Contemporary Issues in Credo Reference: Social Issues

Animal rights stem from early animal welfare organizations. However, there is a difference between the two movements. Animal rights advocates believe in letting animals live according to their nature and not be used as commodities.

Civil rights are guarantees of equal social opportunities and equal protection under the law regardless of race, religion, or other personal characteristics.

Education, any process, either formal or informal, that shapes the potential of a maturing organism. Informal education results from the constant effect of environment, and its strength in shaping values and habits can not be overestimated.

Free trade, in modern usage, trade or commerce carried on without such restrictions as import duties, export bounties, domestic production subsidies, trade quotas, or import licenses.

Gay-rights movement, organized efforts to end the criminalization of homosexuality and protect the civil rights of homosexuals.

Gun control represents legislative, administrative, and enforcement attempts to regulate the manufacture, sale, transfer, possession, and use of firearms.

Human trafficking refers to the trading of human beings for the purpose of forced labor and/or sexual exploitation. It involves acts of transporting, transferring, harboring, or receiving a person through a use of force or coercion, and it is recognized by the United Nations (UN) as a crime against humanity.

The selling, buying, and transportation of military technologies and products outside of the world's formal markets, law, and policies is one of the largest segments of the hidden illegal global economy.

Immigration not only profoundly affects population dynamics but also has far-reaching economic, social, and political consequences for both destination countries and countries of origin.

The process of voluntary migration to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What nuclear energy represents to current debates on solutions to increasing energy demand, reduction in carbon emissions, energy independence, and national security is juxtaposed with arguments of nuclear proliferation, radioactive contamination, nuclear accidents, and “not in my backyard” sentiments.

Crude oil is sold through many contract arrangements, in spot transactions, and on futures markets.

This concept describes an empirical reality, both globally and in individual societies, but the meaning of which is contested. What constitutes poverty depends on how it is defined and measured. The main debates around definition concern the role of material resources, in particular income, and whether poverty should be understood in absolute or relative terms.

A major topic of social research during periods of mass unemployment in the twentieth century, unemployment arose with the growth of dependency on waged employment.

“Global War on Terror” is the term used to describe the military, political, diplomatic, and economic measures employed by the United States and other allied governments against organizations, countries, or individuals that are committing terrorist acts; that might be inclined to engage in terrorism; or that support those who do commit such acts.

Domestic violence, or intimate partner violence, is defined as a pattern of assaultive and coercive behaviors, including physical, sexual, and psychological attacks as well as economic coercion that adults or adolescents use against their intimate partners.

A person's sexual orientation, and whether or not he or she discloses it to others, is generally understood to be a private matter. The decision of the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), recognized that the constitutional right of privacy encompasses adult consensual relationships and that homosexuals' “right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government.” One major exception exists with respect to employment in the United States military.

The notion of gender can be understood to be referring to the cultural assumptions and practices that govern the social construction of men, women and their social relations.

From Encyclopedia of Social Problems
Women, on average, make less than men, a differential commonly known as the wage gap. Although significant changes in the status of women in society occurred since the phenomenon was identified, the gap still persists in the 21st century. Currently, women earn about 77 cents for a man’s dollar.

Gender roles are the set of expectations a society has about males and females. These expectations are multifaceted and include specifications about appearance, personality traits, emotions, interests, abilities, and occupations.

From The American Heritage (R) Dictionary
Misogyny has its roots in the Greek miso-, meaning hatred, and gyne-, meaning woman; it means the hatred or mistrust of women.

A recent United Nations report suggests that, on average, over 250,000 cases of rape or attempted rape are reported each year worldwide, while the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that nearly 200,000 incidents of rape or sexual assault occurred in 2005 in the United States alone.

This term is used to describe those social processes and social structures that demonstrate a prejudice towards the interests of one sex rather than another.

From The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality
Sex trafficking is one of the exploitations given within the transnational crime of human trafficking. Human trafficking is a movement of persons across nation‐state borders or regions by means of fraud or force for the purpose of slavery, sexual exploitation, servitude, or forced labor. Sex trafficking remains a sensitive topic, and the scale of the problem is still debated since victims of sex trafficking are hidden within different forms of sexual services: prostitution, pornography, and/or domestic service.

Sexual discrimination involves treating someone differently, usually less favourably, because of his or her gender.

Sexual harassment, in law, verbal or physical behavior of a sexual nature, aimed at a particular person or group of people, especially in the workplace or in academic or other institutional settings, that is actionable, as in tort or under equal-opportunity statutes.

From Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices
The umbrella term “transgender” refers to people who express their gender differently from the cultural norm.

The concept of women's rights has evolved and expanded as it has been informed by the global activism of women's movements.

Freedom of belief and conscience are essential to democracy; censorship threatens the free exchange of ideas that allows democracy to flourish.

Democratic party, American political party; the oldest continuous political party in the United States.

Election, choosing a candidate for office in an organization by the vote of those enfranchised to cast a ballot.

Political action committee (PAC), U.S. organization formed by a corporation, labor union, or association to raise money for political activity. Funds can be gathered by voluntary contributions from members, employees, or shareholders.

Association of like-minded people organized with the purpose of seeking and exercising political power.

Republican party, American political party.

This word is commonly used to refer to a sudden overthrow of the status quo and its replacement by an entirely different state of affairs.

Voting, which can take many forms, influences the allocation of power at many different levels of office. The most prominent form of voting selects politicians and parties contending for national office and provides ordinary citizens with the opportunity to weigh the performance of incumbents and decide whether to reelect them or vote in new officeholders.

The term affirmative action describes programs that give special consideration or preference to members of previously disadvantaged groups, most commonly African Americans, in areas such as university admissions, employment, and government contracting.

Apartheid means “separateness” or “apartness” in Afrikaans, the language of the Afrikaners, who are descendants of the Dutch settlers of South Africa. As an ideology and statutory framework, it referred to South Africa's notorious system of rigid racial segregation, through which the ruling Afrikaner-based National Party (NP) attempted to create separate cultural, political, and social spaces for white, African, Indian, and colored (mixed race) South Africans after its electoral victory in 1948.

The civil rights movement was a struggle to fulfill the promise, made in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, of full citizenship and equal opportunity for African Americans

Discrimination is negative behavior directed at individuals or at groups of individuals because of their social group membership. Discrimination is based on social categories that individuals do not generally choose to belong to, including gender, race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, stigma, age, and physical appearance.

For individual persons, in the context of criminal behavior, murder is considered the worst possible crime in those criminal justice systems that rank human life as having the most important value. In conjunction with this belief, genocide is probably the most heinous crime recognized by the civilized nations of the world, as it involves the mass murder of people for no legitimate reason.

The term Holocaust addresses the systematic annihilation of Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II. It has since evolved into a global icon representing the perils of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of state-sponsored atrocities.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), organization composed mainly of American blacks, but with many white members, whose goal is the end of racial discrimination and segregation.

A historical means of social classification and differentiation that attempts to essentialize political and cultural differences by linking physical traits (i.e. skin, blood, genes) and social practices (i.e. religion, violence, passion) to innate, immutable characteristics (see essentialism).

Racism can be described as an extreme form of ethnocentrism (i.e., seeing one’s language, customs, ways of thinking, and material culture as preferable). But instead of using cultural factors to mark differences that can be overcome if some are willing and able to adopt beliefs and customs of others, racial boundaries depend on perceptions of physical distinctions between human body types, which are seen to be expressions of innate, biological divergence.

The enforced servitude of one person (a slave) to another or one group to another. A slave has no personal rights and is considered the property of another person through birth, purchase, or capture.

Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy before the embryo or fetus can live independently. Among physicians a miscarriage—the involuntary, spontaneous loss of a pregnancy for some physical reason—is also called an abortion, but in nonmedical circles the term is generally used to describe a voluntary procedure that ends a pregnancy before the fetus is viable.

Health insurance, prepayment plan providing services or cash indemnities for medical care needed in times of illness or disability. It is effected by voluntary plans, either commercial or nonprofit, or by compulsory national insurance plans, usually connected with a social security program.

Medicaid is a government-funded health insurance program for the poor that started in 1965, as part of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiative. It was added, along with Medicare (health insurance for the elderly), as an amendment to the Social Security Act.

Medicare is a government-funded health insurance program for the elderly, which started in 1965, as part of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiative. Medicare covers everyone over sixty-five years of age. It was added as an amendment to the Social Security Act.

The NIH Web site stemcells.nih.gov has a wealth of information available to all regarding stem cell research; the site provides a great deal of information regarding basic stem cell background, the potential of stem cell research, federal funding opportunities, policy, and training.