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By Dave Eggers
$25.00
By James Oakes
$10.67
$21
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What do abortion, nude beaches and group sex have in common? According to author and sex therapist Marty Klein, they’re all targets of a coordinated war on sex. “The government,” he says, “has acquired more and more tools to regulate sexual expression over the last thirty years.”
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By Marie Cocco — Somewhere along Barack Obama’s winding road through the red states, he lost me. It happened when he talked about abortion seekers who are “feeling blue.”
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Now that the presumptive nominees are getting ready to do battle for the presidency, their wives are also subject to increasing scrutiny by the press and public. Here, Cindy McCain takes a moment to endure the (soft focus) glare of ABC News cameras and answer softball questions about her husband’s stance on women’s rights and whether she’d feel safe with Barack Obama as president.
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By Ellen Goodman — So is the glass half full or half empty after Clinton’s departure? Or to pick a better metaphor, is the “highest, hardest” glass ceiling now half shattered by the 18 million cracks or does it look as impermeable as ever after this unsuccessful battering?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Word spread like wildfire in Catholic circles: Douglas Kmiec, a staunch Republican, firm foe of abortion and veteran of the Reagan Justice Department, had been denied communion.
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By Amy Goodman — The women of New York had a champion in Eliot Spitzer. The good news in the wake of the governor’s resignation is that his successor, David Paterson, and the state’s activists are ready to keep up the fight.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — John McCain is feared by Democrats and liked by independents. That, paradoxically, is why he may yet be rejected by Republicans, even though he has bent over backward to satisfy conservative demands.
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observer.com
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While mulling Hillary Clinton’s surprise win, the pundits might want to consider her turn to negative campaigning. Arianna Huffington has collected some of the more distasteful examples, including a direct mailer to New Hampshire women that falsely portrayed Barack Obama as soft on choice (he has a glowing rating from both NARAL and Planned Parenthood).
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By Ellen Goodman — Pregnancy is way cool on the big screen these days. Moviemakers seem to be reflecting a cultural tide that has shifted key positions on both the left and the right.
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By Bill Boyarsky — As he addressed a room full of members of the Iowa Christian Alliance in the small city of Cedar Falls, the senator demonstrated how hard it is for him to find his way through the tangled forest of Christian right doctrine.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The rise of the Baptist minister—an “evangelical populist”—has put the fear of God into the Republican establishment.
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By Eugene Robinson — Is the thought of him as president just vaguely scary? Or have we learned enough about the man that we should be hair-on-fire alarmed at the prospect, still pretty remote, that he could actually win?
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By Ellen Goodman — Scientists may have found a way to grow stem cells without using embryos. The president’s people are claiming this as a White House victory, causing a flood of gall on Pennsylvania Avenue.
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nytimes.com
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Conservative Christian blowhard Pat Robertson has endorsed Rudy Giuliani for president, possibly giving the candidate a boost with fundamentalist voters. Robertson came to the decision because, as only he could possibly put it: “The overriding issue before the American people is the defense of our population from the blood lust of Islamic terrorists.”
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The strangest thing about John McCain’s campaign for president is that it’s supposed to be dead, but it isn’t. This is a real nuisance for his competitors.
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One of the right wing’s most frequently invoked alternatives to abortion is adoption—but, as an Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times points out, the relationship between the two choices is not at all as direct or demonstrable as some politicians, such as Rudy Giuliani, have made it seem.
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By Ellen Goodman — Those who went to the Values Voter Summit left without a candidate to call their own. But the lack of a golden boy isn’t their only problem: There are signs of ideological rigor mortis among the old guard.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — You know the religious right is in trouble when some of its leaders threaten to bolt the Republican Party if it nominates a candidate who supports abortion rights. But the well-publicized warning directed against Rudy Giuliani earlier this month is decidedly not the most important sign that religious conservatives are facing the disintegration of their movement.
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By Eugene Robinson — I believe in affirmative action, but I have to acknowledge that there are arguments against it. One of the more cogent is the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Ron Paul may have soured his antiwar appeal among progressives with a speech Saturday at the Iowa straw poll. Paul referred to Roe v. Wade as “that horrible ruling,” called for the abolition of the Departments of Energy and Education and the IRS, and attacked welfare and immigrants. But the most bizarre moment came when he suggested airline passengers should be allowed to carry guns.
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The House has voted to lift a ban on aid, including contraception, to family planning clinics and organizations that perform abortions. The measure would still block the direct funding of abortions, but Republicans opposed to the bill say sending condoms to the clinics would give them more resources to perform abortions.
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By Ellen Goodman — With the stem cell debate, scientists once again have to negotiate the political gauntlet, where every breakthrough is met by an ill-informed stump speech.
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The Vatican is urging Catholics not to donate to Amnesty International because, it says, the group selectively promotes abortion. The human rights organization says the church has misrepresented its policy and, in the process, imperiled human rights. The World Health Organization estimates that 70,000 women die every year from unsafe abortions.
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The Onion pokes fun at the sometimes ridiculous abortion debate by floating an absurd proposal: fetal consent.
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By Joe Conason — The party Jerry Falwell worked so hard to promote to white evangelical America may soon tear itself apart over one candidate who dares to be Mormon and another who is dangerously sane on gays, guns and abortion.
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In an apparent rebuke to the Supreme Court’s recent abortion decision, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told Fox News that the law “shouldn’t change just because the faces on the court have changed.” O’Connor, who time and again swung the court in favor of a woman’s right to choose, also criticized lawmakers who try to put political pressure on the judicial process.
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The Rev. Jerry Falwell—televangelist, Moral Majority founder and head of Liberty University—was found unresponsive in his office on campus Tuesday morning and pronounced dead shortly thereafter of heart failure.
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AP Photo / Dan Lopez
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — After trying to have it all ways and looking silly in the process, Rudy Giuliani finally came out and restated his support for a woman’s right to choose. If he sticks with his decision, Giuliani will end the free ride his party has enjoyed on an issue that’s supposed to be about morality, but has more often been used cynically to harvest votes.
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By Eugene Robinson — The announced Republican candidates for president did nothing in their first debate to discourage the unannounced Republican candidates—Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich, maybe Chuck Hagel—from wading in. The water doesn’t look very deep.
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AP Photo / Evan Vucci
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By Chris Hedges — When it comes to abortion, the Christian right presents a false choice between self-condemnation and a life of struggle. Until the impoverished and imperiled, so frequently driven into the arms of demagogues, are truly cared for, the freedom of all women will be at risk.
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MSNBC sets the record straight on some of the errors and misrepresentations from the first Republican debate: More than a few thousand soldiers have been injured in Iraq, you can’t flip-flop on abortion like Bush 41 if Bush 41 never flip-flopped, and Bill Clinton didn’t gut the Army—he modernized it with bipartisan support.
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With President Bush slumping in the polls, it’s no wonder the Republican candidates chose to model Ronald Reagan at their first debate. The front-runners, especially, avoided mentioning Bush almost as urgently as the topic of abortion. Iran-Contra just pales in comparison to Niger-WMD-Katrina-U.S. Attorney-Missing E-mail-Secret Prison-Jeff Gannon-Domestic Spying-Halliburton-Abu Ghraib-Plame-Gate.
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By Ellen Goodman — Justice Kennedy’s opinion that a woman’s right to have an abortion should be limited because, in some cases, that decision is regretted harkens to a more primitive time and the Supreme Court’s sometimes ugly legacy on women’s rights.
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If a Mexican woman has an abortion, she could find herself in jail unless she had been raped, her life was at risk or there was a likelihood of severe birth defects. But that’s about to change in the capital city, home to one-fifth of Mexico’s population, where the legislature has voted by a wide margin to decriminalize abortion.
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By Marie Cocco — Make no mistake, the Supreme Court’s recent abortion ruling stands between a woman, her doctor and the choices that could save her life.
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By Ellen Goodman — The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected decades of precedent and the rights of women to satisfy an ideological agenda. Is it any wonder that those most eager to legislate the womb are the lawmakers and judges without one?
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In a ruling that supports President Bush’s abortion politics, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in favor of the ban on partial-birth abortions that Bush pushed and Congress approved in 2003. The Court’s move struck some pro-choice proponents as the (further) politicization of a woman’s personal, and medical, decision.
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AP Photo / John Raoux
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Dr. Joel Hunter, author of “Right Wing, Wrong Bird,” joins the podcast this week to explain why things didn’t work out with the Christian Coalition and why global warming and poverty bother him as much as gay marriage and abortion.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Evangelical Protestantism in the United States is going through a New Reformation that is disentangling a great religious movement from a partisan political machine. This historic change will require liberals and conservatives alike to abandon their sometimes narrow views of who evangelicals are.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign will put to the test the notion that a Republican candidate must be “pro-life” to attract a mainstream following.
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By Ellen Goodman — President Bush has done it again, appointing a doctor who opposes family planning to run the nation’s family planning program.
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nytimes.com
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A prominent Kansas abortion provider has been charged with 30 misdemeanor violations of state law by the outgoing state attorney general. Dr. George Tiller and his supporters believe that Attorney General Phill Kline (above), who lost the November election and has only three weeks left in office, issued the charges as a farewell act of malice.
Update: A judge dismissed all charges only hours after they were filed (h/t: Frank in comments).
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In a cynical and mean-spirited attempt to reach out to their vaunted “base,” lame-duck conservative House Republicans plan on ignoring their duties to pass spending bills that would benefit the poor, and instead will put their energies into passing a “fetal pain” abortion bill based on “science” rejected by the American Medical Association.
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The Florida pastor tapped to lead the Christian Coalition has resigned because he was not able to get the organization to focus on anything aside from abortion and gay marriage.
He wanted to focus on things like poverty and the environment, “issues that Jesus would want us to care about,” the pastor said.
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