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Thousands of potential campaign volunteers will throng the halls of the Christian Right’s Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C. tomorrow and Saturday — and Political Research Associates will be there too, blogging about how the Christian Right is framing this election.

For all the ink spilled on Alexander Hamilton by historians, and for all the buzz generated by the Hamilton musical, there’s a hidden history to this iconic founder that never made its way to the page…

Still looking for a fun and exciting summer activity? Have you thought about ghost hunting? I earned my PhD studying ghost hunters in the contemporary United States. Ghost hunters are people, often…

As the Select Committee on the January 6 th Insurrection is now investigating the terrorist attack on the United States Capitol, one theme that deserves closer inspection is white Christian…

“Race” as an idea barely existed before the Enlightenment and the onset of modernity in the West. Today, many dismiss the race-concept as an illusion, arguing that “there is no such thing as race;” or in more universalist terms, “there is only one race: the human race.” Yet race continues to demarcate and stratify all the world’s peoples in striking ways.

After the demoralizing passage of Proposition 8 overturned same sex marriage in California in 2008 , those with a national platform laid this defeat for LGBTQ rights at the feet of racial minority communities. Much of this chatter went uncontested, as major news outlets asked mainstream LGBTQ groups (typically featuring White male spokespersons) as well as right-wing voices(often conservative religious voices of color) to analyze African-American and Latino communities’ perspectives on LGBTQ rights, cementing ideas of intolerance.

The outrageous killings of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard shine a light on the power of hatred fueled by racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of intolerance that are used to separate and divide us as human beings. Proponents of hate crime legislation and enhanced penalties for hate crimes want to make sure that killings and acts of violence like these provide an opportunity not only to hold accountable those responsible, but to expose and eradicate all violence based on bias, bigotry and prejudice.

At the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, our mission is to eliminate race and national-origin discrimination through litigation, and community and legislative advocacy. Despite our narrowly focused mission we are always working collaboratively with community partners to advance an agenda that supports and affirms expansive hate crimes legislation.

On a visit to Zambia in February 2012, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on African countries to stop treating LGBT people as less than human or as second class citizens. He explicitly asked Zambian lawmakers to stop discriminating against people on the basis of sexual orientation.