In much of the United States, Pride parades have become more or less the equivalent of St. Patrick's or Mardi Gras parades, or really, any ethnic festival: a subcultural celebration where everyone's welcome, with floats and trinkets and t-shirts abounding. It's not quite the same in former Soviet bloc countries. Take a look at what happened to Svyatoslav Sheremet, head of the Gay Forum of Ukraine, for trying to arrange a Pride Parade in his country. Then scroll down past the Russian, here, to see pictures of the results. You don't need Google Translate to understand.

Hatred is ugly.

I don’t know about you, but Jaclyn Friedman’s series last week filled me with all kindsa hope, or, at least, tamped down my hopelessness. Ending rape in conflict zones? Ending rape at all? My Eeyore side was looking askance at her pieces every day, slowly and cautiously persuaded that perhaps All Is Not Hopeless. Reading her was like reading Nicholas Kristof’s Mother’s Day article about the fierce spirit of the Ethiopian woman Mahabouba Mohammed, who managed to find her way to Dr.

We've been talking this week about how to stop rape in conflict. As with many massive social changes, I think one of the greatest obstacles to eradicating this atrocity is the common belief that it can't be done. I tried to address that some in Monday's piece, but I thought we could all use a little more nitty-gritty. So I went straight to the source: Liz Bernstein.

Yesterday I wrote about the new global campaign to end rape in conflict, and why it's a winnable goal. Today, it's time to bring home the reasons why we need to put in the required effort. We’ve all got our lives to live and our own pet issues to look after, and it’s easy for those of us in the U.S. to think of “rape in conflict” as a conceptual "Terrible Thing" that happens to those Other (Poor, Brown) People Far Away. But when we tie it in a tidy little “Over There Issue” bow, we totally erase the ways it’s a "Right Here Issue," both in that we’re complicit in it, and, relatedly, that there are things we in the US can uniquely do about it.

You know how I felt about President Obama declaring himself in favor of same-sex marriage. I was gobsmacked. It’s politically risky. It’s symbolically powerful, in ways that Melinda Hennenberger noted sharply at the Washington Post.

We're having a gay old week, aren't we? The White House press corps battles poor Jay Carney about Obama's eternally evolving position on same-sex marriage after the president's presumed proxies, Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, come out in favor.

Well, sure, women are the richer sex, if by "richer" you mean "making less money." If you take some tiny demographic slices—single, childless college-educated women in major urban areas—those women make more than men their age. But enough of me blathering. Here's some stats: