Recently Democrats in Pennsylvania in a primary election overwhelmingly nominated anti-choice Bob Casey as their candidate to unseat anti-choice Republican Senator Rick Santorum. Many pro-choice Pennsylvanians called Casey “the lesser of two evils”. On the same week, the Vatican invoked the “lesser of two evils” justification to explain its investigation into the permissibility of using condoms to halt the transmission of HIV.
Continue reading
Reproductive Rights
Letter to the Editor of Conscience
Rosalind P. Petchesky recently wrote a piece entitled On the Unstable Marriage of Reproductive and Sexual Rights for Conscience Magazine. Below is my response which Conscience printed in their current Summer 2006 issue.
Continue reading
South Dakota Mon Amour
I’ve never been to the Dakotas, either North or South. My grandmother’s, Margaret Sanger’s, uncle, William E. Purcell, moved to North Dakota from New Jersey, practiced law and eventually represented the state in the U.S. Senate from 1910 to 1911. He didn’t care much for my grandmother’s cause. Neither do his political descendants in South Dakota, which recently passed a law criminalizing abortion.
Continue reading
Two Funerals Play Dirge for Feminist Vote
Last week saw the funerals of two extraordinary women, Coretta Scott King and Betty Friedan.
Continue reading
Two Funerals
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.
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
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.
Alito
Alito
Salito
Scalito
Scalio
Scali
Scari
Scary
Alexander Sanger 