The Takeaway: Story of the Day

Wendell Pierce is best-known for his role as Bunk in the HBO series "The Wire," and he currently plays a struggling trombonist in the series "Treme." But he's taking on a much different job these days in his hometown of New Orleans, where he is in the process of opening a chain of grocery stores meant to revitalize the city he loves.

Inspired by first lady Michelle Obama's healthful food financing initiative in 2011, Pierce and his partners created Sterling Farms, a grocery chain dedicated to eradicating food deserts in New Orleans.

The chain was created to meet a demand that other retailers weren't willing to gamble on supplying. According to Pierce, there are many neighborhoods in New Orleans that lack access to basic grocery store staples such as fresh produce and food staples. "There are so many communities that are undeserved...where people have to make a huge effort to just get to a grocery store. And I saw that happening all over New Orleans after Katrina. And here we are seven and a half years later...and there are still areas like the lower 9th Ward and New Orleans East that still don't have access to a decent grocery store."

Pierce believes that these grocery stores will help the restore the communities in which they're located. "It is the heart and soul of a community when you have access to fresh foods. It is the sustenance of life and the heartbeat of the community," he says."It's no longer acceptable to stand on the sidelines. If not now, when? If not me, who?" asks Pierce.

Last week, Congress and the president managed to avoid a government shutdown with a continuing resolution that funds the federal government for the next six months.

Unbeknownst to most lawmakers, a last-minute rider, nicknamed the "Monsanto Protection Act," found its way, anonymously, into the continuing resolution before President Obama signed it last Tuesday.

Senator Jon Tester, Democrat from Montana, was outraged. "These provisions are giveaways worth millions of dollars to a handful of the biggest corporations in this country and deserve no place in this bill," he said.

As Tom Philpott, food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones, explains, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has to approve genetically-modified crops before companies could sell the seeds to farmers. In 2008 and 2009, the Center for Food Safety, along with other environmental groups, sued the USDA in federal court, claiming that the USDA approved two genetically engineered crops without a detailed environmental impact statement.

The Center for Food Safety won the suit in both cases, but the rider on this year's continuing resolution would bar environmental groups from suing the USDA for these purposes.

The Monsanto Company declined The Takeaway's request for an interview, but they released the following statement:

As a member of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and the American Seed Trade Association (ASTA), we were pleased to join major grower groups in supporting the Farmer Assurance Provision including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Soybean Association, the American Sugarbeet Growers Association, the National Corn Growers Association, the National Cotton Council, and several others.

The point of the Farmer Assurance Provision is to strike a careful balance allowing farmers to continue to plant and cultivate their crops subject to appropriate environmental safeguards, while USDA conducts any necessary further environmental reviews. The attached letter, submitted by the industry in June 2012, should provide you with additional information and context about what the provision is intended to accomplish.

A broad bipartisan group of legislators in both the House and Senate have supported the provision dating back to June 2012, and it passed with broad bipartisan support.

This week, the Supreme Court will hear two cases on same-sex marriage: Hollingsworth v. Perry, the case will determine the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, and United States v. Windsor, the case that will decide the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, also known as DOMA.

Over the last decade, in the midst of public legislative and court battles over same-sex marriage, many gay and lesbian couples have privately decided to start families. According to the 2010 census, the number of same-sex couples raising children more than doubled over the past ten years, from eight percent in 2000 to 19 percent in 2010.

Sarah Gogin is a 24-year-old senior staff associate in San Francisco. Sarah's fathers adopted her in 1988, one of the first gay adoptions in California.

As a trailblazer, Sarah recalls some hardship growing up with gay parents. "As I got into grammar school, I didn't understand why people would be treating us differently," she says. "You hear things on the playground," she continues, "they throw out these words...sometime without even knowing what it means."

Sixteen-year-old Malina Simhard-Halm also experienced bullying when she moved with her fathers from Los Angeles to Santa Fe in the fourth grade. "I was just different," she says, "but it felt like I was the subject of a lot of bullying and my parents were also being discriminated against."

"On a school level," she says, "yes, I was a different kid. I had two gay dads. But, on a political level, too, my parents were still...unable to do certain things and to obtain certain rights."

Unlike Sarah and Malina, Kevin Gibson Weinberger, a 13-year-old who lives with his fathers in Los Angeles, has grown up as one of many kids with same-sex parents.

"More kids in my school have two dads or two moms," Kevin says. "Families are more diverse nowadays, so I don't really feel left out."

"I don't really get bullied at school at all; I don't recall being bullied at all," Kevin says. "But I feel like...the government is bullying my parents by not letting them have rights that they should have."

Kevin continues. "I get all these rights — well, not as many as adults, but I get rights, and when I'm older, I get rights to marry, and I feel like they should have rights to marry also."

Sarah is amazed by the school environment Kevin describes. "Times have changed," she says, "and it's incredible to hear."

"It's crazy and great to see kids so young, starting so young, really standing up for their beliefs and standing up for their families."

As for the cases before the court, Malina feels that her generation is part of a civil rights movement for LGBT rights. "I definitely want to be a part of the huge wave...that has picked up in the past few years." Malina and Sarah are members of Outspoken Generation, a group for children with LGBT parents, and Malina is proud that the organization wrote testimony for an amicus brief filed by the Family Equality Council.

If Proposition 8 and DOMA are upheld, Malina, Kevin and Sarah note that while they would be disappointed, they'd nevertheless remain confident in their families.

"If we lose," Kevin says, "my family is no less of a family than we were before. If gay marriage is approved, and my parents do get married, we're no less of a family and no more of a family."

Click on the audio player above to hear this interview.

We all know Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech—it’s remembered nearly every January, when we celebrate the federal holiday dedicated to the civil rights activist. The speech, delivered at the 1963 March on Washington, will celebrate its 50th anniversary in August.

It turns out August 1963 wasn't the first time that King delivered that speech. A few months earlier, on June 23, Dr. King led more than 100,000 people in a march through Detroit - known as the Freedom Walk - where he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech for the first time.

Journalist Tony Brown, host of the online show "Tony Brown’s Journal," coordinated Dr. King’s 1963 Freedom Walk in Detroit and witnessed the original "Dream" speech. He discusses the original speech and his realization that the words he heard that day would become part of American history.

Click on the audio player above to hear about King's speech, and listen to the full version here.

A recent Pentagon report demonstrates the severity of the problem: based on anonymous surveys, the Defense Department estimates that 26,000 members of the military were sexually assaulted in fiscal year 2012, up from 19,000 the year before. Of these 26,000 victims, only a small fraction, 3,374 in 2012, reported the crime.

These grim statistics combined with recent sexual battery charges against the Air Force's sexual assault prevention chief and similar accusations against an Army coordinator at Fort Hood have Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) pushing for changes in the military's handling of sexual assault cases.

In the current system, these cases are reported and adjudicated within a victim's chain of command. Victims report to their commanding officer and, Senator Gillibrand says, "There is a fear that the commanding officer will not take them seriously, or punish them for reporting."

Gillibrand's proposed legislation would allow victims to "report these cases to the JAG attorneys, the prosecutors who will prosecute the case," removing the case from the chain of command so that commanding officers with potential conflicts of interest would no longer be in charge of deciding whether a case should go to trial.

While she commends JAG attorneys for their work, because of the charges against sexual assault prevention specialists and the growing number of victims, Gillibrand believes that the overall adjudication of these crimes and the dynamics within the military need to change.

"For one of the Air Force Chiefs of Staff to have testified...that part of the incident rate is because of the hook-up culture that's being held over from high school demonstrates how there is so little understanding," she says, referring to recent comments by Air Force Gen. Mark Welsh to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"Sexual assault and rape is a crime of violence, it's a crime of aggression, it's a crime of dominance; it may not even be related to sex in any way. These are violent crimes that are often committed by recidivists, people who have done it over and over again, where they target their victim and are really predators."