Word: taboo
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Though abortion is common, "even last year people were going around talking about the A word," says Evelyn Mahon, a sociologist at Trinity College Dublin. "It's our last great taboo." This debate has forced the issue into more open dialogue. The referendum "means that people have to confront an unpalatable truth," says McManus, health spokeswoman for the Labour Party, which opposes the proposal. "We do have a relatively high level of abortion...
...Abdullah faces similar difficulties when it comes to issues like sex and education. The ban on women driving certainly limits Saudi economic potential. But what had been a long-standing cultural taboo became a seemingly irreversible religious edict in 1990 after a group of 40 women protested against the prohibition by driving cars in a convoy through downtown Riyadh. Abdullah has green-lighted a very limited population control campaign to address what may be the gravest long-term threat to stability, a birthrate unofficially put at 4.2%, one of the world's highest. (The population of Saudi nationals...
...appreciation for the subject’s complexity and demand for nuanced interpretation. To dismiss the word as a one-dimensional insult disregards its deep and loaded history. Kennedy’s book is in many ways an effort to analyze this history and place the deeply stigmatized and tabooed word at the forefront of race-relations dialogue in America. In fact, Kennedy censured what he called the “eradicationist” position, espoused by those who want the N-word systematically eliminated from the American-English lexicon. To deny the usage of the word in any context...
Much of Finley’s lecture was spent going over the art that she has produced in the last two decades. Many of Finley’s friends died of AIDS in the ’80s, and she believes that the taboo associated with homosexuality denied them proper funerals. And so she decided to initiate her own funerary pageants. “Written in Sand” is about the process of mourning. Viewers enter a candle-lit room and write the names of loved ones who have died of AIDS in sand on the ground...
...want to study the Bible in China, you are supposed to do so through either the Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement or the Catholic Patriotic Association, which follow state-sponsored liturgy. If you have doctrinal questions, those churches provide the only approved answers. If you're interested in such taboo topics as the Second Coming of Christ, you are defying the state. "Lai was just trying to help people explore all parts of Christianity," says a friend of Lai's, who worships at the same church in Hong Kong. "But Beijing does not want anyone learning about Christianity without...