Gainesville appears to be hosting some kind of lovebug Coachella at the moment. Luckily, you’re holding a pile of papers that function as both an informative news medium and an oversized lovebug swatter!
As usual, your friends at the Alligator got you covered.
The Fall 2013 fun continued this third week of September in Gainesville despite a certain assistant city attorney’s decision to go rogue with a butt-naked break-in of a local woman’s home. Will Ferrell should star in a new movie this year: “Stranger than Gainesville Local Politics.”
Here we go: Your I’m-still-getting-used-to-iOS-7-and-its-lack-of-textures edition of Darts & Laurels.
We’re handing yet another LAUREL to Pope Francis for being an all-around rad guy. Yesterday, he told the world the Catholic Church must move beyond “small-minded rules,” i.e. hating on gay people, abortion and contraceptives.
According to CBS News, he said, “The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”
While we don’t exactly plan on becoming your Independent Catholic Alligator anytime soon, we have to give the Pope some props — he’s using his influence to spread a message of tolerance.
Speaking of intolerance: If you’ve been on Twitter since the Miss America pageant, you probably saw the onslaught of racist, ignorant tweets about Nina Davuluri. Wow, people on Twitter becoming angry over nonissues and spouting stupidity? Cutting edge.
However, it seems the racists of Twitter aren’t being the only jerks about Davuluri’s win. According to TIME, people in India have a problem with the color of her skin as well — yep, the actual color of her skin. Skeptics say, what with the prevalence of skin-bleaching products in India, that Davuluri would never win a beauty pageant in her parent’s home country, because her skin is “too dark.”
So this week, a DART to dumb Americans who don’t know the difference between Islam and Hinduism, and to Indians who can’t appreciate how on-point Davuluri looked in that yellow dress.
In other beauty pageant news, it appears France is finally the first do something. Earlier this week, members of the French Parliament voted to ban beauty pageants for girls under the age of 16, according to NPR.
A thanks-for-teaching-little-girls-that-they’re-worth-more-than-their-looks LAUREL goes to the French Parliament — although it’s kinda weird that a bunch of old guys sat around talking about little girls’ beauty pageants under the guise of the lawmaking process. C’est la vie, we suppose.
OK guys, listen up: It’s 2013, and you need to stop being so racist.
This week, the University of Alabama’s president literally had to mandate new sorority recruitment rules after a surge of racial discrimination allegations. To University of Alabama sororities, we hand off a this-is-too-much-racism-for-one-week DART.
That’s all for this week, folks.
Have fun at the game tomorrow — lots of sunscreen-smeared, water-drinking, sensible-shoe-wearing fun.
A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 9/20/2013 under the headline "Darts & Laurels"
