Remembering Leslie Feinberg—A Queer and Trans Fighter for Justice

I will never forget the first time I saw Leslie Feinberg speak—New York City, 1996. The auditorium was full of young people like me who had read Stone Butch Blues and wanted to hear about gender and queerness. Leslie spoke about those things, but also about war and labor struggles and racism and U.S. militarism, refusing to deliver the narrow single-issue politics that the mainstreaming gay rights discourse had trained us to expect.

Affordable Housing Rally, San Jose

San Jose has the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. In response to San Jose’s homelessness crisis, the Sacred Housing Action Committee led a rally at city hall last week to inform and persuade the public and elected officials to pass a fee to raise funds for affordable housing.

Militant Resistance Can Look Like This

In Downtown Oakland on August 31, a group of Buddhists and interfaith allies sat in meditation, blocking the doors of the Marriott Hotel. The group was protesting the hotel hosting Urban Shield this week, a militarized police expo and SWAT Team training. Nichola Torbett shares her friend’s reflection of the demonstration.

Helen Prejean: The ‘Whole Death Penalty System is Botched’

The recent botched executions of three death row inmates have brought the death penalty issue under intense scrutiny once again. Sister Helen Prejean, who has been a spiritual adviser to many death row inmates and is the author of Dead Man Walking, shared her thoughts on the latest executions with NAM health editor Viji Sundaram.

My Research Is My Therapy

Questions about internalized oppression have been the backbone of Warren Blumenfeld research, and even before he came to consciousness of this fact, his research was his therapy, for it had challenged and continually challenges him to change and to grow.

Forceful Penetration as Terror Tactic in Immigration Debate

Rather than characterizing immigration and migration issues as humanitarian concerns, the anti-immigration activists connect the narratives representing immigrants and migrants to our borders to the language of disease, crime, drugs, alien and lower forms of culture and life, of invading hoards, of barbarians at the gates who if allowed to enter will destroy the glorious civilization we have established among the lesser nations of the Earth.

What Would a Transformative Justice System Look Like — Politically, Economically, Spiritually and Intellectually?

Almost 2.5 million Americans are presently housed in prisons and jails and this marks an increase of almost five times as many as there were in 1980. The present criminal justice system and its hardline paradigm is a broken structure, a machine that has created and continues to create unimaginable human pain and misery and dehumanization for its victims and their jailers. But what would a revolutionary transformative America and its justice system look like?