dear christians defending rapists: your prejudice is showing

Last updated on: June 7, 2016 at 11:53 am By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Our existing prison systems do nothing to eradicate rape mentality: they only shift the focus, making rape punitive, instead of making it disappear. But if you want to make the plea that prison would have a "severe impact" on Brock Turner, I want to see that same argument made in the case of every single young man of color who is sentenced for much longer periods for much less troubling crimes. I want to see the excuse that "he was drunk, and couldn't help himself" extended to every single person, male or female, black and white, who makes a grave moral error. Why is it that whenever a young black man is shot for resisting arrest, it's added damnation of him, if it can be proven that he had alcohol or drugs in his system, while this same proof is an excuse for rich white rapists? Why is it that the future of rich white men, especially if they happen to be athletes, is so precious, that we can wave aside the gravity of their crimes, when we apparently care nothing for the future of women, or the poor, or persons of color? If Brock Turner gets off with a wrist-slap for rape, why should Jane Laut be sentenced to life in prison for shooting her abuser in self-defense? Read more

confessing the sin of racism

Last updated on: June 6, 2016 at 9:54 pm By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Looking back, I am ashamed. Now I wish to mend whatever flaw in my soul allowed me to harbor racist tendencies, whatever failure of love or magnanimity blurred the face of Christ. Read more

the bombing of hiroshima, the case of jane laut, and our immoral preferential option for the powerful

Last updated on: June 5, 2016 at 11:56 am By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Or is it that we who laud death-dealing violence as an aspect of manliness, the supposed "strength" touted by the likes of Trump - and who accept the spectacle of a woman with a gun as long as it's sexualized, fetishized, all the phallic connotations of a gun in the hand of a woman there to meet the delectating eye - are unable to excuse the use of force by a woman raising her hand against that most glorious of American idols, the male sports star? Read more

scapegoating, nature, and narcissism: some thoughts on the cincinnati zoo incident

Last updated on: June 3, 2016 at 11:22 am By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

It is ironic that in our quest to overcome all boundaries, we have enclosed other animals within boundaries of our own making, for the sake of our own increased experience. Read more

party loyalty is not important. it isn’t even a good idea

Last updated on: May 30, 2016 at 11:10 pm By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

I've lived through sixeen years of two different Hitlers and, amazingly, lived to tell the tale. Read more

no, a vote for a third party is not “a vote for candidate X” (unless the world is more absurd than I expected)

Last updated on: May 28, 2016 at 10:06 am By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

A vote for a third party is not a vote for Hillary. Nor is it a vote for Trump. It is a vote for a third party. Read more

love, death, time: the myth of the cicadas

Last updated on: May 26, 2016 at 11:50 am By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Outraged at the divine, I decided I was tired of being good, and would begin to be bad. How can I regret that, though, the years spent underground, a sightless nymph struggling towards unseen light, sipping the sap of survival? Read more

is a bourgeois version of charity inhibiting social change?

Last updated on: May 25, 2016 at 10:45 am By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

In the July 2012 issue of Yes! magazine, Peter Dreier writes about “The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller“: “In her investigations into the causes of blindness, she discovered that poor people were more likely than the rich to be blind, and soon connected the mistreatment of the blind to the oppression of workers, women, and other groups, leading her to embrace socialism, feminism, and pacifism.” We all know the story of the deaf and blind girl who was “miraculously” transformed... Read more

a window might not open, and you might be given more than you can handle: the clamor of insufficient explanations

Last updated on: May 23, 2016 at 12:09 am By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the atheist brother Ivan refuses to believe in a God who allows the suffering of children, and says that even if there is some inexplicable benefit to be derived from this, he will not have it. “I respectfully return the ticket” he says. I sympathize. Read more

is it okay to put your enemies in a book? the strange moral discipline of fiction writing

Last updated on: May 21, 2016 at 12:26 pm By Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Faulkner spoke of the conflict of the heart as the "only thing worth writing about," and this is true, whether one writes about religious weirdos, mermaids and dragons, aliens who live in seven dimensions, pretty ladies in floral gowns, angsty teens, or suburban families obsessed with having perfect lawns. Wriggle your way into the heart and, it turns out, no one is dull. But without this interiority, everyone is dull, even the sexiest mermaid or the most mind-boggling alien. Read more