Category: Sexual Assault Survival
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Religious Institutions & Sex Scandals Go Together Like S & M
Today we learned that the Mormon church faces yet another sex scandal. Maybe it’s just how it is. Religious institutions and sex scandals go together. As the AP reported: “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was hit with several lawsuits Monday for allegedly covering up decades of sexual abuse among Boy Scout troops in…
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If We’re Honest With Ourselves, We Suck At Being Honest With Ourselves
Americans love honesty. In the abstract, anyway. Young George Washington could not tell a lie about cutting down his father’s favorite cherry tree (“the story first appeared in an 1806 autobiography of Washington, whose writer admitted that he was just trying to show how our most beloved president’s “unparalleled rise and elevation were due to…
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Depression Is Like “Thought Cancer”
Slowly — too slowly — our culture is beginning to understand that depression isn’t just one person feeling blue because their life sucks. It’s a health issue with causes and effects that can be treated and ameliorated. The human brain is, by far, the most complex, complicated organ in our bodies. It’s also the organ…
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Everyone Has Their Point Of View But Not Every Point Of View “Has A Point”
Does a raging, racist a-hole have a point? We know they have a point of view; they’re happy as hell braying it. But do these guys have a point to make? Do they? Is their racist, ignorant point really one we should take seriously? Consider the professional criminal. He knows what he’s doing is completely…
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The Only Confession Booth Anyone Needs Is Their Own Bathroom Mirror
No confessions required. We all do this. We just do. We stand in front of a bathroom mirror and we get real with ourselves — realer than we get with anyone else because the person we’re getting really, really REAL with is US. When we look into our own eyes, we see a version of…
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Every Story May Have Two Points Of View, But It Doesn’t Necessarily Have Two “Sides”
“Both Sides Do It” journalism (an oxymoron really) wants to insist that truth & lies have the same weight; it’s not for them to tell their readers which to believe — lies or truth. That’s not journalism, it’s malpractice justifying its intellectual laziness and lack of moral conviction. A thief and his victim both have…
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My Sexual Assault Survivor Spidey Senses Are Tingling Like Crazy: What The GOP Is Doing To America Is Exactly Like A Sexual Assault
No one really “recovers” from being sexually assaulted. You can live with it, of course. You can make a kind of uneasy peace with it. But you can never accept that it happened to you. The disease that comes with being sexually assaulted is believing that you deserved it. That’s what keeps you silent. In…