Why don't you 
I gave the keynote address at the Hewlett Model Congress in Long Island, NY on April 14, 2000. It was my first major speech, so I wanted to practice it first. I did a practice run at AU with NYRA-AU and my friends in the audience. One of my friends was from Long Island and had attended the previous year’s Model Congress. She said everyone there played “the dot game” during long boring speeches. So I slipped in a reference. 
July 4, 2009
My Keynote Address to the Hewlett Model Congress
June 25, 2009
Savana Redding Wins Strip Search Case!!
Tuesday NYRA-SEFL filed their lawsuit against West Palm Beach’s curfew law, and today the Supreme Court rules declares Savana Redding’s strip search to be illegal!! Youth Rights is on the march!
Download the full Safford v. Redding decision here.
Download the Safford v. Redding amicus curiae brief NYRA signed onto.
June 24, 2009
Lots of Updates from NYRA-SEFL’s Curfew Lawsuit
June 23, 2009
NYRA v. West Palm Beach
At 4 o’clock this afternoon, NYRA-Southeast Florida filed their lawsuit against the city of West Palm Beach, Florida. After months of attempting to negotiate with the city council to repeal their unconstitutional curfew law, the chapter has now taken their battle to federal court.
NYRA is making history!
This is the first time a NYRA chapter has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the rights of youth. This is also, as far as we are aware, the first time a youth-led civil rights organization has filed a lawsuit against a curfew law anywhere in the country.
Earlier this month the Rochester, NY curfew law was struck down in court, now it is our turn!
NYRA-SEFL is working with veteran civil rights attorney Barry Silver who successfully fought West Palm Beach on another matter. Jeffrey Nadel, chapter president, is confident Silver will beat the city once more. First the curfew in Rochester fell, soon West Palm Beach’s curfew will fall as well, and NYRA is leading the charge!
Could this be the case that makes it to the US Supreme Court? Could NYRA-SEFL v. West Palm Beach be remembered for all time as the case that eradicated all curfew laws? Only time will tell.
NYRA members have led successful efforts against curfews in New York, Missouri, New Jersey, Washington, DC and elsewhere around the country. This is NYRA’s first effort through the courts.
If you want to help, please write a letter to the editor of the West Palm Beach Post and tell them what you think of NYRA-SEFL’s suit against their curfew law: letters@pbpost.com (be polite though)
June 13, 2009
DSM Targets Young People in Upcoming Edition
With the new DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V) coming out in 2012 , version 5 has already been marred in controversy, lack of transparency, and predictably, an increase in the number of contributors with industry ties (nearly 70%)–up 14% from the last installment. What does this mean for young people? We can probably expect more “disorders” in the near future, and with “Bipolar Disorder” crawling down into the cradle these days, the probability doesn’t seem so far off. We already have kids as young as four on psychoactive medications for conditions not proven to exist in childhood (expect them to be “proven to exist” in the near future), an over-abundance of ADHD diagnoses for kids who just need to play, and for teens, the old favorite–”Oppositional Defiant Disorder.”
What’s next? How about “Video Game Addiction,” a move to target young people by pathologizing their passtimes. How about the fact that the APA DSM revision team retained a certain professional by the name of Zucker who continues to procure psychiatric “treatments” for LGBT youth, with the belief that it is caused by “poor parenting.”
In this age where everyone and his uncle can be diagnosable, and particularly in light of all the targetted pathologizing of young people, perhaps it would be fun to throw the noose back at the society that is creating all these unnecessary “epidemics” with a taste of their own medication–a little something we can call “Over Protective Parental Disorder.” Let’s just try it on for size and see if it fits just as well:
(more…)
June 11, 2009
Teaching Hate and Only Hate
Our country is shaken up today and trying to find answers, one day after the horrifying shooting at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC by a racist, anti-semitic extremist, killing an innocent security guard named Stephen Johns, and it happened not two weeks after another crazy extremist gunned down Kansas abortion provider George Tiller.
Naturally, we have everyone talking about the problems in our society with bigotry and hate crimes, with the fear of more domestic terrorism from crazy extremists. With it comes another question. How do these people get so hateful?
While I of course do not have a definite answer on that, there is a rather large portion of the population that can very easily be made to learn only hate and denied any access to information contrary to the hate. Those people are children and teens.
Because “everyone knows” that it is a parent’s job to instill values into their children, that parents have a “right” to raise their children however they see fit, it is believed that parents have the “right” to decide what information and media their children receive. It’s a common fall-back our free speech allies use against video game restrictions and library censorship, that it should be the parents and not the government or any other non-parent entity who decides what children read, play, etc. In that particular no-win this-or-that, whether parents or the government should be deciding what kids should be reading or playing, obviously the parents is the option to go with, but it’s really annoying that to so many these are the only two options, completely ignoring the rather important third option of “neither”, that the kids themselves should be the only ones to make that decision. (more…)
June 7, 2009
Drinking Age Silences Victims
One major issue with the high drinking age, paired with the high penalties of underage drinking, is that an underage drinker may be left in fear of seeking help in an emergency if he or she has had something to drink. This blog entry I read today highlights get another terrifying problem: sexual assault victims who are afraid to report the assault for fear that they’ll get arrested for underage drinking!
A few weeks back, I mentioned that a former student of mine had been hurt by an abusive boyfriend. The campus judicial hearing was last week. In it, the accuser had to face trial herself.
Here’s the problem: Underage drinking laws and the equivalent campus rules deter victims of violent crime from reporting. As I learned at the eleventh hour, after I’d already written my character reference and shown up for the hearing, my student also faced multiple charges against her! One of them was underage drinking. After the original incident, she’d been frank with the investigators and told them she’d had two beers much earlier in the day. This was used against her, with no corroborating evidence.
…
My student’s problem is typical, I’m afraid. When dating violence and sexual assault occur on campus, alcohol is often part of the picture. Lots of assaults – sexual and otherwise – go unreported because the victims are afraid they’ll be punished for underage drinking. While this is a particularly pervasive problem on campus, it also potentially affects all women and girls who are underage.
This is just appalling! Are the people who keep insisting that the 21 drinking age is for safety really so blind to these horrible consequences? In their (false) insistent belief that the high drinking age saves lives, they are endangering young people, particularly girls, by forcing them into silence when they’re victimized and they happened to have had a drink.
Assault, especially sexual assault, is underreported even when alcohol isn’t involved, especially with young victims. Last thing these victims need is yet another reason to be afraid of coming forward with what an abuser did to them!
Worst part is, it makes me wonder if the pro-21 folks think the underage drinkers deserve it when these things happen to them! That there’s nothing wrong with victimizing someone who has committed the unforgivable sin of drinking before turning 21. For one, it would go to show in no uncertain terms that youth safety is very low on these people’s priority, but sadly it would mean they’re among the disgustingly high number of people who share the belief that if someone, generally a young woman, has engaged in some undesirable activity, like drinking underage, then she deserves whatever she gets.
So we need to lower the drinking age, so someone who has engaged in a harmless activity will not have to fear going to authorities when made the victim of a horrible harmful act of violence.
June 1, 2009
Banning Books Hurts Youth
A number of news stories have come out lately about concerned groups seeking to ban books they find objectionable or inappropriate for kids, for a variety of reasons. One group in Wisconsin successfully got several teen books banned for depicting homosexuality. In Tennessee, some parents are trying to get books removed from library shelves for discussing sexual abuse, racism, self-cutting, and a number of other issues. They are also trying to remove a book about anorexia believing it would encourage teens to become anorexic. The list goes on.
The National Youth Rights Association opposes these efforts to “shield” teens from supposedly objectionable literature. Teenagers’ minds belong only to themselves and are not there for adults to mold as they wish. The only person who should be making decisions about what books a young person reads is that young person herself. Not her teachers. Not her principal. Not some “concerned” group of citizens. Not even her parents. She, and only she, is the one to make that decision. (more…)
May 27, 2009
Two Youth Rights Views on Sonia Sotomayor
I’m more inclined to agree with the first post here, but StudentActivism.net makes a good point that this case was about an injunction, not about the merits of the speech itself. Still, I can’t see how anyone could side with the high school on any issue related to this case.
Sotomayor’s Bad 1st Amendment Decision Should Disqualify Her
Paul Levinson
MAY 2, 2009 6:11PM
According to Sam Stein in the Huffington Post, Sonia Sotomayor is “the odds-on favorite” to be chosen by Barack Obama to fill retiring Justice David Souter’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. She now sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit in New York City. She is regularly described as liberal and a judicial activist - fine in my book - and it would good to have a first Hispanic and another woman on the Supreme Court.
But she has one major, very bad decision on free speech and press to her discredit, which should give everyone who values these freedoms in our society serious cause for concern about Sotomayor’s possible nomination to the High Court.
The decision came from Sotomayor’s Second Circuit Court last May, regarding Lewis Mills High School student Avery Doninger. While running for Senior Class Secretary, Ms. Doninger found reason to object to the school’s cancellation of a “jamfest” event, and characterized those who scotched the event as “douchebags” on her off-campus LiveJournal blog (she also characterized a school official in that same blog posting as getting “pissed off”). The school officials, in turn, took umbrage, prohibited Avery from running for Class Secretary, and disregarded the plurality of votes she received, anyway, as a write-in candidate. Avery sued the school officials, and the Federal District Court supported the school. Avery appealed to Sotomayor’s Second Circuit Court.
After acknowledging the Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker decision, which held that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” Sotomayor’s Court proceeded to affirm the District Court’s ruling - that is, Sonia Sotomayor and her colleague justices upheld the high school’s right to punish Doninger for her off-campus speech. Their reasoning was that schools have an obligation to impart to their students “shared values,” which include not only the importance of free expression but a “proper respect for authority”.
“Proper respect for authority” … is this what our democratic society and freedom is based upon? Last time I checked, I thought our democracy and freedom were predicated on the principle that all people have a right to express their opinions, which must certainly include disrespect for authority, if actions by the authority - such as canceling a school event such as “jamfest” - are at issue.
Or as Constitutional scholar and law-professor Jonathan Turley put it about this decision last year, “The continual expansion of the authority of school officials over student speech teaches a foul lesson to these future citizens. I would prefer some obnoxious speech than teaching students that they must please government officials if they want special benefits or opportunities.”
