Hank Sanders: Sketches #1688 - Travel has made such a difference in my life!

  Travel. Travel. Travel. Travel changes us. Travel educates us. Travel expands our knowledge. Travel broadens our understanding. Travel lifts our vision. Travel has made such a difference in my life.

  I grew up in a very rural and poor area. We lived on a 13-acre heirs property farm. That experience forged a strong foundation upon which a lot was built over my lifetime. The foundation was solid, but so much needed to be added. Travel helped to build upon that foundation.

‘The Rosa Parks of the transgender movement’

  It’s an open question whether Sylvia Rivera left home or was thrown out. Either way, she said she was relieved to be rid of the “viejita” – or little old lady – who was embarrassed by the child she considered an effeminate grandson.

  Rivera, whose mother died and father abandoned her, was finally on her own. She was only 11 years old.

  By the time she was 17, she would be well on her way to becoming, as one writer would later call her, “the Rosa Parks of the modern transgender movement.”

Charles C. Haynes: ‘Cross at Ground Zero’: History lesson or state religion?

  At a time when Americans are deeply divided over the meaning of “separation of church and state,” a ruling from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week provides a much-needed case study in how the First Amendment’s establishment clause is supposed to work.

  In a unanimous decision, the three-judge panel dismissed a challenge by atheists to the display of a cross-shaped beam at the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero in New York City.

Sam Fulwood III: Is white supremacy making a comeback?

  In almost every discussion of race in this country—whether private conversations among friends and family or public debates between political antagonists—those engaged tend to talk past one another. Passions often displace reason; facts disappear like smoke in the wind, blown aside in the rhetoric of extreme beliefs.

  Who among us, having lived any appreciable time in the United States, lacks an awareness of our nation’s intractable racial frictions? And, after rubbing against the rough edges, who eschews the seemingly hard-wired opinions shared by peers of the racial others?