1. This Is What It’s Like Being a Gay Christian Rock Star
A year after Christian singer Vicky Beeching announced she is gay, BuzzFeed followed up with the songstress on reactions from the Christian community and her life since. “At times it felt like there wasn’t much respect for me as a person. It was either ‘We’re going to grab her as a mascot’ or ‘We’re going to shoot her as an example of this evil.’ For many conservative Christians, I became a sign that people were slipping down a slippery slope into unimaginable sin. People forget there’s a person hiding under a duvet wondering if they’re going to have a life left.”
2. LISTEN: This American Life: The Problem We All Live With
“Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district that, not long ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program. First of a two-part series.” (Part two HERE.)
3. Fake Customer Service Rep Trolls Complainers of Target’s New Gender Neutral Policy
Immediately after Target announced it would no longer identify its toy sections by “boy toys” and “girl toys,” online backlash descended. So one crusader posed as a Target support account and took matters into his own hands, responding to the more ridiculous online critiques (though, sadly, Franklin Graham’s) to hilarious results.
4. President Obama’s Letter to the Editor
President Obama responds to New York Times Magazine’s story on efforts to dismantle the Voting Rights Act over the past 50 years. “I am where I am today only because men and women like Rosanell Eaton refused to accept anything less than a full measure of equality. Their efforts made our country a better place. It is now up to us to continue those efforts.”
5. Coming Soon: Millennials Married With Children
Oh, you mean all the predictions and declarations that this generation is marriage-and-family-averse might have been a bit premature — especially given its oldest members are still under 35? “The group is near a demographic tipping point. For births in the year 2015, 59% of children born to this generation will have married parents, according to Demographic Intelligence’s forecast, and that share will ultimately rise to about 77% in the next 10 years. The coming wave of millennial births will also increasingly come from the college-educated.”
6. How #BlackLivesMatter Changed My Theology
In the past year, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has challenged our nation — and our faith communities — to actively resist systemic racism. So we asked people of faith: how has the Black Lives Matter movement shaped your theology? Hear their answers in this series.
7. ISIS May Be Using Chemical Weapons
U.S. officials are looking into reports the terrorist group used mustard agent against Kurdish fighters in Iraq — which begs the question: how did the agent end up in ISIS hands?
8. Parenting While Black: Toya Graham on Violence, Fear, and Freddie Gray
Toya Graham gained notoriety earlier this year when a YouTube video emerged of her reprimanding her teenage son, who was participating in the Baltimore protests following Freddie Gray’s death, and, according to Graham, had a rock in his hand at the time. TPM follows up with Graham and discusses and the larger implications of ‘parenting while black.’ “Black parents are burdened with the knowledge that, for a black child, the price of error is higher.”
9. ‘Sesame Street’ to Air First on HBO for Next 5 Seasons
“It is an unexpected union: the nonprofit behind a TV show created to teach children in underserved communities matched with the premium cable network that targets affluent adults with innovative programming.”
10. The Arlington Police Department Takes a Different Approach After Christian Taylor’s Death
Texas Monthly examines the Arlington PD’s response to the officer-involved shooting of 19-year-old Christian Taylor — including releasing updated information and firing the officer earlier this week — and whether public pressure is forcing a shift in how departments police themselves.
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