Tagged: scott mackay

The annual Metcalf Awards for Diversity in Media sponsored by Rhode Island for Community and Justice have been announced. For the third consecutive year, Rhode Island Public Radio has won. This year, RIPR education reporter and Morning Edition host Elisabeth Harrison is a winner. Harrison won for her ongoing series covering minority students in Rhode Island. Other winners include Billy Reynolds, the ProJo’s wonderful sports columnist and one of a very few Ocean State journalists with a well-known national reputation. Reynolds has long been one of the nation’s top basketball writers.

Change happens slowly in politics. Except when it doesn’t. RIPR political analyst Scott MacKay explains the forces behind Rhode Island’s reversal on gay marriage.

The Ocean State is poised to become the 10th  state in the nation to recognize same sex marriages and join our five New England neighbors in the vanguard of the movement for equal treatment for our gay citizens.

As the hours dwindle to tomorrow’s Senate Judiciary Committee consideration of same-sex marriage, it appears advocates of gay unions have an advantage, say State House sources. What is still unknown is what will happen when the issue hits the Senate floor, which could come as early as Wednesday, or more likely, Thursday.

What is clear this time around is that the marriage equality campaign has done a better job this time around than two years ago, when the General Assembly approved civil unions in a compromise that pleased neither side.

After the mourning comes the reckoning. RIPR political analyst Scott MacKay on why Boston will not only survive, but thrive.

The year was 1976 and Boston, the nation’s birthplace, was celebrating the American bicentennial with paeans to liberty, equality and justice. But the city that spawned the abolition and women's rights movements was riven by racial division.

The image of Boston that flashed around the world that year was a photograph of a black man being assaulted by an angry white man using as a spear a staff with an American flag on it.