The Virginia abortion bill, which would mandate that the women seeking an abortion get a trans-vaginal ultrasound – a forcible assault at the very least – before having the procedure, has received entirely too much notoriety for the tastes of conservative lawmakers in the state. Today, as Laura Conaway reports, protesters held a silent demonstration outside the Virginia legislature, which was enough for them to delay the vote on the measure.

Charlie Savage has a great piece on the mess that is the DOD’s investigation and trial of those charged with the 2005 massacre of Iraqi civilians in Haditha. Sadly, as Savage points out, the lack of justice in this case is part of a disturbing pattern in the military, where all too often, PR trumps justice.

It’s not new. The Pat Tillman case was the same way, as PR concerns shoved the truth aside. Another example of the ongoing “PR trumps justice” movement in the military is on view at the Sundance film festival with “The Invisible War,” a film that describes itself as “a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of our country’s most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within our US military.”

Within the military, it seems PR trumps justice, all too often. Our military, and our nation, deserve better.

Hot Coffee, the fast-paced, info-packed exploration of tort reform exposes the real story behind Stella Liebeck, who sued McDonalds after being badly burned by spilled coffee, an incident which wrongly entered the collective consciousness as a prime example of a “frivolous” lawsuit. First time director Susan Saladoff, a civil litigator with 25 years of experience, uses the McDonalds coffee case as the starting point and from there builds a strong case that tort reform, binding arbitration and non-economic damage caps subvert justice and benefit big business.

One night in January after a lot of dancing at a friend’s house party in Brooklyn, a male neighbor and I made our way back to our building less than a mile away. We’d both consumed alcoholic beverages but nothing unusual for twenty-somethings on a Saturday night. My roommate had a new love interest at home with him, so to give him some privacy I went back to the neighbor’s apartment to crash, which I’d done several times before. I felt safe going back there as I’d spent a lot of time with this neighbor in a Will & Grace, Glee-watching, Katy Perry-listening kind of way.

We live in a culture that is more comfortable asking rape victims “why did you let yourself get raped?” than asking their attackers “why did you rape?” After a Toronto cop’s remark seemed to put the responsibility for rape on how a victim dressed, it lit a fuse of anger that has spread around the globe.

Slutwalk. “Because We’ve Had Enough”

It’s coming to Kansas City today, and maybe to your city next.

The word slut is used to dehumanize and blame far too many victims of sexual assault. Well, some women have had enough and are arranging Slut Walks all over the planet.

I wish that headline was in any way hyperbolic. And this comes out of a five-year study, not a quick answer to deflect criticism. This is the formal opinion of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Many are nervous that, without leadership at the top, the reforms DSK attempted at the IMF will wither.

The House plans to vote on its anti-abortion bill, HR 3, this week, which would effectively end all insurance coverage of abortion-related services. The White House has threatened to veto the bill.

The Administration didn’t mention the most egregious part of the bill, though they captured most of it. Because of an outcry earlier in the year, House Republicans changed the language that would alter the definition of rape to only include so-called “forcible rape,” in an effort to limit the rape exemptions in the law where abortions are allowed.

Danielle McGuire, the prizewinning author and assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, has written a beautifully crafted and richly researched testimony of the hidden transcript of the Civil Rights Movement. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power makes a powerful case for re-imagining the Civil Rights Movement in the South through the lens of sexual violence. This path-breaking book spotlights incidents of sexual assault from the early 1940s to the mid 1970s. Rather than remaining secreted, these brutal attacks inspired community protests among African Americans and their white allies. These grassroots struggles of resistance to white supremacy helped initiate the wider Civil Rights Movement that emerged after World War II and which eventually forced the national government to end racial segregation and black disfranchisement. Also, these community-based networks of support provided the infrastructure for the more familiar history of civil rights activities in Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Tallahassee, Florida and other southern cities.