These days I settle for small and subtle signs of progress. Take the story inthe February 15 Washington Post on the demise of a proposal in the Virginia legislature that would have required public-school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. State Senator Warren E. Barry–the outraged sponsor of the legislation, which was amended by […]
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
Bad Vibes in Alabama
A dvocates of censoring the Internet often argue that sexually explicit material today is “worse”–more graphic, more violent, more deviant, and more available–than it was 25 or 30 years ago. If only we could return to the innocent days of the 1950s and 1960s, when Playboy was considered risqué, they imply. Then we wouldn’t be […]
Posted inFeatures
Election Blues
A t first, voting was a pleasure. I got to vote for George McGovern. Since then, I’ve voted with genuine enthusiasm for several senators and congressmen (I don’t think I’ve ever had the chance to vote for a congresswoman), and a few statewide and local officials. Sometimes my candidates actually win. But today, while I’m […]
Posted inArticle
Trial Heat:
Wendy Kaminer Choice: Senator Bob Kerrey, Senator John Kerry, Senator Tom Daschle, or Senator John Edwards Present a group of lawyers with a political question and they will approach it strategically, focusing on finding the most feasible, acceptable answer, a professional facilitator once told me. Present a group of […]
Posted inFeatures
Pictures at an Execution
Timothy McVeigh is scheduled to be killed on May 16, on closed-circuit TV (for the benefit of his victims) and with luminaries like Bryant Gumbel presiding over what networks presume will be a national death watch. We won’t actually see McVeigh being poisoned, unless a pirated tape of the execution is disseminated. But we’re sure […]
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Criminally Unjust
It’s no coincidence that declining support for capital punishment has been accompanied by increased mistrust of law enforcement and discomfort with the war on drugs. A relative lull in violent crime during the 1990s contributed to a reconsideration of harsh police practices and prosecutorial tactics. But many people are willing to tolerate bad policing so […]
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Speech Isn’t Cheap
Despite the materialism that defines American culture and our reverence for financial success, a suspicion that money really is the root of all evil retains its appeal, especially among progressives. The association of wealth with corruption is particularly clear in debates about campaign finance reform. Reformers are self-proclaimed proponents of “clean elections”; their opponents are […]
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Reproductive Emergency
Life is one long emergency for most advocacy groups–whose members are apt tobe united by the belief that they’re besieged. To an outsider who lacks theirpolitical passions, however, they seem less besieged than overwrought. So casualsupporters of abortion rights may be unimpressed when the National Organizationfor Women (NOW) declares an official state of emergency in […]
Posted inFeatures
Abortion and Autonomy
Two important abortion cases will be decided by the Supreme Court this term. In Hill v. Colorado, the Court will rule on the constitutionality of statutory buffer or bubble zones–no-speech zones around abortion clinics and individuals entering clinics, in which even peaceful anti-abortion protests are prohibited. In Stenberg v. Carhart, it will determine the constitutionality […]
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Up from Reparations
Self-invention has always been an American ideal. We’re supposed to enjoy opportunities to make our own fortunes and control our own fates, in this world and the next. The Calvinism of seventeenthcentury colonials proved less quintessentially American than did the notion that you can choose to be born again in Christ. This is not a […]