To help Greensburg, Kansas

By Diane Silver

[updated 5/7/07 5:33 p.m.]
I've been away from the computer and out of touch with the news. I only just learned about last night's enormous tornado in Greensburg in southern Kansas about 270 miles from me. My thoughts and prayers go out to the people in the town and to their families and friends.

The Wichita Eagle has information for those who would like to help and those who are looking for loved ones. Thoughts From Kansas has maps and a discussion of how tornados form.

Here is an updated link for those wishing to provide donations and other help to the good folks of Greensburg, Kansas.

Feminism, fear, science fiction, and related subjects

By Nancy Jane Moore

I'm now contributing to Ambling Along the Aqueduct, a literary blog that aims at expanding the conversations started by Aqueduct Press authors. The starting place for our conversations is feminist science fiction, but I think you'll find that we range all over the place. If you want to read my first post -- on the resurgence of feminist science fiction -- it's here.

I'm also continuing my discussion with Erin Solaro on Women, Feminism & Fear on her blog. You can find my latest post here.

Nigerian to install his own bishop in the U.S. & conservatives should worry

By Diane Silver

The Associated Press bills the entry of Archbishop Peter Akinola of the Anglican Church of Nigeria into the U.S. as a proof of a widening rift within the Episcopal Church. But does the tiny group of conservative Episcopal congregations really understand what they're doing by allying with Akiola?

It's one thing to oppose the expansion of gay rights. It's quite another thing to put yourself under the control of a church leader who wants to legally limit people's right to assemble or even to speak. These Nigerian proposals had the smell of Nazism, and Akiola was all for them.

See:

• Poisonous legislation targets gays in Nigeria
• Anglican Communion turns gays into "21st Century scapegoats"

SEX! Now that I've got your attention ...

By Nancy Jane Moore

It seems we have a new sex scandal brewing in official Washington, D.C. A woman has been charged with running a high-class call-girl operation (i.e., one aimed at upper class men). A deputy secretary of state has already resigned.

The so-called "Washington Madam" says it was just an escort service with massages. Her girls (who apparently included women in their 50s) didn't have sex with the clients. If you believe that, I'd like to offer you a great deal on that bridge in Brooklyn.

ABC News is all over this story. They're interviewing the madam on 20/20 tonight. Apparently they have her client list and plan to divulge some names -- though I don't know whether that's on 20/20 or on their regular news program. If you care, watch both.

Frankly, I don't care. Oh, it says something about the inherent sexism of our society if powerful men prefer the pretense that comes from hiring a woman -- whether as arm candy or for sex -- to the messy nature of actual relationships. And given that the current administration is given to religious self-righteousness about sex, it's amusing to catch some of their people with their pants down.

But I doubt there's really much going on here that affects the security of the country or even the running of the government. The real scandal of this administration isn't who's screwing who; it's the growing gap between rich and poor, the incompetent handling of key governmental responsibilities like disaster relief, the full-scale assault on our civil liberties, and -- most importantly -- an unnecessary and unsuccessful war that has sacrificed a significant percentage of our armed forces and only made our country more vulnerable.

The sex scandal isn't dominating the airwaves and front pages yet, but I fear that it will. Washington loves a sex scandal -- witness all the nonsense over Bill Clinton's games with his intern. Since this will be a Republican sex scandal, it allows the press to feel all self-righteous about covering it. After all, this scandal makes it tit for tat between the parties, and that's what passes for objectivity way too often.

I hope I'm wrong. The media have finally begun to take on the real failures of the Bush administration after years of inaction. Bill Moyers reported on the media's failures thoroughly in "Buying the War," the first broadcast of his new PBS program, Bill Moyers Journal. But the coverage of late has been significantly better. I'd hate to see good reporters get sidetracked by a garden-variety sex scandal.

Friday flights from Kansas to the Beltway

By Diane Silver

Almost every morning, I get up, get a cup of tea, go to the computer and surf the web for interesting reads. Today, I thought I share a few of my finds.

This morning The Washington Post muses (scroll down in the story) that the battle between the moderate and right wing of the Kansas GOP could undermine Republican efforts to defeat Nancy Boyda in the 2nd Congressional District.

Alternet takes on the topic of the progressive blogosphere and links to two interesting articles. The Washington Post profiles the youngish websters who are making waves in presidential campaigns. It's worth reading to get a sense of who's who.

Joan Walsh's thoughts on last night's GOP presidential debate are interesting. Her take is that the Democrats, who were not in attendance, were among the big winners.

Clergy Call for Justice -- Hate Crimes and Workplace Discrimination

By Pamela K. Taylor

Yesterday saw a victory for what should be no-brainer legislation; a bill that would extend federal hate crimes legislation to include the glbt community passed in the House. The Senate is expected to take the matter up soon, and I urge everyone to call their senators and ask her/him to support this bill.

I also encourage you to talk to both your senators and your representative about legislation that would make workplace discrimination against glbts expressly illegal. This legislation is expected by the end of the year, and is desperately needed as it is still legal in 36 states to fire someone simply because they are gay.

I had the honor to participate two weeks ago in a lobbying effort by religious leaders in support of the bill. Organized by the Human Rights Campaign, the Clergy Call for Justice brought over 225 religious leaders from every major faith tradition (and a few smaller ones) and every state in the union to support the right of members of the glbt community to live in safety, just like any other human being in this country.

The religious right have long tried to impose the notion that if you are a person of faith, you cannot be a liberal. They have tried to claim that the far right has the cornerstone on morality. That Tuesday morning, two weeks ago was a proud day for the religious left. A day where we stand up and said, "No! Our faith teaches us that every human is loved by God. Every human has the same inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That we should want for our brothers and sisters what we want for ourselves, and that is moral. That is just."

If you are a person of faith -- please, please call and let your elected officials know that you are a Christian or a Jew or whatever you are, and that your faith calls for equality for all
-------------

When not raising a boisterous family and blogging at In This Moment, Pamela participates in The Washington Post/Newsweek On Faith online discussion.

Kansas: Domestic partner registry panel answers questions, makes new stars

By Diane Silver

Take that "new stars" comment in the headline as sarcasm on my part. Somehow, my two-minute speech at last night's forum about Lawrence's proposed domestic partner registry ended up making me the lead of the Journal-World's story. At least, they got my name right...

Actually, I thought the account of the forum, although limited, was fairly accurate. A couple of key points: Commissioner Boog Highberger, who attended, said the issue could come up within a month of so. Meanwhile, prepare yourself for yet another public comment session in front of the City Commission.

Hate crimes bill passes House, Bush threatens veto, life remains the same

By Diane Silver

The U.S. House has passed the bill adding sexual orientation to existing federal hate crimes law. George Bush, of course, has already threatened to veto it.

Neither the House nor Senate seem to have the voters to override a veto, and so life remains the same.

Andrew Sullivan has the best take on why this is all very two-faced, and Sullivan doesn't even like hate crimes laws!

More on the US attorney scandal, Missouri & questions about Kansas

By Diane Silver

Corpus Juris over at Watching Those We Chose has a good overview today on what is looking more and more like a Republican attempt to undermine the November election in Missouri.

What happened? Think: Voting fraud hysteria that turned out to be a fraud itself and the U.S. attorney scandal.

Missouri may well have been targeted because of the importance of the Senate race in that half red, half blue state.

Attempts to drum up fear over voting fraud has already showed up in the Kansas Legislature. (scroll down. Also see here.) With the fortunes of Kansas Democrats on the rise these days, can the Sunflower State expect to see increasing efforts to muck with our elections?

Stay tuned...
--------------

In the interest of transparency, I also blog periodically at Watching Those We Chose.

Indiana University study shows Bill O'Reilly using propaganda techniques

By Diane Silver

Why am I not surprised? Indiana University today released a study showing that Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly out-propogandizes one of the top hate mongers of the 20th Century.

The study published in the spring issue of Journalism Studies notes, and the emphasis in bold is mine:

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Conway, Grabe and Grieves found that O'Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

• Name calling -- giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
• Glittering generalities -- the oppositie of name calling;
• Card stacking -- the selective use of facts and half-truths;
• Bandwagon -- appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
• Plain folks -- an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are "of the people";
• Transfer -- carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
• Testimonials -- involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.

Call Congress today about the proposed hate crimes law

By Diane Silver

The far right is ramping up it's attack on proposed legislation giving lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered citizens hate crime protection. That's the same protection that religious groups enjoy.

The attacks being mounted today are absurd and misrepresent the bill.

The U.S. House is supposed to vote on this tomorrow. Contact your representative today. We should particularly focus our efforts on Kansas Democrats Dennis Moore and Nancy Boyda.

Here is the Human Right Campaign's video, explaining the proposed bill and responding to the far right's attacks.

Kansas Legislature gets ready to adjourn with mixed results for lesbians & gays

By Diane Silver

[updated 3:21 p.m.]
The Legislature has adjourned.
------------------------------------------

The Kansas House and Senate are expected to finalize the budget this afternoon and then pack it in for the year. Except in the unlikely event of a special session, the part-time Legislature won't be back to take another vote until January 2008.

That's both good news and bad news for Kansas' lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered citizens. This year was a mixed bag when it came to fair laws.

We won a victory in gaining passage of a bill requiring school districts to institute an anti-bullying law.

“School should be safe for all students,” Thomas Witt, chair of the Kansas Equality Coalition, said in a statement when the bill passed.** “Too often bullying makes school a nightmare for lesbian and gay students. That’s why this bill is so important to us. This is a good first step toward ending the harassment faced today by far too many kids – both straight and gay.”

We were also able to keep a proposed ban on domestic partner registries from moving forward. The ban passed out of a House committee, but never won the support it needed for a vote by the full House, which is the more conservative of the Legislature's two chambers.

However, we failed once again to get a bill providing anti-discrimination protection out of a Senate committee. We got a hearing on the measure, which would have added sexual orientation to the state's anti-discrimination statutes. We just couldn't get the votes to move the bill to the Senate floor.

That's frustrating, but it's not surprising. Any civil rights law tends to take time.

I do have to admit that I want to scream periodically. I'm not certain what's so frightening or wrong, for that matter, about a law that says, for example, that people, whether they are straight or gay, can't be kept from making a living because of their sexual orientation. Why should I be denied a job because of who I am?

And so it goes...

The solution to these problems, of course, is to realize that passing legislation takes time, it takes lobbying and the political strength to put supportive lawmakers into office. That's why the Kansas Equality Coalition exists.
--------------
** In the interest of transparency, I work with the Equality Coalition, and I wrote that press release about the anti-bully bill.

Kansas: Domestic partner registry heads toward Lawrence City Commission agenda

By Diane Silver

Lawrence's proposed domestic partner registry is expected to come up sometime within the next month or so on the City Commission's agenda. If passed, it would make Lawrence the first city in the state with such a registry.

With the registry debate hearing up, it's time to contact the commissioners. Send your polite notes of support for the registry to all five commissioners. Contact information is here.

Many thanks to Josh at Thoughts From Kansas for his support for the registry and his well-reasoned post. Thanks to Red Letter Day and Mike for his continued work on the registry.

If you're interested in learning more about the registry, you can attend "So, What's a Domestic Partner Registry?" tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Plymouth Congregational Church, 925 Vermont St. in Lawrence.

Iraq & the logic that dare not speak its name

By Diane Silver

Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo writes today:

For all the endless debate about strategy and tactics, past and present about Iraq, it is astonishing how little the public debate in this country entertains the idea that the occupation itself is the cause of the unrest and violence in the country.

This isn't an original and unheard of concept. I know that. Indeed, it's common sense. But in our public debate it is what we might call the logic that dare not speak its name.

Marshall may well be right. His post is an interesting read.

In This Moment's Pamela K. Taylor made the same point in January in President Bush's Iraq Plan.

For Something Completely Different: Hat tip to a fellow writer

By Diane Silver

I'm pleased to see Peg over at Kansas Prairie posting an enthusiastic plug and some family stories about Pam Grout, a friend and member of my writers group. Peg knew Pam when she was a kid in Ellsworth.

By the way, if you want to get a sense of what life is really like on the Kansas prairie read Peg's delightful blog.

Taking a look at progressive family values

By Diane Silver

Progressives talked about family values last week at an American Constitution Society conference. And yes, progressives really do have family values. I've only skimmed this, and I'm not certain I agree with everything that was said, but it looks interesting.

If you look at the comments, you'll see a link to a video of other ACS events.

Kansas City ACORN voter registration indictments violated policy & more

By Diane Silver

Interesting timing. I just finished my U.S. attorney post and learned that Talking Point Memo's Muckraker.com had just posted about Bradley Schlozman's indictments of four ACORN workers.

The entire Muckraker post is worth reading, but here are the highlights.

• Schlozman's indictments broke with longstanding Justice Department policy to NOT bring election charges just before a vote because it "can intimidate minority voters, affect voter turnout and potentially even influence the result of the election."
• At the time, the indictments were trumpeted as the first of a national investigation of widespread fraud. No charges were ever filed anywhere else against ACORN workers.
• The fraud was likely perpetrated on ACORN and wasn't an effort BY ACORN to sway the election.
  
• One of the indictments targeted the wrong person, perhaps proof of how fast they were rushed to get them into court before the election.
• Only six fraudulent voters were ever registered. Only two people have pleaded guilty. (I originally reported on one.)
  

U.S. attorney scandal reaches into elections & law enforcement in Kansas & Missouri

By Diane Silver

I have to admit there are moments when the screaming fits and scandals of Washington, D.C., seem far removed from life out here on the prairie. This isn't one of those times.

The scandal in the U.S. Department of Justice has now reached into the U.S. attorney's office in Kansas City and possibly into the 2006 election in Missouri. What may be Republican efforts to target core constituencies of the Democratic Party may also have reached into the 2006 election in Kansas and into the 2007 Kansas legislative session.

If those of us out here in the great middle weren't concerned before, it's time to pay attention now.

This post is an attempt to put all of this into perspective and to pose the questions that remain unanswered.

Two issues are paramount.

• The quality of federal law enforcement in the Kansas City region
• The fairness of elections in Kansas and Missouri

When I covered northeastern Kansas and the Kansas Legislature for The Wichita Eagle, I quickly realized that although U.S. attorneys are political appointees, their jobs were and are not political. They are charged with enforcing federal law in their regions.

They take on cases involving drugs, civil rights, corruption and a multitude of other issues. Our safety and the health of our democracy depends on the professionalism and fairness of U.S. attorneys.

The first issue before us is this: Was a U.S. Attorney named Todd Graves forced out in Kansas City for no other reason than the fact that he was, well, fair and professional? Was he forced out because he would not bow to the demands of the Bush Administration that he use his office to unfairly target Democratic constituencies for voting fraud charges?

(The KC Star's Steve Kraske reviews Graves approach to his job.)

Graves resigned in March 2006, a few months after his name was put on a White House target list. Graves told The Kansas City Star that he is thankful that he left because the "current environment at the department can only be described as toxic." Graves also told the reporter that he didn't know his name was on what appears to be a hit list.

So perhaps Graves wasn't forced out. Why would he have quit if he didn't know he was on the hit list?

Look, though, at what happened when he left. Within 13 days of his departure, the White House appointed Brad Schlozman, a justice department official who had already filed a voter fraud case against Missouri.

Thirteen days? If the Department of Justice didn't know Graves was leaving, how did it find a replacement at what amounts to warp speed? But then again, Missouri was a battleground state in November. The victory of Claire McCaskill helped secure the Senate for Democrats. At the time Schlozman was sent to Kansas City, the Missouri Senate race was still neck and neck.

What did Schlozman do when he got to Missouri? A week before the election, he prosecuted ACORN workers for allegedly filing false voter registration forms. This is the only federal case filed against ACORN in the nation. ACORN works in urban areas with key Democratic constituencies.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Kansas pushed hard in the 2007 session for a bill requiring voter identification, a measure Democrats think is aimed at thinning out some of their core voters. Even its supporters say the bill is designed to fix a voting fraud problem that apparently doesn't exist in the Sunflower State.

Also just before the November election, the Wichita Eagle reported that Spanish-speaking voters were facing difficulties in registering to vote. The Kansas election system is run by its secretary of state, an office held by a Republican.

Unanswered Questions

What does it all mean? Do all these events go together, or is this a vast coincidence?

Honestly, I don't know.

The Bushie's choice for the Kansas City U.S. attorney office has a record of putting politics before professionalism. The case Schlozman filed against Missouri before coming to the Kansas City office was dismissed by a federal judge last month. The judge said she found no evidence of major voter fraud in the state.

The voting fraud case Schlozman filed just before the election eventually ended up with one ACORN worker pleading guilty in February to falsely registering one Kansas City woman. According to a Feb. 7, 2007, Kansas City Star story ACORN itself informed authorities in October 2006 of irregularities by three of its workers. (I'm not linking to the story because I found it in a library database open only to registered members of the library.)

Schlozman said at the time that the ACORN charges weren't political. ACORN's own involvement in the case seems to indicate that. However, the fact that the entire case ended in one person pleading guilty to doing something wrong one time indicates that the case may have been overblown. But then again, shouldn't even one crime be prosecuted?

Questions have also been raised regarding Graves.

I don't have good answers to the questions raised by all of this. However, I do know that antics of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and crew have destroyed the credibility of that department.

Never before have I questioned the integrity of a U.S. attorney. I do now. Never before have I questioned the integrity of elections out here on the prairie. Unfortunately, I do now.

Kansas lawmakers find a tiny bit of sanity in university repair plan

By Diane Silver

The good news is that the Legislature has finally decided to fund desperately needed repairs for the state's crumbling campuses. The even better news is that lawmakers have finally realized that Kansas' state universities are actually part of the state.

I'd call that a good first step for a state that has been abandoning its universities at an alarming rate.

Depending on who's talking, the package provides about $380 million or about $326 million (if I did the math right) over the next five years to the six universities, multiple community colleges and technical schools. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is expected to sign the bill.

A combination of grants, state-subsidized loans and donor incentives, the package doesn't come close to the $663 million the Board of Regents says it needs.

However, the plan does not include an earlier Republican proposal for folks in university towns to raise local taxes to pay for the repairs. First floated by Speaker Melvin Neufeld, R-Ingalls, that plan scared the heck out of me.

I'll admit that as a resident of the home of the University of Kansas, I would have paid higher taxes under the plan. That isn't the most frightening thing, though. I'd actually be glad to pay higher taxes to fix our universities if the taxes applied equally across the state.

What really spooked me was the idea that one of most powerful people in state government didn't understand that universities serve the entire state. Such foolishness shows an ignorance that is, well, mind boggling.

All I can say today is congratulations to Neufeld and the rest of the Legislature for figuring out that our state universities are actually assets to Kansas and not burdens.

More on the repair funding can be found in the Topeka Capital-Journal and Wichita Eagle.

Paternalism raises its ugly head: thoughts on the Supreme Court's anti-abortion decision

By Nancy Jane Moore

Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale -- the story of a bleak totalitarian future run by right wing religious fundamentalists in which women have virtually no rights -- first appeared about 20 years ago. It sent chills up my spine when I read it, but I didn't take it all that seriously as predictive fiction.

After all, even if we were moving into the so-called post-feminist era, U.S. women at least had secured many of the rights we were fighting for. Most importantly, we had gained control over reproduction -- an essential element in giving women the freedom to conduct their lives on their own terms.

I'm not just referring to Roe v. Wade and the legal right to abortion. There were also medical advances -- the significant decline in maternal mortality as well as the development of the pill and other more reliable forms of birth control. And before the 1973 Roe ruling, there was the 1965 Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, overturning a law that prohibited dispensing contraception, and the 1972 decision in Baird v. Eisenstadt, which threw out a Massachusetts law that prohibited giving contraceptives to the unmarried.

Many states have tried to chip away at the rights set out in Roe, but until April 18, no one had been successful. On that date, by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court disregarded precedent while pretending not to overturn any previous rulings and upheld a law prohibiting a specific abortion procedure despite the fact that it contained no exception for the health of the woman and did not turn on whether or not the fetus was viable outside the womb.

In other words, the court started us back down the road to those days when the future, potential life of a fetus was valued over the here and now life of a woman.

The law in question was called the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act by Congress, which tended under its then-Republican majority to apply Orwellian terms in naming laws. It actually refers to a procedure called Intact Dilation and Evacuation -- Intact D&E. It is certainly serious surgery, but according to lower court testimony, there are times when it is the safest procedure for a woman. Interestingly, two federal trial courts and two courts of appeal both found the law unconstitutional.

But five male lawyers on the Supreme Court decided that they and Congress had a better understanding of medical procedures than doctors. What's worse, they decided they had a better take on moral decisions than the women of this country. In the court's opinion, Justice Kennedy wrote:

Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child. The Act recognizes this reality as well. Whether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision. ... While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.

He goes on to suggest that doctors don't give women the whole truth, implying that the court has to protect women from their doctors.

I could deconstruct the decision, but fortunately the court's lone woman member, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (pictured above) has done it in detail in her thorough and blistering dissent. (Scroll down to page 49 of this pdf of the decision.)

Here are a few of Justice Ginsburg's observations:

Today’s decision is alarming. It refuses to take Casey and Stenberg seriously. It tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). It blurs the line, firmly drawn in Casey, between previability and postviability abortions. And, for the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman’s health.
...
Similarly, Congress found that "[t]here is no credible medical evidence that partial-birth abortions are safe or are safer than other abortion procedures." ... But the congressional record includes letters from numerous individual physicians stating that pregnant women’s health would be jeopardized under the Act, as well as statements from nine professional associations, including ACOG, the American Public Health Association, and the California Medical Association, attesting that intact D&E carries meaningful safety advantages over other methods.
...
In this insistence, the Court brushes under the rug the District Courts' well-supported findings that the physicians who testified that intact D&E is never necessary to preserve the health of a woman had slim authority for their opinions. They had no training for, or personal experience with, the intact D&E procedure, and many performed abortions only on rare occasions.
...
Ultimately, the Court admits that "moral concerns" are at work, concerns that could yield prohibitions on any abortion. ... Notably, the concerns expressed are untethered to any ground genuinely serving the Government’s interest in preserving life. By allowing such concerns to carry the day and case, overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our precedent.
...
Revealing in this regard, the Court invokes an antiabortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence: Women who have abortions come to regret their choices, and consequently suffer from "[s]evere depression and loss of esteem."
...
This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution -- ideas that have long since been discredited.
...
Though today’s majority may regard women’s feelings on the matter as "self-evident," ... this Court has repeatedly confirmed that "[t]he destiny of the woman must be shaped . . . on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society."
...
Instead of drawing the line at viability, the Court refers to Congress' purpose to differentiate "abortion and infanticide" based not on whether a fetus can survive outside the womb, but on where a fetus is anatomically located when a particular medical procedure is performed.
...
In sum, the notion that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act furthers any legitimate governmental interest is, quite simply, irrational. The Court's defense of the statute provides no saving explanation. In candor, the Act, and the Court’s defense of it, cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court -- and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women’s lives.

Balkinization also has some fine posts on the subject, including this one from one of the lawyers who argued against the law at the Supreme Court.

Fortunately, the religious right has had less success with its attacks on the First Amendment: The Handmaid's Tale is still in print. It's probably time to read it again.