The Death Penalty: An American History By Stuart Banner, Harvard University Press, 385 pages, $15.95 The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment By Franklin E. Zimring, Oxford University Press, 285 pages, $30.00 More than 3,700 people reside on death row, an average of 60 people are executed annually and, except for a brief period in the […]
Wendy Kaminer
Wendy Kaminer is a former senior correspondent for The American Prospect and a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly. She also serves on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union.
A lawyer, social critic, and former Guggenheim Fellow, she writes about law, liberty, feminism, religion, and popular culture. Her latest book is Free for All: Defending Liberty in America Today. Other books she has written include Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety; True Love Waits: Essays and Criticism; It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture; I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions; and A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight from Equality. Kaminer's articles and reviews have appeared in many other publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and Newsweek, and her commentaries have aired on National Public Radio.
Before embarking on her writing career, Kaminer practiced law as a staff attorney in the New York Legal Aid Society and the New York City Mayor's Office.
Wendy Kaminer retains copyrights to all her articles.
Posted inFeatures
On the Contrary
Sectarian conservatives have reason to resent the First Amendment: It prohibits government officials from posting the Ten Commandments in public places while it protects the Godless Americans March on Washington (scheduled for Nov. 2.) No wonder they think the road to hell is paved with the Bill of Rights. The Constitution surely paves the way […]
Posted inFeatures
On the Contrary:
It’s naive to expect partisan politicians to play fair, I know; still, I’m always surprised by the boldness of their hypocrisies. Take the initial reaction of Bush administration cheerleaders to demands for an independent investigation of intelligence failures before September 11. Critics of the intelligence community were playing the “blame game,” they intoned, practically in […]
Posted inFeatures
On the Contrary
It’s too bad that the word “Orwellian” is losing its power from overuse, because sometimes no other word will do. Sad to say, it’s often used appropriately. There’s no better word to describe U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s depiction of himself as a freedom fighter. “We’re not sacrificing civil liberties, we’re securing civil liberties,” he […]
Posted inFeatures
On the Contrary:
“When will it be OK to laugh again?” So the press and maybe the public wondered after last September 11. The moratorium on laughter, unofficially declared by David Letterman, was intended to signal respect for the dead and for the people who mourned them; but the desire for laughter persisted. Only people hungry for a […]
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On the Contrary
It’s a summer of stupid lawsuits. Food “addicts” are suing McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and KFC, claiming that the fast-food industry creates cravings for unhealthy food and fails to provide consumers with nutritional information. (They might as well sue their parents for failing to provide them with common sense.) A female passenger is suing Delta […]
Posted inFeatures
On the Contrary
Women are hardwired to experience and recall emotions more readily than men, according to a study announced last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as on CNN’s morning show. “The wiring of emotional experience and the coding of that experience into memory is much more tightly integrated in women […]
Posted inFeatures
On the Contrary:
Considering the generous tax exemptions long enjoyed by religious institutions, the routine invocation of God at official events or even the persistence of blue laws prohibiting the sale of liquor on Sundays, it’s clear that the “wall” between church and state has never been much more than a curtain. While separationists often succeed in closing […]
Posted inFeatures
On the Contrary:
Nearly 25 years ago, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court held that educational institutions may consider the race of their applicants in making admissions decisions. But the Court didn’t clarify the constitutional justification for racial preferences. Are they permissible only when offered as remedies for previous discrimination (to […]
Posted inFeatures
Ashcroft’s Lies
Conservatives are supposed to stand for personal accountability. But at the FBI, under the ultraconservative stewardship of a Republican president and attorney general, no bad deed goes unrewarded. Recent revelations that agents in Washington ignored clues of terrorist activities before September 11, and afterward covered up their incompetence, diminished what was left of the bureau’s […]