The Week: Most Recent social-issues

Did Obama trigger a rise in black support for gay marriage?

The Week — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:44:00 -0500

Before President Obama endorsed gay marriage, Maryland voters narrowly supported upholding their state's law legalizing same-sex marriage. Now they overwhelmingly plan to vote for it in the fall, and the shift is almost entirely due to a sharp increase in support for gay marriage among black Marylanders. Previously, 56 percent of them planned to vote against the new law; now 57 percent plan to vote for it. Polls elsewhere suggest this reflects a national trend — there has been a 19-point shift in black support for same-sex marriage in Pennsylvania, a swing state, since Obama announced his...

Gay celebrities and the decline of the 'mega-outing'

The Week — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:04:00 -0500

When Jim Parsons, the Emmy-winning star of CBS' hit comedy The Big Bang Theory, publicly confirmed that he is gay this week, he didn't announce it in a hyped TV interview, or declare "Yep, I'm gay" on the cover of Time magazine. Instead, the 39-year-old actor casually shared the information with The New York Times' Patrick Healy, who mentioned Parsons' sexuality and his 10-year relationship with a man almost in passing, near the end of a lengthy article on Parson's role in a Broadway revival of Harvey. It was the kind of low-key coming out that's becoming increasingly common. Here, a chronological...

Have the cops finally caught Etan Patz's killer?

The Week — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:37:00 -0500

"An individual now in custody has made statements to NYPD detectives implicating himself in the disappearance and death of Etan Patz 33 years ago," New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said on Thursday. That statement is raising hopes that authorities have finally figured out what happened to Etan, who was six years old when he disappeared on May 25, 1979, while walking to the bus stop from his family's Soho apartment in New York. Etan's disappearance helped raise national awareness of child abductions, and he was one of the first missing children ever to appear on the side of a milk carton...

The surprising rise of gay comic book characters: A visual history

The Week — Thu, 24 May 2012 07:53:00 -0500

Marvel's Astonishing X-Men mutant superhero Northstar made history in 1992 when he declared, "I am gay." He'll do so again by proposing to his boyfriend Kyle in an upcoming issue. Meanwhile, DC Comics announces that one of its "major iconic" superheroes will also come out of the closet this June. "This is a huge deal," says Entertainment Weekly. Here's a look at the growing number of gay comic book characters:

Why a 'record low' number of Americans are 'pro-choice': 5 theories

The Week — Thu, 24 May 2012 07:10:00 -0500

Gallup has released its annual poll of Americans' views on abortion rights, and the headline number made quite a stir: Half of respondents called themselves "pro-life," just shy of the record 51 percent from May 2009, while a "record-low 41 percent" identified themselves as "pro-choice." When Gallup first asked people to choose between those two labels in 1995, "pro-choice" was at its high-water mark of 56 percent and "pro-life" was at 33 percent. This isn't the only new poll raising eyebrows, and the others don't exactly paint the U.S. as increasingly socially conservative: In a Washington...

25 years of wrongful convictions: By the numbers

The Week — Wed, 23 May 2012 09:05:00 -0500

Last week, researchers at Columbia University released a detailed, book-length account of how Texas probably executed an innocent man, Carlos DeLuna, in 1989. This week, a new report from Northwestern University and the University of Michigan "picks up where the DeLuna case left off," says Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic. Focusing on the big picture, researchers from the two schools launched the first-ever National Registry of Exonerations, and their first report takes a stab at cobbling together hard-to-find, rarely publicized stories and statistics about Americans who've been cleared of...

Should prosecutors drop the murder charges against George Zimmerman?

The Week — Tue, 22 May 2012 07:00:00 -0500

Last week, Florida prosecutors in the Trayvon Martin investigation released a pile of documents in their second-degree murder case against Martin's shooter, George Zimmerman. The documents include evidence that appears to bolster Zimmerman's argument that he killed Martin in self-defense — including photos of Zimmerman with a bruised and bloodied face and autopsy reports indicating that Martin had scraped knuckles. Some legal experts say the new material amounts to the disintegration of the prosecution's murder case. Should lead prosecutor Angela Corey drop the charge?

Yes. Corey was wrong...

Tyler Clementi case: Is Dharun Ravi's jail sentence too lenient?

The Week — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:47:00 -0500

In 2010, gay Rutgers student Tyler Clementi committed suicide by leaping off the George Washington Bridge after learning that fellow student Dharun Ravi had used a webcam to record him kissing another man. The case thrust the bullying epidemic and the suicide trend among gay teens into the national spotlight. Now, Ravi, convicted in March of "bias intimidation and invasion of privacy," has been sentenced to 30 days in jail, far less than the maximum of 10 years. The judge ruled that, while he believes Ravi acted out of "colossal insensitivity," he does not believe that "he hated Tyler Clementi...

The jail where every prisoner gets a flat-screen TV and private shower

The Week — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:29:00 -0500

Anyone who's been to a U.S. prison, or even seen one on TV, might be surprised by Norway's Halden maximum-security penitentiary. Opened in 2010 at a cost of about $280 million, the flagship of Norway's criminal justice system has won multiple awards for its minimalist modern design. If not for its tall, insurmountable concrete wall — tastefully hidden behind a mossy green birch forest — you might mistake it for a "Scandinavian boutique hotel," says Amelia Gentleman at Britain's The Guardian. Every murderer, rapist, and pedophile has his own room with a flat-screen TV, private shower...

The NAACP's gay-marriage endorsement: Is black homophobia overstated?

The Week — Mon, 21 May 2012 11:20:00 -0500

The NAACP, one of the nation's most influential African-American advocacy groups, endorsed gay marriage on Saturday, with NAACP President and CEO Ben Jealous calling it a civil right. Several other black luminaries, including rapper Jay-Z, have also expressed their support in the two weeks since President Obama said he has come to believe that same-sex marriage should be legal. Many pundits worried that black voters would abandon Obama over that stance, thanks to the conventional wisdom that African-Americans, especially strongly religious ones, oppose legalizing gay marriage. But polls show no...

The Trayvon Martin case: A timeline

The Week — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:29:00 -0500

This article — originally published on March 29, 2012 — was last updated on May 18, 2012. Scroll down for the latest updates.

The February shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a black 17-year-old staying at a gated community in Sanford, Fla., was a minor local news story for weeks before exploding into the national media. Since then, the killing has both fascinated and repulsed the nation, touching on all sorts of cultural and racial issues, and becoming nightly fodder on the cable news shows. Here's a look at what happened, and when, in this complicated, still-unfolding...

The new book that claims to unmask the Zodiac Killer: 6 takeaways

The Week — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:45:00 -0500

In 1968 and 1969, as San Francisco was bathing in the hot afterglow of the "Summer of Love," a serial killer was coldly stalking the Bay Area. The so-called Zodiac Killer — immortalized in the 2007 David Fincher film Zodiac — fatally stabbed or shot at least five people, then sent cryptic, taunting notes to the police and local newspapers until 1974. He was never caught, and the San Francisco Police Department officially closed the case in 2004. But now, retired California Highway Patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty has unofficially reopened it in a new book laying out the results of...

Jay-Z's gay marriage endorsement: More influential than Obama's?

The Week — Wed, 16 May 2012 12:10:00 -0500

The president isn't the only world-famous person whose stance on gay marriage has evolved. Hip-hop king Jay-Z also just publicly announced his support of same-sex marriage: "I've always thought [of] it as something that's still holding the country back," the rapper told CNN. "It's no different than discriminating against blacks. It's discrimination, plain and simple." The remarks come as pundits weigh whether President Obama's endorsement of marriage equality will hurt him with black voters. Obama won 95 percent of the black vote in 2008, but only 39 percent of black voters support...

The Carlos DeLuna case: Definitive proof that Texas executed an innocent man?

The Week — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:27:00 -0500

Supporters of the death penalty routinely dismiss the notion that innocent people can get ground up in the wheels of justice. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, wrote in 2006 that not "a single case — not one — [exists] in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit." Well, "Scalia may have to eat his words," says Ed Pilkington at Britain's The Guardian. In Columbia Human Rights Law Review, law professor James Liebman and five of his students lay out over 436 heavily footnoted pages in support of their case that Texas executed the wrong...

The disturbing shooting targets featuring Trayvon Martin

The Week — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:42:00 -0500

The controversy: An unidentified businessman is selling gun range targets designed to make people feel like they're shooting Trayvon Martin, reports Mike DeForest of WKMG Local 6, a Florida television station. The unarmed black teen was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in February, and Zimmerman, who claims he was acting in self-defense, has been charged with second-degree murder. The targets (see the image at right) do not feature a photo of Martin himself, but show a silhouette in a black hoodie — the outfit Martin was famously wearing when he died — with a huge bullseye...

Obama's gay-marriage endorsement is a moral and political win

The Week — Thu, 10 May 2012 21:40:00 -0500

Forty-nine years ago this spring, as he proposed the landmark civil rights reforms of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy became the first president to declare that ending racial discrimination was a moral issue — that "this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free." Now Barack Obama has taken the next step in the unfinished journey toward that ideal: He cut through a cacophony of political advice, the calculus of pre-election caution, to become the first president to endorse marriage equality — and thus to affirm that gay rights are...