It struck me this week that we had the funerals of two extraordinary women, Coretta Scott King and Betty Friedan. Each had respectful obituaries in all the papers and on TV. The similarities end there. King’s funeral was a major media and political event. Friedan’s wasn’t. Ten thousand people attended King’s funeral, 300 attended Friedan’s. King’s body lay in state and 100,000 mourners filed by and thousands more lined the streets to the church as her casket passed by. There was no lying in state for Friedan, and no mourners lining the streets.
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Author: alexandersanger
Sam Alito’s Fictional Memoir
The last few weeks have been busy ones for fictionalized memoirs. Sam Alito’s performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a masterful display of myth-making that would have made James Frey and JT LeRoy, the newly crowned kings, or queens, of the fictionalized memoir, proud.
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How Are The Sexes Doing? The 2005 End of Year Report
This week the Congress finished work on the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), reauthorizing it for another five years with a healthy (20%) increase in funding as well as new programs to address and prevent the problems that domestic violence causes women and children (but not men!). Women’s groups hailed the passage of the law, and the sponsors.
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Alito and Marriage in America
Over the next months attention will be devoted to divining Judge Alito’s probable position on Roe v. Wade. Will he affirm it or overrule it or chip away at it? No matter what happens to his nomination, states will continue to line up to send the Supreme Court new laws restricting or criminalizing abortion in whole or in part in hopes that the Roberts Court will overturn Roe or at least weaken it more.
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HaitiThe Failed State in the Americas
The foreign policy rage of the past few years has been the failed state—Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Sudan, maybe even Iraq. But we in the Americas have one right in our backyard—Haiti. Continue reading
Responding to Cohen’s “Support Choice, Not Roe”
In response to Richard Cohen’s article, “Support Choice, Not Roe,” in October 20’s Washington Post
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Getting to a Nominee’s View of the Constitution
Harriet Miers has submitted her response to the questionnaire of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her response reveals her to be a competent, ambitious, corporate functionary. She rose through the ranks to lead her law firm and the Texas Bar while representing big corporations (that’s what big law firms do) and participating in every conceivable community/legal/charitable/do-good organization in sight. No wonder she didn’t have much of a personal life. She was out networking, connecting, schmoozing and getting ahead. Like Woody Allen, she showed the value of “showing up”. Even so, she ends up with a fraction of the net worth of John Roberts. Maybe she should have come to Washington sooner. John Roberts’s questionnaire revealed precious little in community involvement, in fact virtually none. He was a legal eagle with little time for the rest of life.
Article in the Oklahoma City Pioneer
See page six of the for “Abortion in the Spotlight” by Tina Morlock. Note: The newspaper is in PDF form — click here to download it.
Alexander Sanger 