out of the supply chain in US government contracting

Last week, President Obama issued a rather critically important executive order that attracted little to no attention in the US, perhaps because it didn’t deal directly with domestic issues, which are the all-consuming subject of interest for many people. The order, though, was important on a global and national relations scale, and it marked a […]

Crisis Pregnancy Centers are the future of reproductive health in Texas

Rick Perry has been on a crusade to limit access to reproductive health care in Texas, and so far, it’s been going pretty well for him. Especially in regards to Planned Parenthood, notorious hotbed of sin, which he’s trying to run out of the state. Last week, we got a taste of what he envisions […]

Tea Party practices its voter intimidation skills for November in Massachusetts

Massachusetts held a Democratic primary recently; you might have missed it, in a haze of other election news and everything else that’s going on. But something really, really important happened there, and it wasn’t just who won the election. It’s something that didn’t get nearly as much coverage as it should have, even in progressive […]

Stop justifying abortion

Either you believe abortion should be legal and we need to protect access to safe, compassionate, and confidential abortion services, full stop, or you want to fall right down the slippery slope of moral relativism and directly into the hands of conservatives. You do not need to justify abortion because a pregnancy endangers the life […]

Free labour is never truly free

Despite the fact that the rest of the world celebrates labour on 1 May, the United States, ever determined to be contrarian, chooses to observe Labour Day on the first Monday of September. Today, it seems fitting to give a shoutout to all the people who work tirelessly in labour organising to make the workplace […]

Hate, fear, and rhetoric: The labeling of hate crimes in the United States

Two weeks ago, the news exploded with a shooting at the Family Research Council which injured a security guard in the arm. Conservatives immediately went on the attack, labeling the shooting ‘terrorism’ and a ‘hate crime’ and zeroing in on the fact that the shooter was associated with a gay community centre, creating the image […]

Lives worth living: Disability, abortion, and slipshod ethics

I’m still seething over this post at Reproductive Health Reality Check, in which I am essentially informed that my life has so little value, is so not worth living, that I was such a burden on my father to raise, that I should have been aborted. Things like this are why I have problems interacting […]

Because everyone deserves sick days

One of the many things that used to distinguish freelancing from other forms of employment was the lack of sick days. If you were sick, you either worked anyway, or you didn’t work, and you lost out on a day’s income. That was just how things operated, and you seethed in jealousy at your conventionally […]