Wendy Kaminer

Thanks to the U.K., where incivility is apparently the new infidelity, for providing a little black comic relief from the dangerous idiocies of American politics: a bullying scandal has erupted over Prime Minister Gordon Brown's allegedly abusive behavior of his staff. (You can read all about it here, here, and here.) The director of an anti-bullying helpline has claimed that members of Brown's staff contacted the helpline with "issues and concerns" about Downing… More »

Increasingly ubiquitous surveillance is enabled not just by its invisibility but by the common refrain that people who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear. I doubt that sentiment will prevail in suburban Pennsylvania, where, according to a complaint recently filed in federal district court, high school officials spied on students and their families, in their homes, by remotely activating Webcams on laptops issued to over 2,000 students last year. (Even… More »

Civil libertarians have good reason to feel betrayed by President Obama's embrace of Bush-Cheney national security policies (including his invocation of a state secrets privilege and continuing reliance on military commissions), but we can't claim not to have been warned. In July 2008, candidate Obama reversed himself and voted for amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that expanded executive authority to spy on us, without warrants, and… More »

Politico reports that freshman Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown is "writing a book," and I suppose that's an accurate statement if "writing a book" means hiring someone to write a book for you. As Brown's spokeswoman says, he "will work with a collaborator," indicating that like most celebrity athletes, pop stars, and politicians, he will be the "author" of a book (a memoir, no less) that someone else has written. But the degradation of authorship, hardly a… More »

"I never tried to cut her throat," Scott Lee Cohen protested, defending himself against one of several allegations of abuse during his 15 minutes as Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor of Illinois. Apparently, not trying to slaughter your girlfriend is insufficient qualification for public office, even in Illinois, and even at a time when Sarah Palin is considered a serious presidential contender. Under fire from desperate Democrats, Cohen stepped down,… More »

When Republicans controlled Congress in the 1990s, liberals fought hard to block a series of constitutional amendments demanded by conservatives, including provisions allowing official school prayer and prohibiting flag burning that would have effectively repealed core First Amendment freedoms. These days, with Democrats at least nominally in control, some prominent liberals are on the other side, fighting to repeal the First Amendment--in the wake of the Citizens… More »

Like most political earthquakes, Martha Coakley's decisive loss to Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race was over-determined, by all the obvious factors--her own ineptitude, voter anger and anxiety, economic stress, Brown's expert ad campaign, the fickle, personality driven politics of independents, and the passage nearly 4 years ago of a health care mandate for Massachusetts. (The health care debate resonates differently here.) But one lesson of this loss… More »

In my lifetime (and I am now astonishingly old) I've witnessed dramatic declines in social and institutional biases against women, racial minorities, and gay people. When I applied to law school in 1971, sex discrimination in higher education was still legal and relatively respectable (Title IX, the federal equal education law, was enacted in '72), courts were still arguing about the application of landmark civil rights laws (see, Griggs v Duke Power Co.) and laws… More »

In 1992, the Kansas legislature amended the state's involuntary manslaughter law to include an "intentional killing (based upon) an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force.'' I doubt that the legislature intended this amendment to mitigate religiously motivated terrorism, but that's precisely what it will do if Scott Roeder, on trial for murdering Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, is allowed to present an… More »

Thick-skinned, Rudy Guiliani is not, but despite the mockery he's endured for "forgetting" 9/11, he could still enjoy the last laugh, along with fellow 9/11 deniers Mary Matalin and Dana Perino. "Bush kept us safe" has been a Republican talking point for over a year (Peggy Noonan used it in a December 2008 column,) and I bet it's taken root in the minds of many voters, along with the mistaken belief that Saddam Hussein orchestrated 9/11. In these mindlessly… More »

If you consider a stash of obscene videos scarier than a stash of firearms then this is the country for you. In America you have a constitutional right to own a gun, and you may traffic in firearms with legal impunity; but you risk being imprisoned for buying and selling arguably obscene pornography. And don't even think about child porn (I mean that literally): possessing obscene cartoon images of imaginary children is a federal offense; so is communicating your… More »

Jytte Klausen's excellent analysis of the Muhammad cartoon controversy, "The Cartoons that Shook the World," has once again fallen victim to myths about the cartoons -- and the dangers of publishing them -- that Klausen so incisively debunks. First her publisher, Yale University Press, refused to print the cartoons or any images of Muhammad. Then, in a startling act of cognitive dissonance, Index on Censorship declined to include the cartoons alongside an… More »

Bill Donohue, the reliably apoplectic president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, attributes freedom of speech to Christianity (never mind its history of burning heretics): "The only reason he has freedom of speech is because Christianity is the foundation of liberty in this country and western civilization," Donohue sputtered during a Fox News "debate" with a representative of the American Humanist Association, Jesse Galef. The subject of… More »

Workplace surveillance is pervasive, legal, and "devastating to employee privacy," the National Workrights Institute lamented in a 2006 report. "Virtually everything we do and say at work can be, and is, monitored by our employers ... There has been no attempt to balance employer demands with legitimate employee privacy concerns." Surveillance has only increased in the past few years, (and people may be increasingly inured to it, except perhaps in bathrooms or… More »

Reactions to former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger's report on ACORN have been predictably partisan. On the left, progressive leaders praise the report for dispelling right-wing myths about ACORN as a criminal enterprise, stressing that Harshbarger exonerated its staff of "intentional, illegal conduct" in the embarrassing, videotaped counseling sessions that prompted Congress to de-fund ACORN. On the right, Harshbarger's report is dismissed as a… More »

Purpose driven pastor Rick Warren repeatedly disassociates himself from the religious right: "never even been to one of their meetings - not one," he assured a group of journalists convened by the Pew Forum last month. Indeed, Warren disassociates himself from politics: in addition to harboring "no political aspirations," he has "no aspirations to even influence public policy." He's not interested in legislation, he stresses, referencing the health care omnibus… More »

White House gate-crashers and aspiring parvenus Michaele and Tareq Salahi can count among their questionable accomplishments the right to a footnote in assessments of Oprah Winfrey's legacy: reality TV is partly to blame for the Salahis, many agree, and Oprah is partly to blame for reality TV. She was not the only talk show host to feature ordinary people talking about themselves, airing private problems and conducting private relationships in public, but she… More »

Should civil libertarians celebrate the administration's decision to try five alleged 9/11 co-conspirators on criminal charges in federal court? Glenn Greenwald regretfully characterizes the decision as a scam, stressing that detainees "for whom conviction is less certain will be ...put in military commissions:" the administration's plan for a "multi-tiered justice system" is a set-up for "a rigged game of show trials." ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero,… More »

It's about time the medical profession began taking seriously the costs as well as the debatable benefits of annual mammograms for women over 40 (among other routine screening procedures). If the controversial new set of guidelines constitutes rationing, it may be one form of rationing that's overdue; the challenge is for women who consider "clean" mammograms clean bills of health to recognize that their value is limited, partly by the ability of doctors to… More »

By questioning the presumed virtues of independent voters as a group, I was not suggesting that individual voters have paramount civic obligations to identify with either major party. Independents share Democratic perspectives on some issues and Republican perspectives on others (according to Pew,) so I'm not denigrating them for eschewing party membership. There are also logistic reasons not to enroll in a party: I'm officially un-enrolled partly in the hope of… More »