Kay Steiger

NO WAY OUT. A friend of mine was upset to learn that her son’s deployment in Iraq has been extended, and now he won’t be able to return in time to attend law school in the fall as he had hoped. Her son, who enlisted before September 11, is one of the many National Guardsmen […]

GAGGING. Campus Progress’s Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza did a fantastic job of writing about the Global Gag Rule, which never gets enough media attention. When we put abstinence-only provisions on our global aid, we put women around the world at severe risk. Americans vastly overestimate the amount that actually goes in to foreign aid; it’s a safe […]

BODY COUNT. I realized as I was reading Spencer‘s recordings of each soldier’s death release that the DOD has, perhaps intentionally or unintentionally, made the fatalities boring. The press releases are a dull monotone — a template into which soldiers’ names, hometowns, and circumstances of death are inserted (with a note that they died “supporting […]

IF ONLY I LIVED IN SWEDEN. The World Economic Forum recently released its Global Gender Gap Report for this year. The United States ranked 22 on the list. Although it (barely) ranked above countries like Tanzania, it fell short of South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Croatia. What really hurt women in the rankings were what […]

CANCEL THE APPOINTMENT. The Department of Health and Human Services is now defending Eric Keroack as an appointee to lead federal family planning groups based on Keroack’s private practice as an OB-GYN, during which he prescribed birth control to patients. Keroack has a record of working for Christian family planning centers that dissuade women from […]

TRIAL IN ERROR. Today, Human Rights Watch released a report on the legal and procedural failings of Saddam Hussein’s trial. It’s not a shocker — the trial didn’t follow standard rules: regular failure to disclose key evidence, including exculpatory evidence, to the defense in advance; � violations of the defendants� basic fair trial right to […]

UGLY FACE. Noy‘s review of Iraq in Fragments conveys the power of wartime images — images that usually aren’t pretty. This week, the Post offered an excellent snapshot of the lasting effects of the Vietnam War, depicting vivid images of children who suffer from the remnants of toxic Agent Orange. The images of deformed children […]

FIRST WOMEN. As an addendum to Addie‘s post, the first woman was elected as chief justice of the Supreme Court in Alabama. –Kay Steiger

CLOSE CALL. Fears about de facto voter suppression are well-founded. Today I arrived at my local polling station in Virginia and ran the risk of not being allowed to vote. Virginia requires one form of identification — of which the voter registration card mailed to you is acceptable. Voter registration card in hand, I was […]