NGOs Fail Palestinian Women at the UN

By Paula Kweskin In April 2010, a 32-year-old woman was shot to death in a town in the northern Gaza Strip.  Several men, including her father, were arrested for the crime.  A year prior, a girl from a Palestinian village south of Qalqilya was smothered to death by her brother.  In 2005, a father murdered two of his daughters and badly injured a third for an alleged sexual affair.  In December 2008, two Palestinian girls were killed when militants' rockets directed at Israel fell short of their targets.  Two years later, a teenage girl was injured in central Israel when Hamas militants fired rockets on her kibbutz. Unfortunately, at the UN review of Israel’s compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in January, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) squandered the opportunity...

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The Ah-Hah Moment

By Steven Philp Matt Goldman was not like the other six-year-old boys in his Cub Scout Den. First, he was Jewish. Second, he was gay.  He recalls one Cub Scout meeting at the local Baptist church in his hometown of Virginia Beach. Sitting in a circle with fifteen or so boys, they shared what they wanted to be when they grew up. When it was his turn, Matt was honest: “My husband is going to be a policeman, and I’ll be living in a three-bedroom house, with flowers and a beagle – and I’ll make the best ice cream in the world.” This upset the other boys and resulted in his banishment to the front steps of the church for the duration of the meeting. When his mom found out what happened – like all good...

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