ALERT Collective Blog

Wednesday, August 26, 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. When the U.S. Constitution originally allowed states to set voting requirements, many states limited voting rights to white men who owned property – or about 6% of the population . Starting in the mid-1820s, property-ownership qualifications were dropped, allowing most white males to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment extended voting rights to African American men by banning states from denying a person the right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" – but still did not protect voting rights based on sex. The road to women’s suffrage was long and difficult. After Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were barred from entering London’s World Anti-Slavery Convention because they were women, Stanton was motivated to organize the first Women's Rights Convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. At this convention a “declaration ...

You could be holding a letter or object in your hand on Monday and for a small fee an army of government employees will take that letter or object and put it in the hands of anyone in this country with an address, usually by the end of the week. Though we take this for granted, it is truly a modern marvel.  Not only is the United States Postal Service regarded as the best in the world, it is fairly unique in its function as a Government agency and a service provider. USPS provides delivery at the same rate to all Americans and receives no direct tax dollars. No other delivery service can or would make the same claim. Since 1970 , it has been independently funded. Being originally authorized in the U.S. Constitution (another rare attribute), the Postal Service has a long history. However, that legacy has been undermined and  attacked by those seeking to privatize it and is now being directly threatened in order to disenfranchise voters in a Post-Covid world. While the under...

You have probably heard a number of terms having to do with the political spectrum. From political quizzes charting your ideology, to debates in Congress, to news featuring Antifa, there seems to be a need for a handy heuristic to solve the problems of partisan politics. Enter the Left-Right political spectrum. But before we dive into the subject a warning: it is important to remember that human beings are complicated and contradictory animals that cannot be mapped on anything as simple as a political spectrum , let alone one with a single axis. Furthermore, there are plenty of voices that would argue that it is an outdated or overly simplistic idea.   Nevertheless, we will take a look at the Left-Right Spectrum, its history, its uses, and its complications in order to make more sense of this political moment and the partisan groups that inhabit it.   Why Right and Left?  The use of the terms left and right date back to the French Revolution. In 1789, the National A...

Transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and other queer individuals have more visibility today than ever. While many people have learned a lot about these communities and have accepted their identities, many people remain confused, or are hostile toward the idea of a person feeling that they were assigned the wrong sex at birth, or feeling they don’t belong to either sex. How can a person be assigned the wrong sex? How can there be anything other than male and female sexes? Most of us learned in school that there are two biological sexes, and they are controlled by two chromosomes X and Y. If a person has XX they will be female, and XY will be male. You may have even learned that it is the presence of the Y chromosome that makes someone male, so someone with an extra sex chromosome XXY would still be male. Unfortunately, like so many other things you learned in school, it turns out that your teachers did not tell you the whole story. Biological sex is actually a really complex subject, there...