Wendy Kaminer

Who cares if American intelligence agents or private contractors tortured terrorism suspects? That is not a rhetorical question. A widely discussed, 2009 Pew Forum poll suggests that the public is evenly divided over the use of torture, with 49% agreeing that it is "often or sometimes justified" and 47% objecting that it is "rarely or never justified." These results may have been skewed by assumptions about torture's effectiveness in extracting information implicit…… More »

Just in time for Banned Books Week, the American Library Association's annual celebration of intellectual freedom, the Brooklyn Public Library has removed a 79 year old children's book from its shelves after a patron complained about its racial offensiveness. As the New York Times reported last week, "Tintin au Congo," has been locked up in a "vault-like room" of the library, where it is "available for viewing by appointment only." How does this infringe on the…… More »

Driving civil libertarians crazy is probably not a goal of this month's town hall protesters, but it may be one of their signal achievements. Having openly applauded, tacitly supported, or simply ignored the Bush/Cheney national security state and the unprecedented expansion of unaccountable executive power, the right wing now defends freedom against the spectre (and it is only a spectre) of universal health care? If the fury directed at "Obamacare" is partly…… More »

Repudiating its professed commitment to "the discovery and dissemination of light and truth," Yale University Press will publish Jytte Klausen's forthcoming account of the Muhammed cartoon controversy, The Cartoons That Shook the World, only after excising the cartoons and other images of Muhammed. ("Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book," the New York Times reports.) A justifiably outraged statement from the American Association of University Professors…… More »

Add the "r-word" to the lexicon of words that may only be referenced by their initials. As Bob Johnson, President and CEO of the Massachusetts Special Olympics, explained today in an NPR tribute to Eunice Shriver, "the r-word, as we put it, has really become a bit of a pejorative ... our athletes are offended by the term that begins with "r," which I'm not going to repeat. And suggested to us that a better term, a more acceptable term, would be that of…… More »

My post last week on the battle over releasing the names and addresses of people who signed a petition placing Washington state's domestic partnership law on the ballot generated some confusing responses that seem to me worth addressing. First, it's important to distinguish between the privacy interests of people who merely sign a petition to place a referendum on the ballot and people who financially support a referendum campaign. While there are sound arguments…… More »

If you sign a petition supporting a controversial ballot referendum should your name and address be publicized (posted online) in the interests of transparency? Do you have a right to privacy or relative anonymity when you engage in political advocacy that trumps the public right to know your identity? These difficult, increasingly familiar questions are at the heart of a lawsuit brought by Protect Marriage Washington, which has just won a temporary restraining…… More »

For free speech advocates, the arrest of Skip Gates was an easy case, involving no conflicts of rights or interests, as I suggested last week: his right to insult a cop was obvious, and his alleged insults posed no appreciable threat of violence or other lawlessness. It's the reaction to his arrest that's producing hard cases: In Boston a police officer has been suspended for allegedly writing a racist email that referred to Gates as a "banana eating jungle…… More »

Another day, another casualty in a conflict pitting equality and demographic diversity against free speech and diversity of opinion: "A Singapore law professor who was to teach a human rights course at New York University Law School this fall has withdrawn after students protested what they called her anti-gay views," the New York Times reported last week. The anger at Dr. Thio Li-ann's appointment as a visiting professor was understandable: According to a petition…… More »

You have a constitutional right to talk back to a police officer; and whether Skip Gate's account of his arrest or the police version is closer to the truth, it seems clear that Gate's speech rights were violated and his arrest was illegal. Less clear are the officer's motivations for the arrest. Naturally, the prevailing assumption and apparent, primary source of Gates' outrage is the belief that the officer, James M. Crowley, is a racist; but that ignores the…… More »

New York Congresswoman and possible Senate candidate Carolyn Maloney made news this week by uttering "the N-word." Too bad Lenny Bruce wasn't around to hear her. He used racial and ethnic slurs purposefully, repeatedly, to deprive them of their power. As free speech stalwart Nat Hentoff recalled in a 2000 interview, Bruce "used to come into the Vanguard Stage, and at this time, that was probably the most integrated audience of all kinds, sexual preference, color…… More »

Last week, the House of Representatives repealed a 10 year old provision of the D.C. appropriations bill that blocked implementation of a voter approved medical marijuana law for the District: joining the lobbying effort to repeal this amendment was its author, former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr. Like Arianna Huffington, Barr once palled around with Newt Gingrich; but after losing his seat in 2002, he became a friend of the ACLU and the Marijuana Policy Project,…… More »

Here's a quick response to comments on my post last week re Sarah Palin's stylistic debt to popular liberalism, or more precisely, the culture that popular liberalism helped shape. Mainly I want to respond to the suggestion that I have maligned liberalism by associating it with Palin's illogic, solipsism, sense of aggrievement and tendency to dismiss criticism as hate speech or libel. I probably should have explicitly acknowledged the obvious -- that,…… More »

Listening to Republican attacks on Sonia Sotomayor's alleged biases and the undue influence of her "personal experiences" on her judgment, you could be forgiven for inferring that, just like a woman, Sotomayor thinks with her heart, not with her head. You might also infer that she has a rather post-modern take on justice - one that denies both the possibility and the virtue of relatively objective decision-making, in the belief that facts are mere perceptions…… More »

In the wake of several serious, widely publicized accidents involving apparently confused or otherwise incompetent elderly drivers, the Massachusetts legislature is considering new safety regulations, including mandatory tests for drivers 85 years and older. Naturally this modest proposal is controversial, as anyone who has tried to persuade an elderly parent to stop driving can imagine. Call it TSS -- Ted Stevens Syndrome -- the resistance of the very…… More »

Last month, Christopher Handley, a collector of comic books, pled guilty to federal charges of importing and possessing obscene cartoon drawings of children; he faces a maximum prison sentence of 15 years, for a crime involving neither actual children nor actual child porn. Last week, a Tennessee prosecutor charged Michael Wayne Campbell with aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor, for photo shopping the faces of three girls onto the nude bodies of three…… More »

If Bernie Madoff's crimes were "extraordinarily evil," as his sentencing judge declared, than how to we describe the crimes of Joseph Stalin, or the warp speed massacres in late 20th century Rwanda? How do we distinguish linguistically between a massive Ponzi scheme and genocide? It's not an idle semantic question. Hyperbole, pop culture's lingua franca, doesn't simply exaggerate; it also diminishes. It threatens to obliterate essential moral and…… More »

"Schools given OK to discriminate against Christians," a press release from the Alliance Defense Fund declares, with some justice. The Supreme Court has declined to review the 9th circuit's decision in Truth v Kent, which I discussed here last week (along with a contrary ruling by the 7th circuit in CLS v Walker.) The decision in Truth, allowing public school administrators to withhold official recognition from student religious groups with religious membership…… More »

Back in 2003, while the government was busy enforcing its notoriously inaccurate no fly lists, ensnaring a range of travelers from Senator Kennedy to an activist nun, New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg was protesting the Justice Department's failure to use terrorist watch lists to screen prospective buyers of guns and explosives. "The possibility that a person on the State Department's watch list, such as Adnan G. El-Shukrijumah (suspected Al Qaeda Cell…… More »

Secularists scoff when conservative Christians complain that they're oppressed. So many demands for putative religious rights - like the "right" to conduct official school prayers - are really demands for religious power. But Christian groups sometimes have good reason to protest denials of their rights, especially in academia. On college and university campuses and in high schools, Christian student groups risk being denied official school…… More »