This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was signed into law on July 26, 1990. The ADA prohibits discrimination based on disability, which is defined as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity. In the United States alone, one out of every five people are affected by a disability, which is roughly 54 million Americans. However, since the ADA was enacted into law, significant changes in technology have created new challenges and forms of discrimination for people living with disabilities. For instance, people with disabilities are twice as likely to not have access to the internet or are severely limited to certain online activities. Those who are blind, for example, are often unable to enter passwords and use certain authentication software, barriers that could be overcome with the development and availability of voice recognition technologies.

As we look back at the last twenty years of progress in increasing access and eliminating forms of discrimination based on disability, we must keep the voices and experiences of people with disabilities at the forefront of policy debates to ensure that our laws keep up with changes in technology and that they continue to protect against new forms of discrimination which impede upon peoples’ capacity to engage with their communities and fulfill their chosen life courses.

After a 16-hour debate, and a vote that ended in the wee hours of the morning, Argentina’s Senate passed a bill recognizing same-sex marriages, thus becoming Latin America’s first nation to grant homosexual couples the same rights, protections, and privileges of marriage as heterosexual couples. Less comprehensive measures towards marriage equality have been instituted in other regions of Latin America, such as the legalization of same-sex civil unions in Uruguay and in a small number of states in Brazil and Mexico. And recently last year, Colombia’s Constitutional Court granted equal civil, political, social and economic rights to gay couples, including such protections as inheritance rights and the inclusion of partners in health insurance plans. In Buenos Aires, proponents of the same-sex marriage bill framed the issue in terms of fulfilling the constitutional mandate of equality before the law and ending discrimination towards individuals based solely on their sexual orientation. Opponents, on the other hand, argued that the passage of such a bill would signify a threat to the “existence of the human species.”

Despite the existence of  reasonable objections to gay marriage based on religious belief, I find the argument that a bill granting same-sex couples the right to marry if they so choose will endanger the survival of humanity a bit absurd, if not dangerous in its fear-mongering. Passing legislation that grants homosexual couples equal rights will not magically change the sexual orientation of heterosexuals. The earth is currently the home of 6,830,000,000 human inhabitants; and according to a 2004 UNICEF report, more than 16,000,000 children are without parents, a number which is only increasing with the spread of HIV/AIDS. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that procreation is not an issue for the human race. It seems to me that the larger, more pressing issue for humanity is caring for humanity, and creating a world where all 7 billion of us have an equal chance at healthy, self-determined lives, free of discrimination in all of its forms.

Gay Pride Activists in Buenos Aires (AP Photo)

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The average American is a slave to technology. Although no one really knows the physical and psychological impact of this, there is a lot of discussion recently about the danger of computers and cellphones. According to several articles and books, these “gadgets” have resulted in shallower thinking, weakened concentration, reduced creativity, heightened stress, and interrupted work and family life. There are also concerns about the physical impact. One Swedish study that followed young people, who began using cellphones as teenagers, for 10 years calculated a 400 percent increase in brain tumors. Another study revealed a potential link between cellphone radiation and loss in bees’ honey production—given that bees pollinate 90% of commercial crops in the USA the side effects of this could eventually be dire. However as Maureen Dowd wrote, “even if scientists told us our computers would make our arms fall off, we’d probably keep typing.” All this recent attention to the physical and psychological impacts notwithstanding, it is people who don’t even use these “gadgets” that are at the greatest, yet far less talked about, risk. Smartphones and laptops are built from minerals—tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold—that warlords trade and use to fund mass slaughter and rape in eastern Congo. This straightforward video by the Enough Project describes how these minerals leave a trail of destruction from the mines in Congo to the cellphone in your pocket, and what consumers can do to help end the violence.

On this day in 1852, the day following the spectacular celebrations of July 4th, the great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass delivered one of the hallmark speeches of the anti-slavery movement, the Fifth of July speech. The speech is a profound work that weaves together both irony and powerful demands for human liberty. It is often overlooked, however, that Douglass was invited to deliver this address by the Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Society. In understanding the significance of this speech, it is thus crucial to recognize the interconnectedness among social justice movements and how the long-fought struggles for racial equality and women’s rights were able to transform popular consciousness by drawing upon principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence- namely the existence of inalienable rights and the Right of the People to alter or abolish government if it becomes destructive of securing the rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. While the speech is a most pressing condemnation of the hypocrisy of the United States- in proclaiming freedom and liberty while profiting from the cruel and exploitative practice of slavery- the echo at the conclusion of the speech inspires critical reflection of the Declaration and resounds a call to action to uphold the nation’s most fundamental principles.

“Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them… To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American Slavery…

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which lie is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”