Christian groups seek to keep National Day of Prayer despite having, oh, every other day

Argument over the federally-declared National Day of Prayer has only intensified as the date–tomorrow, May 6–draws ever nearer. On April 15, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb of Wisconsin ruled that the National Day of Prayer, created by a 1952 law, is unconstitutional. According to a post on the In Queen Anne blog hosted by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,

You’ve gotta fight for your right to get an education

Originally published October 29, 2009.

We’ve spent months fighting over facets of the college experience, from the clout scandal to Illinois’s MAP grant funding to the DREAM Act. At the heart of all of these issues lies a single question: do we have a right to a college education?

We’ve spent months fighting over facets of the college experience, from the clout scandal to Illinois’s MAP grant funding to the DREAM Act. At the heart of all of these issues lies a single question: do we have a right to a college education?

When I use the word “right,” I mean a choice that everyone has access to, in which their individual merit is the only factor that determines their attendance at a particular university. Two of the greatest impediments to this, as we’ve seen over the course of the summer through this fall, are political influence and money.

Since the clout scandal broke months ago, apathetic onlookers seem to express the same complaint.

Whether in regard to people’s obsession with forcing trustees to take the blame or to the sense of futility that things could ever change, they respond with the point that many schools have clout lists.

While forcing a good chunk of the Board of Trustees to resign, including Joe White and Richard Herman, may relieve a little of our immediate frustration, the problem won’t be corrected until we demand that the state legislators involved pay the price for essentially starting everything.

If we truly believe in working toward fairness in higher education—that is, insisting that dedicated minds have a right to attend college based on that academic dedication alone—then we need to step up our response and set the example for other public institutions governed by unfair political influence.

The bigger obstacle (one further aggravated by state government in Illinois) is money, as we’ve seen in the recent fight to re-establish funding for Illinois’s MAP grants. Public response to the under-funding of the program over the summer finally pushed Governor Quinn to allot another $205 million for grants two weeks ago. As the state takes out a loan to pay for the expense, people are voicing their concerns about how we’ll manage to pay it back.

Anyone attending college in the last several years has likely noticed a continuous increase in tuition rates, brought on in part by legislative efforts to keep costs down for students. To compensate for flat-lining funding from other sources (in our case, state government), universities jack up their prices, increasing the need for grant and scholarship funding.

Ice that expensive cake with the skyrocketing cost of textbooks and you’ve got a dessert so pricey that many in even the upper middle-class have a hard time footing the bill, to say nothing of the impact it has on lower-income students’ college prospects.

It’s impossible not to recognize that race and ethnicity are tied into this battle against college cost. While certainly not all prospective lower-income students identify as racial or ethnic minorities or vice-versa, the exorbitant price of attending a university plays a serious role in determining the make-up of a college population. Increasing costs and dwindling financial aid resources make college a privilege, not a right.

In some circumstances, the U.S. outright denies people a chance to attend—people who, though technically undocumented, have lived here most of their lives.

This is the problem the DREAM Act aims to correct by providing conditional residency to those who qualify. But if it’s not one thing, it’s another: even if the legislation passes, these students would be ineligible for federal aid.

Greater social, historical, and cultural factors have established much of America’s financial landscape, and it would be naïve to say that making college truly affordable for all would be a simple solution to enact—or that it is a solution able to level out the inequalities created by those factors. But the issues we’ve faced as of late can and must be opportunities to make headway in the struggle to refocus the college experience from a discriminatory business to a truly higher, broader, and better education.

Chelsea is a senior in LAS.

Change needs a progressive partner, and that partner is…a boyfriend or girlfriend

Originally published April 2, 2009.

The word “partner” means a number of things: “a person who takes part with another or others in doing something,” “a dancing companion,” “a person who is party to something,” and “each of a group of two or more symbiotically associated organisms,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

A partner is also “a person who is linked by marriage to another, a spouse; a member of a couple who live together or are habitual companions; a lover.”

This particular definition represents the conflict of opinions surrounding the usage of the word “partner” in the context of an emotional relationship. The general consensus seems to agree that referring to someone as your partner denotes a lengthy, serious relationship with that person.

That relationship, however, can be as friends, as a dating couple, or as spouses…and these are only a few examples.

Introducing someone as your partner inspires a variety of responses. I typically get a confused look from the person I’m talking to, reflecting the internal debate over whether I’m straight.

For this reason, many straight people opt out of using “partner” to describe their own relationships. It represents the whole “Hey, it’s cool if you’re gay, but I don’t want people to think I’m gay” facet of homophobia.

The problem is that “partner” exists in a kind of linguistic limbo. People across the spectrum of sexuality feel that it denotes too serious a connection with someone to be used casually. It also comes with a lot of unwanted attention.

Because of the connotation that the speaker is in a committed, same-gender relationship, some LGBT individuals avoid it altogether.

Its usage suggests that the length or seriousness of one’s relationship is up for public discussion.

For some straight people, however, calling your significant other your “partner” demonstrates a willingness to open yourself up to this kind of discussion. I wouldn’t refer to the person I’ve been seeing for two and a half years as my “boyfriend,” and I’m fully prepared to explain in conversation with others why I call him my partner.

To me, talking about my choice of language forces me into a (only minimally) similar experience to what LGBT-identified people face when talking about their romantic relationships with others—the judgment of listeners.

Despite the readiness of some straight-identified people to give up some of their privilege as “the norm” by employing the term “partner,” the word itself took on its current meaning in an effort to provide LGBT people a means of talking about their relationships.

Because of this, some argue, “partner” inherently implies the existing legal and cultural inequality between different-gender and same-gender relationships.

Using it means many can forgo explicitly “outing” themselves in certain situations, but it also highlights the fact that for most LGBT relationships, titles like “wife,” “husband,” and “spouse” are legally unavailable though conversationally used.

Does this mean that it’s counter-productive for a straight-identified person to have a “partner” rather than a “boyfriend”? No, but it does point to a few other things. The first is that a single word doesn’t have the power to erase inequality. The second, though, is that the movement to make all these terms interchangeable does.

If straight people made a mass decision that as of tomorrow, everyone would say “partner” instead of anything else, it wouldn’t erase the belief that same-gender relationships are somehow inferior.

But if LGBTpeople claim heteronormative, gendered terms as their own and straight allies try to understand LGBT perspectives by making their sexuality ambiguous using terms like “partner,” a whole lot of confusion is bound to ensue.

That confusion results in explanation, which fosters discussion about relationships and relationship rights. And that’s where cultural change—the key to legal change, civil rights, and equality—begins.

Chelsea is a senior in English and creative writing and has mostly figured out how to wrap her sari … mostly.