I doubt, or at least hope that I should doubt, that anyone is unaware that the United States has a history of excluding women and people of color from important institutions that offer opportunities toward a better quality of life.  To be more specific, we used to have explicit laws and policies that barred women and racial and ethnic minorities from the labor market, institutions of higher education, and the military, just to name a few.  We can celebrate the social progress that has been made with respect to race, ethnicity, and gender (especially now during Black History Month and next month, Women's History Month) and really jump for joy when we start to see true equality.  One victory has been an equal representation of women in institutions of higher education.  But, now that women are starting to enroll and graduate in higher numbers than men, some people are starting to worry, like New York Times's Alex Williams:

"North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented...

Now 42 years ago, the United States Supreme Court struck down any remaining anti-miscegenation laws in the case Loving vs. Virginia, Mildred and Richard Loving’s challenge to the state of Virginia’s ban on the marriage between people of different races.  But, a recent Justice of the Peace’s denial of a Louisiana couple’s application for a marriage license indicates that the debates over interracial marriage are hardly over.

Keith Bardwell, a Louisiana justice of the peace, denied Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, an interracial couple, a marriage license citing concerns for their children.  The couple does not currently have children, so the justice is operating under the assumption that, once married, the couple would seek to have children, presumably through conception rather than adoption. ...

The sensationalizing, melodramatic, "scare-the-crap-out-of-you", hype machine that passes for mass media these days is once again doing its best to ensure that parents are ready to break out the chastity belts, pass out whistles for "stranger danger" encounters, install nanny software on their home computers to block adult content, and this time, take away their cell phones to ensure that they are safe from the big, bad, sexually predatory world out there. Yes, I'm talking about the attention the "recent phenomenon" labeled "sexting" has gotten in the mainstream media in the last few weeks.  According to the news reports I found via a simple Google search, sexting is a very dangerous activity that could damage your future and ruin your life - although there wasn't really much of an explanation of how this could happen.  Instead of getting caught up in yet another panic, let's take a rational look at this "new" behavior as well as some of the real concerns that a more responsible press might address. 

First, sexting is not new.  Cell phones are no longer new; texting is no longer new; and even sending photos via a cell phone is no longer a new technology.  And before there were cell phones, there was the internet and a similar panic about teens emailing nude photos or posting nude photos online. There was even a...