Williamson County parent and advocate Revida Rahman has linked arms with a national campaign organizing parents against what they call "extremists trying to control what our families and kids believe, read and learn." The campaign, dubbed "Freedom to Parent 21st...
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The Book-Bans Debate Has Finally Reached a Turning Point
Across multiple fronts, Democrats and their allies are stiffening their resistance to a surge of Republican-led book bans. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the past month have conspicuously escalated their denunciations of the book bans...
Granddaughter of longtime U.S. senator hopes to reverse legacy of anti-abortion policies
Ellen Gaddy, the granddaughter of former U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, was raised in a conservative family, in the shadow of a man who championed an agenda that included fierce opposition to Roe v. Wade and any effort to compromise on the issue of abortion. For Gaddy,...
Op-Ed: How in good conscience can Rep. Tricia Cotham deny NC residents the abortion access she had?
Republicans in North Carolina have passed a sweeping abortion bill that further restricts access to abortion care — a bill filled with medical misinformation, misdirection and false narratives about abortion. In practice, it will ban medication abortion after 10...
Op-Ed: Lessons for Becoming a Public Scholar
Academics at many colleges and universities today face an uncertain future. Rising tuition and falling enrollments, the lack of tenure-track positions, the dwindling student interest in the humanities in favor of business and STEM degrees, and growing questions about...
What are local schools doing for student safety?
The list is long, as are our memories, of youths who have been victims of school shootings. And as the public cries for a solution become deafening, it is left to school districts and law enforcement to fortify schools with what amounts to bandaids as prevention as...
Abortion policies could make the Republican Party’s ‘suburban women problem’ worse
The 'suburban women problem' Polling shows a majority of Americans disagree with policies that outlaw the procedure, which has become a political liability for Republicans. And the biggest fallout could be with women, like Tiffany Sheffield, who live in the suburbs....
Students, authors fight censorship in PA schools
About four hours before the Central Bucks School District passed a new library policy in July, local high school junior Lily Freeman warned a crowd of about 100 what would follow. The policy, passed by a 6-3 vote, targeted books with explicit or implied depictions of...
The day the book banners lost in Pennsylvania’s culture wars
If you ban it, they will come. For the better part of an hour Saturday, dozens of teenagers and their parents snaked around the towering stacks of tomes inside Kutztown’s Firefly Books and sometimes spilled onto the sidewalks of this quaint Berks County college town —...
Abortion Pill Battle Threatens to Further Box In GOP
“It’s up to politicians to put it front and center in terms of the stakes of the campaign,” said Katie Paris, founder of Red Wine and Blue, a group that seeks to turn out the vote among suburban women. “I think any candidate who chooses to do that in 2024 is going to...
Recent Posts
Do This: Unite Against Soft Censorship
The only way to end censorship, whether it’s the quiet removal of books from library collections or in-your-face book bans, is to fight it head on. We saw a huge example of this – and a big win for free speech – this week when ABC and Disney returned Jimmy Kimmel and...
Watch This: Learn How to Spot Soft Censorship
A lot of people are talking about freedom of speech right now. As Americans, it's a right that has always defined us and that we all hold dear. That’s why the majority of us oppose book bans and censorship. The rise in book bans over the past few years has been well...
Read This: The Quiet Danger of Soft Censorship
We’ve been fighting the explosion of book bans since Red Wine & Blue started. PEN America reports 16,000 book bans in public schools since 2021 — a level not seen since the 1950s during McCarthyism. This increase has been driven by organized groups with a...
Okay, But Why is Gerrymandering Legal?
Lawmakers in Texas made headlines for leaving their state to protest the unfair re-drawing of district maps, known as gerrymandering. Almost all Americans, regardless of political party, are against gerrymandering. But over the past few decades, it’s gotten worse and worse.
So… what exactly is gerrymandering? Why is it legal? And how do we get back to a fair system where all of our votes matter equally?
Okay, But Why Were The Suburbs Shaped By Racism?
We know that the suburbs have been diversifying over the past few decades, and today “suburban woman” is no longer code for “white woman” – no matter how much the media tries to simplify us. But there’s no denying that the suburbs have excluded families who aren’t white for most of their history, and if we’re not careful, they will again in the future. So why – and how – did the suburbs end up so white for so long? What happened to make them more diverse, and why are some people worried that we’re reversing that progress?