Sunday roundup

One for the maybe-her-ideology-is-affecting-her-ability-to-judge-character file:

Four years ago, Michelle Obama praised Weinstein at a White House event.

“I want to start by thanking Harvey Weinstein for organizing this amazing day,” she said at the beginning of her remarks. “Harvey. This is possible because of Harvey. He is a wonderful human being, a good friend and just a powerhouse. And the fact that he and his team took the time to make this happen for all of you should say something not about me or about this place, but about you. Everybody — we are here because of you.”

Good on ya Mike: Vice President Pence left today's Colts game when players took a knee for the national anthem.

The poor babies:

So-called “Diversity Educators” are suffering from burnout due to the “emotional weight” of their jobs, according to a recent academic journal article published this week in the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice.

The study, written by University of North Carolina-Charlotte professor Ryan Miller and six colleagues from the University of North Texas, interviewed seven interviewed diversity educators from a “predominantly white research institution” who claim that they suffer from “compassion fatigue,” “burnout,” and “racial battle fatigue” in their efforts to combat microaggressions on campus.

According to Miller, the burnout is caused by the diversity educators’ “consistent exposure to various microaggressions” from students who don’t see things their way. He notes that these microaggressions have been conceptualized by some scholars “as forms of assault and torture.”

The article, which was highlighted Friday by Campus Reform, describes the burnout as a “gradual wearing down of individuals entrenched in the work of helping others as diversity educators.”

“Team members described the emotional toll of facilitating diversity education, which sometimes led to fatigue, burnout, and disengagement,” Miller states. He adds that they “found it difficult to separate their identities and experiences from the topics at hand in a facilitation.”

The diversity educators struggle with feeling underqualified for their jobs and suffer from a desire to “prove their legitimacy to others,” according to Miller, who proposed paying them higher salaries and giving them more recognition for their efforts.

“We recommend that senior institutional leaders publicly and symbolically recognize the work of diversity educators,” Miller states. He claims that their work should be prioritized by institutions, and their efforts rewarded accordingly due to the emotionally taxing nature of their work.

One for the signs-of-light-in-the-darkness file:

President Donald Trump announced new reforms that would broaden conscience exemptions to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, expanding protections beyond small and closely held businesses to publicly traded companies and other employers as well as extending protections not only to those with religious objections but to those with moral objections that are not specifically religious in nature. This is an excellent development: The overbearing contraception mandate was an assault not only on religious liberty but on the legal standing of private conscience itself. (The mandate included types of contraception that, as even the Obama administration’s FDA acknowledged, might instead operate post-conception to prevent implantation and thus kill the early embryo.)

Guess national healing ain't their thing: The Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement announces a nationwide campaign of defacing Christopher Columbus statues tomorrow.

A comprehensive yet succinct explanation of the Catalonia situation at Hay Derecho.

At Return to Order, John Horvat examines the process by which music became removed from daily life. On the surface, it seems like an odd claim to make, given how ubiquitous music is, but read his take and see if it doesn't make sense.