Commentary
Happy Pride Month. Creepy, bully Republican lawmakers are fixated on assaulting our community.
Happy Pride Month, America, where LGBTQ+ people are under constant assault by bully Republican lawmakers who are weirdly obsessed with our community, especially the transgender members of it. Transgender people — especially transgender people of color — have been leading the activist charge toward LGBTQ+ human rights and equality since the beginning, literally throwing the […]
Tying voting rights to military service defiles the spirit of Memorial Day
Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a multi-millionaire pharmaceutical entrepreneur, has a lot of bold ideas, like visiting college campuses and inner cities, seeking to expand the GOP base. He also has another controversial idea: tying mandatory military service to voting for Americans between the ages of 18 to 25. While military service, or any national service, […]
It’s not ‘drug dealers’ who are killing us, it’s drug stigma
“If I die as a result of a drug overdose, I request that no one be charged, prosecuted, or held criminally responsible for my death. This decision is being made in part to challenge the oppressive and false dichotomy between people who use drugs and people who sell drugs. We are, more often than not, […]
Someone needs to challenge Biden in the presidential primary
It appears a Biden-Trump rematch is inevitable. Former President Donald Trump announced in November he’s running for president a third time, and at the moment no potential GOP challenger comes anywhere close to him in the polls. Ever since President Joe Biden said last month that he’s running for reelection, most of the discussion about […]
Mothers in Arizona and across the U.S. depend on Medicaid
America has a maternal mortality crisis. Research shows the U.S. mortality rate is more than three times higher than other industrialized nations, with an average of 24 deaths per 100,000 births in 2020. This crisis, however, overwhelmingly impacts mothers of color — mortality rates for Black and American Indian and Alaska Native women are two […]
The eviction of mobile home residents happened by design. Zoning reform can prevent it.
The same week that the Phoenix City Council was debating providing a mobile home zoning overlay at three mobile home parks that are facing imminent eviction and displacement, another mobile home park at the I-17 and Indian School Road showed up for sale on Zillow. The listing stated that the tenants were facing annual rent […]
The AR-15 is ‘America’s Rifle.’ Ban it.
How many dead children does it take to finally move to restrict access to high-powered weapons of war? Lawmakers in Texas provided us with an answer this week, as a bipartisan panel of state lawmakers voted to advance a bill raising the minimum age to purchase assault weapons, the New York Times reported. “It was […]
This is a jump-ball moment for the future of Arizona public schools
On Monday, legislative Republicans released a budget that utterly fails to prioritize public education and shows exactly where their priorities lie. Budget spreadsheets are crammed with line after line of pork-barrel spending for pet projects and a massive appropriation for ESA vouchers to subsidize private schools. For the first time in 14 years, Democrats — […]
Here’s how reporters should cover Trump’s 2024 campaign
On the evening of Jan. 6, 2021, CNN personalities tried to interpret for viewers across the world what had transpired that day in the nation’s capital. “I would just like to remind our viewers that President Trump now for years has referred to journalists as the enemy of the American people,” anchor Jake Tapper said, […]
The Arizona Department of Education doesn’t want to protect students from discrimination
State-funded hate has no place in our great state. Yet, that’s exactly what the Empowerment Scholarship Account voucher program continues to prop up — a wide network of religious and private schools that are taking hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars while deliberately excluding LGBTQ+ students, educators, staff and even families. These vouchers were sold […]
We need to broaden the conversation about guns to include manufacturers
There is a familiar pattern after the mass shootings that have become a well-known feature of American life. The initial shock and grief gives way to demands for greater regulation of gun ownership by Democrats, while Republicans dismiss such measures and blame mental illness instead. But if we actually want to do something about it, […]
It should be no surprise ‘the most pro-life’ Trump is waffling on abortion
It’s not that former President Donald Trump says one thing and does another. It’s that he says and does whatever he wants, but very purposefully. Both must provide him with some sort of personal, business or political advantage. As anti-abortion stalwarts are now learning, Trump won’t say anything if that benefits him the most. One […]