This Gay Week 33: LGBTQ Rights, Russia, Africa, and Ukraine

Karel Bouley is a history-making LGBTQ broadcaster, entertainer, author, singer, and activist. With his late partner Andrew Howard, he became part of the first openly gay radio talk-show duo on a major-market U.S. station when “Karel and Andrew” joined KFI AM 640 in Los Angeles in 1998. After Howard’s death, Bouley pursued a landmark California wrongful-death case that helped affirm domestic partners’ legal standing to sue retroactively. Karel rose to prominence on KFI AM 640 in Los Angeles and KGO AM 810 in San Francisco, later expanding his work through Free Speech TV, Karel.com, YouTube, and The Karel Cast podcast. His career spans journalism and commentary, including work associated with HuffPost, The Advocate, Billboard, CNN, MSNBC, and LGBTQ entertainment media. He has also released dance music, authored books including You Cannot Say That! and Shouting at Windmills, and remains active as a voting member of NARAS/The Recording Academy, GALECA, and SAG-AFTRA. Karel now lives and creates in Las Vegas.

Karel Bouley and Scott Douglas Jacobsen discuss life under bombardment in Kyiv before examining the deteriorating landscape for LGBTQ rights internationally. Their conversation explores Russia’s crackdown on LGBTQ organizations, political scapegoating, anti-LGBTQ legislation across Africa, colonial and religious influences on sexuality, and international human rights. They also consider propaganda, generational attitudes, marriage equality, discriminatory examinations, transgender policies in sport, and how authoritarian systems can normalize cruelty toward minorities and civilians during periods of conflict.

Karel Bouley: We’ve got Scott Jacobsen standing by in Kyiv, Ukraine. Scott, y’all have been told that tonight, and to quote Rod Stewart, “Tonight’s the Night.” This might be the worst night of bombing ever experienced in Kyiv. How do we know if this is an idle threat from Putin? How do we distinguish sabre-rattling from a credible threat that it’s probably going to happen?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Right, there could be instances of a red herring in the military-logistical sense, not in the logical sense, in that it’s a smelly old fish that takes your nose off the real trail of what is going to be happening. There have been a lot of false alarms.

Bouley: It’s like a tornado watch and a tornado warning. A tornado watch, everybody ignores, because a tornado watch means there could be one. But a tornado warning is, bitches, you better hide because there’s going to be a tornado. There are two separate things. Would you say tonight is a tornado watch or a tornado warning?

Jacobsen: Tornado warning. There have been several over the last couple of weeks.

Bouley: This is the first one I’ve been told may be the worst. Wow. Psychologically, before we get to this gay week, what does that do to a human being? Let me ask you this, as humans: when something is overwhelming, particularly the thought of death, it’s like when you live in California. The big one is coming, and when it comes, it’s gonna kill a bunch of people, maybe even you. You prepare for it, but you don’t think about it every day, even though at any moment the San Andreas could let loose. You don’t think about it because you think, I’ll deal with it when it gets here. I know it’s a real possibility, but I’m not going to let it rule my life. Is living in Kyiv right now like living on the San Andreas Fault? It’s going to blow. You don’t know when.

Jacobsen: I’ve been here for more than six months, pretty much consecutively. It’s more or less routine at this point with the bombings. They blew up a hotel 400 meters away a couple weeks ago, a few weeks ago.

Bouley: That’s 1,200 feet for you Americans.

Jacobsen: That’s only 1,200 feet for you Americans, or four football fields. That’s it.

Bouley: Right.

Jacobsen: I did some field review of the site the morning after, and the top of the building was blown off. Concrete was on the bottom, and water was gushing out the top of the building because they’d blown up some pipes.

Bouley: You were on our air when that happened. You heard it happen on our air. You heard that when we were taping the show. You heard that hotel get bombed. You are downtown Kyiv. Where is the central government?

Jacobsen: I don’t want to give away too many details, but I am in Pecherskyi District, which is pretty much the central district.

Bouley: Lord, I’m not comforted by it. I want you to know I’m not comforted by any of this. I’m not happy about any of it. I want you out of there! When are you leaving? Are you staying for a year?

Jacobsen: I have some plans which I cannot reveal yet. I have had invitations to even more dangerous areas. I am unsure whether or not I will take those up.

Those will be forthcoming depending on logistics, financing, and whether I choose to go to them. Some are safe, some are dangerous. To your prior question, that’s important. It’s a routine thing here. People expect it. When you try to break morale in a war that has lasted as long as it has- longer than World War I- episodes of Nazis, as long as Americans have war, when it’s expected and routine, it’s not as much of a morale.

Bouley: All right, Scott is in Kyiv, and the term I was thinking of is, “Bend, but never break me.” That’s what you’re saying. Morale-wise, this bends people, but it doesn’t break them. They are steadfast. They are going to get through this. I don’t know how this ends. I don’t. We’ve had the UN working on it. We’ve had Trump working on it. We’ve had Macron working on it. We’ve had many leaders in the world who have tried to negotiate peace, and nothing’s come of it. I don’t know how this ends. I don’t know what’s going to make Vladimir Putin happy. He’s not going to get the Crimea. A win for him right now would be to stop the war, take what he’s gotten, and go on. But he wants more.

Jacobsen: I don’t think he’s going to get it. It’s going to be a stalemate back and forth ad infinitum. That’s scary. We have the footnote to the American case. They have done some helpful things. They have done more optics of helpfulness because six arrest warrants are from the International Criminal Court for six senior officials of the Russian Federation for allegations of war crimes.

Now, the United States is currently sanctioning the ICC and its head officials and deliberately putting up, through Marco Rubio, a targeted attack on the legitimacy of the ICC. In addition, the Trump administration, with Marco Rubio as a spokesperson, has been actively reducing funding and support for the United Nations. Therefore, the United Nations works at reduced capacity.

When I interviewed one of the commissioners for the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, Vrinda Grover, who’s an advocate for the Indian Supreme Court, she put it as the liquidity crisis of the UN. When they’re trying to do these investigations through this commission, they have reduced capacity. Therefore, they have to be picky. When they do pick something, they can’t go as full-bore as they otherwise would.

Helpful, but more helpful in terms of optics, as per the Instagram war secretary, Mr. Hegseth, but a lot of moves to be non-helpful. Generally, they’re doing a general attack on these institutions, but the derivative secondary effects are specific to this particular war, which I happen to be living in.

Bouley: God, I hope for the Ukrainians that it ends soon and for you, that you can get back to the safety of Canada. Although Trump is once again, 50 percent tariffs on hold for three days because a deal is closed with Canada. Somehow, I don’t think Canada is dealing with him. How do you deal with that man-child?

Jacobsen: You don’t deal with Trump; you manage.

Bouley: Exactly. Canadians are done. Canadians are done with us. They’re not coming here. They did a poll in Canada, and Americans normally poll high in Canada in terms of likability. “Oh yes, we love Americans,” whatever. Now we’re underwater. Now 64 percent of Canadians said they have a negative view of Americans. He is destroying our reputation, particularly with Canada. You guys are done. You’re not on board. You’re not liking this.

Jacobsen: That’s an interesting frame too, because “you Americans” in that survey, that’s different than American values that they’re targeting. That’s a subtle distinction. This can change.

But if you’re hating people, you’re disliking them.

Bouley: I love all people unless they’re bad. I do not love Israel, and I do not love what Israel is doing. I have a negative view of Israel. I have a positive view of Jews.

I have a negative view of Israel because, to me, they are two different things. The rank-and-file Jew is not controlling Netanyahu. Netanyahu is a war criminal, and he’s committing genocide. I’m not happy with that. But I feel the same for the Palestinian people. No, I do not love Hamas. I always have to qualify that. I don’t love Hamas, but I don’t love MAGA.

That being said, I can love America or Americans and still hate MAGA. I can love the Jews and the Palestinians but still hate Hamas.

Anyway, speaking of Russia, there is an organization that is 20 years old, started in 2006. It is stopping now. It’s sad because, from everything that I’ve read, it is possibly the only hope that many gays have in Russia for information, for community. This was after a court ruling by the St. Petersburg City Court.

Bouley: And it goes to what we were speaking about last week about language. The St. Petersburg City Court designated them extremists. Once they were designated extremists, they decided to call it quits. We talked about this last week. This is how they’re framing LGBTQ rights and LGBTQ organizations, not in Russia, but across the globe, including the United States. They’re trying to label anyone who’s pro-gay or a gay ally as an extremist.

As I said last week, they’re doing it because it’s effective. Look at the story we have this week. The court labels them extremists, and suddenly they’re quitting. That’s sad, because they’ve been around for 20 years. They’ve weathered hostile environments there for 20 years, and all of a sudden one word has caused them to shut down.

Jacobsen: In Russia, if you’re labelled an extremist, you can be rounded up, jailed, or killed. Some things are more severely penalized there and therefore legally. Those terms could have severe consequences. They jailed the leader of the minority-only anti-war party that is available in Russia, with the leader now in jail for something like 11 years, if I recall correctly. This is a person who’s anti-war in Ukraine. End the war.

Bouley: Do Ukrainians have any idea how average rank-and-file Russians feel about the war? Do we have any idea? Would Putin even let that get out? I would think they’d be against it after all this time; they’re tired of the sanctions, and they’re tired of it for nothing. They’re not getting any rewards.

Jacobsen: It’s mixed. You can do a couple of things. One, you can survey prisoners of war of Russian nationality and descent who have been captured by Ukrainians and then analyze the responses to that. Do they believe the war is justified? On what grounds do they believe it? That Ukrainians are inferior? That it’s the right thing to do? That they think it’s part of the retaking and restating of the losses of the Soviet Union, which Mr. Putin called the greatest tragedy of the 20th century: the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Or you can go to state sources of the Russian Federation, which are not likely to be accurate in terms of support for the war. If I recall correctly, that was done by the Russian Federation at the start of the full-scale invasion or a little bit after. About two-thirds, approximately, had reasonable support for the war. However, if you have near-total control of the media and the state institutions, or the propaganda system, it becomes a lot less reliable.

Bouley: It’s what’s happening here in America. You would think if you watched Fox News or NewsNation or Newsmax that everyone loved Trump, that MAGA is great, but it’s propaganda. That’s not true. They are a minority. What’s sad is that Russia is taking their time. They’re at war. They’ve got greater issues.

And yet here we have this organization, which has been around for 20 years, the Russian LGBTQ organization, stopping mainly because of the case that we covered where there were three Russians who were arrested for providing space for LGBTQ people. They were arrested on June 29, and a court in Orenburg sentenced these three people. We didn’t know their sentence. Now we do.

They were sentenced to up to seven years. It was the art director, the owner, and another person from this club. It was in that trial that they labelled LGBTQ as extreme, and that led to the closure of this organization. They banned LGBTQ propaganda, as they called it. They banned LGBTQ safe spaces and all of that.

This club provided that. They got arrested in that court trial. They labelled LGBTQ people and their allies as extremists. Now the oldest LGBTQ network in Russia, the Russian LGBTQ Network, is closing. What we can get before going to break from all of this is that right now is not a great time to be gay in Russia. I have to wonder: are they cracking down on the gay community in Russia harder because of the war?

To me, it seems odd that they’re making gay a big issue right now while they’re at war. They weren’t doing this eight years ago. Now, suddenly, they’re at war; they’re also at war with gay people. You would think that all gay people in Russia were Ukrainian. It seems to me that Trump and MAGA are using gay people as a scapegoat to distract the public from the fact that they’re in an unending war, which is hurting them and their economy.

Jacobsen: It’s probably two things. One, an easy distraction within the war and a victory to be taken culturally. In other words, it’s an American-style culture-war win from the traditionalist point of view. Also, Mr. Putin has a long line of traditionalist values against what he deems LGBT propaganda. We have covered some cases where they get influence internationally, the Kazakhstan case, some of the legislation, and it could be a legitimate push based on ideological grounds to combat what they see as Western decadence and confusion.

Bouley: But I have to believe younger Russians are not going for this. Recently, when I’ve been seeing Russian cities and Russian people, the young people want what the West has to offer. That would include acceptance of diverse people. I wonder if it’s a generational conflict. In Kyiv, where you are, and in Russia, we have, I think, a generational divide. But we don’t know because we can’t hear from the young people. They can’t post on Instagram. We don’t see them on Twitter or X.

Then we move into Africa, which our next story is about, and all the anti-gay tactics going on over there and the laws. What scares me is, in Africa, it’s not old people out there holding the “no homosexual” banners. I used a Senegalese protest in my video for “You Have to Be Proud,” which is out now and streaming, and everyone should go watch it at YouTube.com/Karel. It’s the sign that you sent me, “non à l’homosexualité,” which sounds nice, but it means no homosexuality. It sounds nice, but it isn’t. It’s young people. That’s scaring me because I have always found, as a gay man in America and other places, that it’s the older people that tend to be more bigoted, more hateful, more homophobic, more racist.

And younger people tend to skew more diverse and more inclusive. But all of a sudden, I don’t know, in Russia, Putin is the ultimate exercise in feudal conversion therapy. He is out there trying to convert everyone to be not gay, and it’s not working. There are still gay people. He thinks he can legislate them out of existence. Africa thinks it can legislate gay people out. Every country since the dawn of fucking countries has thought that they could legislate gay people out of existence, and it hasn’t worked. Why haven’t they learned? I don’t understand. Vladimir Putin has been trying to eradicate gay people in his country since he took office. Has he done it? No. You would think he’d get the point.

Jacobsen: On other subject matter, I believe there is still the Flat Earth Society. Some sectors of society do not learn, period.

Bouley: No, you can’t fix stupid. This goes to Africa. We talk about Africa every fucking week, and people wonder why. “Karel, why do you talk so much about Africa?” The stats on Africa are overwhelming. It is quickly emerging as one of the world’s biggest economies and will be the world’s biggest economy within the next 10 years. There is crazy investment going on all over the continent from American companies. American social organizations and churches and all that are invading Africa and have, ever since the 1700s, sought to inflict their beliefs on Africans. The Catholic Church certainly has a foothold there.

Now conservative groups, anti-gay conservative groups, are flooding Africa because it is the world’s frontier. If you think about it, in terms of the population and the size, and the fact that it’s rapidly modernizing, as it comes into the new age, it’s bringing old-age bigotries and phobias, racism, homophobia, all that. It’s bringing those with it, these draconian, colonizing sentiments.

I heard an interesting thing from a Black person. He was asked a question here in America by a gay Black man, and he said, “Why are we,” meaning Blacks, “homophobic? We know what it’s like to be marginalized. We know what it’s like to be oppressed. Yet gay Black people are afraid to come out because their culture does not accept it.”

The guy he was asking on this panel thought for a moment, this learned individual, and he said something that was powerful. That was that if you are Black and you find yourself exhibiting racism or homophobia, what you’re exhibiting is the values and the traditions of your colonizer. You are not exhibiting the values and traditions of your people. You are exhibiting the values and traditions of your colonizer and of your captors. That was powerful to me.

Because, as I told you, in African culture hundreds of years ago, gay wasn’t a thing. Then the white people got involved in Africa, and then the white people brought Africans to America, and then the Africans that stayed here in America after slavery took on the values of their white captors. I never thought of it that way, but it’s true. They did.

Jacobsen: Three issues, stretching back a long way, in two successive waves, and then one more perennial. They have their traditionalist superstitions. That’s part one. That’s still contemporaneous, but warped or disappearing. First, the second case you already mentioned, which is European Christian colonialism. The third is Arab Muslim colonialism.

A good indicator: if you look at the most populous nation in Africa, it’s Nigeria. In the north, Muslim. In the south, Christian. In the Middle Belt, a lot of death. Historically, the relationship between Islamic societies and same-sex desires was complex and varied, differing significantly from the rigid, politicized opposition seen in many modern-day…

Bouley: I was right. The Quran recounts the story of Lot, and that, put into mainstream Islamic jurisprudence, is interpreted as a condemnation of male-to-male sexual intercourse. Even though we now know the translations of that Old Testament and Lot are wrong translations.

It was not male-to-male sex that they were condemning. It was male older to male younger, meaning pedophilia is what they were condemning. Classical legal codes prescribed severe penalties for sodomy, but the burden of proof under Sharia was so high that judicial prosecution was rare. This is exactly what happened. Early Muslims: gay wasn’t a thing. They looked away. As long as it wasn’t overly overt, they wouldn’t have tolerated a pride festival, but they weren’t eager to prosecute it.

Then it’s in poetry and literature. From a century onward, Islamic literary traditions in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish frequently and openly featured homoerotic themes, romantic love for male youth, and celebration of same-sex attraction. So there’s a lot of Muslim literature where they celebrate same-sex attraction. Again, modern religion, both Christian and Muslim, gets it wrong. Up until recently, it wasn’t a thing.

Then we now go to Africa, where there is a huge rise. In the headline, it sums up what we’ve talked about here. Experts say harsher legislation is driven by political scapegoating; we talked about that even in Russia, anti-Western backlash, and U.S. conservative groups. The U.S. is exporting gay hatred to Africa. Africa is receptive to it because of the money and the resources that come with those groups.

These anti-gay groups are going over to Africa. They’re saying, hate gay people, legislate against them, and we’ll give you XYZ. They do it.

Jacobsen: It’s either coming from non-governmental resources or literal church tithes, some percent of that, and then getting shuttled over to influence. There is a bit of a symmetry with that anti-Western, hyper-judicialist stance that the Russian Federation is taking in labelling the LGBT organization extremists and LGBT propaganda, when they’re, in the same way, looking at LGBT cultural-positive influence as Western cultural…

Bouley: Why do they see that? The West has not been overly accepting of LGBTQ people. Quite frankly, Europe has excelled more than we have. Are they considering Europe the West? And not every European country.

Jacobsen: No. Not all the time.

Bouley: No. But Amsterdam, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Spain, certainly Greece. The birthplace, allegedly, of us. Sappho and the Isle of Lesbos and Mykonos for gay men, allegedly. So, I don’t understand. European values are more pro-gay than American.

Yes, Africa, it’s critical. Russia and Africa are critical when it comes to LGBTQ rights right now. And we need a country, the U.S., to step in and calm this down. But the opposite is happening. The U.S. is encouraging this behaviour.

It’s frightening for me because when I think of gay Russians or gay Africans, they are still living in a world where death and imprisonment are on the table every day. Here in America, it’s going backwards. It’s not good. There is violence against us. Trans people are dying in record numbers. It’s scary to me that now we have one large nation and a whole continent of nations where it is increasingly getting hard to be gay.

India is still struggling with LGBTQ rights. We make some advances there, and then we get setbacks. Complicated country.

It’s scary that the biggest land masses in the world, Russia and Africa, are turning anti-gay when historically it wasn’t that way. Even in Russia before Putin, under Gorbachev and stuff, gays… He had other fish to fry. There was a Cold War going on, and there were oil problems and all of that. But now it seems that Putin is obsessed with it. So, know what that means? He’s closeted gay.

That’s usually what I thought that was meant for Mike Pence. Hello. He calls his wife mother. Creepy, creepy. Would you sleep with your mother? Obviously he would.

Jacobsen: I only had three points of fact to add to this in terms of that more specific commentary that you gave. One and two are connected. A lot of this stuff…

It has almost nothing to do with the other person, simply in terms of whom you love, public or private, and what you do in the bedroom. What does it matter to you? That’s part one. Part two, which is the third point, I don’t see acceptance and equality for gay people, LGBTI+, as a Western value. I see it as a value of equality that you see propped up in different sectors of the world throughout time. In some areas of time, you do see it get institutionalized, in parts of the EU or the UN. But broadly, you can see this, as you’re noting, about pre-European and Christian colonialism in parts of Africa. You had a lot more acceptance. Two-Spirit.

Bouley: Yes. It’s odd because, while we didn’t have legal- and I want to be clear about that- we did not have, even here in America in the Old West, legal acceptance; being gay was not that big of a fucking deal. Cowboys had sex with each other all the frickin’ time. They’re out on these cattle runs; there’s no women around for months. A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. In the 1700s, 1600s, and 1800s, it wasn’t that big of a deal. Now, granted, gay people were not out marching for rights, and they weren’t out demanding equality.

The root of all of this in Russia and Africa and here in America is that straight people in power were fine with gay people as long as they were out of sight, out of mind. Didn’t talk about it.

Jacobsen: There is a plausibility to that hypothesis.

Bouley: Didn’t see it, didn’t talk about it. Then gay people got tired of oppression, of not having equal rights, of not being able to get married, especially during AIDS in the ’80s, where we could have our whole life taken from us because a family swoops in, because we have no legal right to the house we’re living in, because we shared it with our partner and we couldn’t legally be married. They would throw gay people out into the streets.

Then gay marriage became crucial. That’s what started the gay marriage movement in the United States: AIDS. Gay men were not sitting around going, “Gee, I’d love to be married.” That’s the last thing on our minds. But because we were getting rights denied because of AIDS, suddenly we knew the only way through that was marriage. That’s where marriage equality came from. Lesbians benefit from that as well.

But it wasn’t until we started speaking up and demanding rights that the anti-gay backlash started in earnest. In other words, when we were out of sight, out of mind, when we weren’t demanding equality, when we were being quiet and cowering, straight people were fine with us. When we suddenly wanted to be open as teachers and wanted to be open at work and wanted to be open in our lives and have our identities recognized, that’s when people started having a problem with us.

Jacobsen: There is an analogous case. You see that with the commentaries around the atheist community. You’ve probably gotten these similar responses of, “I’m fine that you do not believe in God. Why do you have to be so vocal about it?”

Bouley: Right, it’s the same sentiment. But they’re not understanding that, as Christians, they’re more vocal about their belief in God. I would turn that statement around. I don’t care if someone believes in God. I don’t want them to be vocal about it because they’re insane, trying to put it in schools and crosses on the walls. That’s insane.

Jacobsen: Who shows up at your doors in the United States? Jehovah’s Witnesses, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormons. Who else? That’s it. Not Jews, not Muslims, not Catholics. Hare Krishnas at beaches. In airports too.

Bouley: Yes, it used to be at airports. It was a big joke at airports. They’d be there bald with their tambourines. Hare Hare, Hare Krishna.

So, the Women’s Tennis Association. I don’t know that I can do this story with a straight face. I don’t. The WTA has been called upon to drop their sex-testing policy. They’re testing for the SRY gene, which helps in determining biological sex and can be conducted via a cheek swab. They’re doing this to make sure that women tennis players are women and that male tennis players are male. But they’re doing this as an anti-trans rule.

Martina Navratilova is not trans, but that is the fucking butchiest dyke I have ever seen in my life. She is one penis short of being a guy. The notion that women’s tennis has a problem with butch women or trans women? Martina Navratilova, an out lesbian, wants women to be tested to make sure they’re not trans because she doesn’t want to compete against trans women. Martina, a lesbian, is turning on her own people, and she said it’s because if they transitioned after puberty, their legs are longer, their arms are longer, and their body frame is bigger. This is from a woman who looks like a man.

But their body frame is bigger. It’s odd that she supports a trans ban in women’s tennis, being a lesbian.

Jacobsen: In Senegal, they have anal examinations. They have no scientific basis. They’re used to determine sexual conduct and have long been condemned as degrading and abusive. They’re being applied to detainees, including women, and it illustrates how criminalization builds on pseudo-medical examinations, which are humiliation via the state.

Bouley: When the Rwandan debacle was happening, they did this to women as well. They examined them to see if they were pure or if they were virgins. If they were found not to be, they would rape them with machetes and mutilate their genitalia and all of that.

As we leave with this today, you’re sitting in an area where there’s bombing going on, and I know that all of the things we talk about here, what you’re going through there in war, it isn’t new. There’s been war since there’s been tribes, and there’s been anti-gay or anti-them sentiment since the dawn of time. But I worry that we’re starting to excel at cruelty.

We are perfecting the art of cruelty. Anal examinations on women in Senegal are one of the cruellest things I have ever heard; that any nation would allow that to occur, that other nations know that this is happening and don’t step in to stop it.

Not only are we excelling at cruelty these days here in this country, we delight in cruelty in this country now. The meaner someone is, the more we edify them. But across the globe, I am seeing people delighting in being cruel. What Putin is doing to Ukraine is cruel. He has no reason for this. He doesn’t need Ukraine. This is strictly his ego. He wants it back because it was once his.

And what they’re doing in Senegal to women, or the 71 men who were arrested for being gay, is cruel. It’s cruel. We’re almost a quarter of a century into the 21st century, and we’re not evolving beyond cruelty. We’re perfecting it. That’s what scares me about all of these stories: we seem to be perfecting the art of cruelty.

What you’re going through there, what the people of Ukraine are going through on a daily basis, the fact that you guys have become numb to war, and we’ve become numb to these gay stories that we hear every week. You and I have come out here every week. One of these stories should be appalling enough to get global action. One. Yet another week, now they’re annually examining women in Senegal. For what? For what?

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer and Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 2,000 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic, media, and research institution fellowships, and currently serves on numerous international boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.