Tagged: Discrimination

The shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Florida has sparked heated reactions across the country, but there was a lag before mainstream media picked up on the story. Not so online, where a more immediate outcry grew into a petition drive this week to encourage a federal investigation.

Now the Justice Department is looking into Trayvon Martin's death at the hands of a neighborhood watch volunteer, and black media and social media were key in demanding closer scrutiny.

The 17-year-old was shot on Feb. 26, but it was the release Friday of 911 tapes from the night of his death that made the case a top story in the mainstream media — and kept it there.

A web site provides a place to post and read the insidious, small incidents of discrimination many of us encounter - and are guilty of - every day.

The official end of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ is barely a month old. But the circumstances around Chief Warrant Office Charlie Morgan reveal inequities still exist within the U.S. military. Gay rights advocates hope Morgan’s story pressures the Department of Defense and Congress to keep leveling the playing field.

Now that ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ is gone, Chief Charlie Morgan can be as OUT to friends and co-workers at the New Hampshire National Guard as she wants to be.

But that doesn’t change the fact that if her spouse Karen gets sick, then she’s out of luck says attorney David McKean.

McKean is a lawyer with the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.

He says the spouses of gay soldiers are denied key benefits.

The treatment of female prison inmates in New Hampshire is raising questions of civil rights violations. After a two year investigation, that’s the conclusion reached by the New Hampshire Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The Commission reports that male inmates enjoy greater opportunities in everything from vocational training to mental health services.

JerriAnne Boggis didn’t have to see anything at the Women’s Prison to know about the problems in Goffstown.

“When we visited the women’s prison, the sheer noise, constant noise, we walked in, until we left... everybody is crushed together, and all of the announcements over the loudspeakers, it was just constant, constant, constant, there was no quiet.”