Politics of Identity
George W. Bush opposes affirmative action, at leastintheory; in practice he has an affirmative-action record that might have made BillClinton proud. According to Time magazine, Bush “has appointed more women to positions of power and influence than any president in history.” He even has a diversity policy that requires 30 percent of administration jobs to…
New Options, New Politics
In recent years, medical science has devised new options for very early termination of unwanted pregnancy, measures that did not exist when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. In addition to widening the range of choices for women, these advances–most notably the “morning after” contraceptive and the abortion pill mifepristone (RU-486)–are likely to alter…
The Sound of Silence
“I am here today in the United States to testify about the impact of the global gag rule,” declared Susana Galdos Silva, the co-founder of Movimiento Manuela Ramos, a women’s health organization in Peru that receives family-planning funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). This was last July. She was speaking, with full…
Making Choice Real
The 25th anniversary of Roe v. Wade in January of 1998 was a bittersweet celebration. While pro-choice organizations were publicly paying tribute to a quarter-century of legal abortion, they were privately worried that the alarming decline in the number of abortion providers would soon strip reproductive rights of their meaning. After all, what good is…
The Austerity Trap
“This is junior’s ‘read my lips,'” gloats former Clinton campaign adviser Paul Begala. Bush has broken his pledge not to dip into the Social Security surplus. Democrats are rolling out town meetings, television ads, and a press offensive to castigate Bush for “squandering the surplus” and to tell him to “keep his hands off…
Comment: Tax and Spend
President Bush insisted that we could afford botha tax cut and the shoring up of Social Security. He was dead wrong. So theDemocrats could hardly pick a better set of galvanizing issues. But as RobertBorosage points out in “The Austerity Trap” (see page 13), many Democrats aretaking surplus-worship to such an extreme that they are…
Hard Cell
President George W. Bush’s August 9, 2001, address to the nation on embryonic stem cells was an exercise in politico-moral bumper bowling. He acknowledged the hopes of desperate patients and their families, then bounced across the alley to embrace the moral arguments of right-to-life allies. It was fascinating to watch this slow, lurching journey down…
Borderline Sanity
United States policy toward Mexican immigration is suddenly on the table again. The Bush administration is talking about a new amnesty for undocumented Mexicans living in this country, as well as an expanded guest-worker program. One suspects that these initiatives have more to do with wooing Latino voters than with any recognition that the current…
A Proper Global Agenda
These days, any official organization with the word”International,” “World,” or “Global” in its title has to worry about where itmeets, check in with the riot police, and pray for rain. Washington is alreadygirding itself for the International Monetary Fund’s next gathering. Global protesters haven’t communicated clearly to the rest of the worldexactly what they’re against.…
Who Speaks for the Rich?
Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform By Bradley A. Smith. Princeton University Press, 286 pages, $26.95. Money Talks: Speech, Economic Power, and the Values of Democracy By Martin H. Redish. New York University Press, 319 pages, $35.00. It’s a shame that the debate over campaign financereform as played out in the mainstream media…
Auto Erratic
Two or three times a day, perfect strangers come up to me in the parking lot at the grocery store or the bank and ask about my hybrid car, a Toyota Prius. Stranger: How do you like your car? Me: I love it–it’s great. Stranger: Does it really get 50 mpg? Me: No, it’s doing…
The Partial-Birth Fraud
The article was buried far down in section a of The New York Times on Wednesday, February 26, 1997. But it hit supporters of abortion rights like a punch to the gut. Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted that he lied when he’d said that partial-birth abortions were rare…
Will Choice Be Aborted?
Americans are profoundly ambivalent about abortion. A majority of voters accept the formulation of the pro-choice movement that abortion should be legal, safe, and rare. Yet most Americans consider the procedure distasteful and will accept an array of restrictions on it, particularly if they see abortion as undertaken lightly or irresponsibly. The public’s very ambivalence…
Reproductive Roulette
In 1996 the newly Republican Congress approved nearly$440 million in public funds over five years to teach celibacy. The law comes upfor renewal next year. The local programs supported under this legislation teachthat abstinence is the only appropriate way to prevent pregnancy and sexuallytransmitted diseases (STDs). Indeed, the limited information aboutcontraceptives permitted in such classes…
The Sex-Ed Divide
If Maple Grove Senior High chose a prom queen, AshleyGort would have had a good shot at the crown. Ashley, a petite and popular juniorwith delicate features, wore deep-sea blue to the event, accessorizing her fullybeaded gown with a blue necklace like the one Kate Winslet wore in Titanic and matching blue rhinestones scattered over…
Drawing Connections
The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel So Alone By Laura Pappano. Rutgers University Press, 224 pages, $26.00 Better Together: Report of the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement inAmerica John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 108 pages More than 100 years ago, Friedrich Nietzscheobserved the gradual turning inward of the German population, away from…
Body Politics
President Bush insisted that we could afford botha tax cut and the shoring up of Social Security. He was dead wrong. So theDemocrats could hardly pick a better set of galvanizing issues. But as RobertBorosage points out in “The Austerity Trap” (see page 13), many Democrats aretaking surplus-worship to such an extreme that they are…
Translations: Stealing Tocqueville?
For years Harper and Row featured a blurb on thefront cover of George Lawrence’s 1966 translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’sclassic Democracy in America: “Tocqueville, whose brilliance has always been granted by academics, is now accessible to readers who don’t mind brilliance as long as it is readable.” Apparently, though, it’s not been obvious to everyone…
Without DeLay
Nothing divides the labor movement like a good cityelection. To watch the calculus of narrow self-interest play out in the scrambledunion endorsements of candidates in this month’s New York mayoral primary is tobe grateful that all politics isn’t literally local–that at least rudimentaryconcerns of ideology tend to loom larger in state and national contests. In…
