Wendy Kaminer

Should Guantanamo detainees facing the death penalty for their alleged roles in the 9/11 attack be allowed to plead guilty without ever going to trial? I suspect that a strong majority of Americans would say "yes," with little hesitation; an Administration proposal to allow pleas in these cases (reported by the New York Times) seems likely to encounter opposition primarily from human rights advocates, law professors not occupying the White House, and defense… More »

Sonia Sotomayor has received the unofficial endorsement of the ACLU, but not on the basis of her record on rights and liberties. Citing her personal story and Puerto Rican descent, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero celebrated Sotomayor's nomination in a blog on the ACLU website (and the Huffington Post.) "My heart swelled with such pride" when he heard of her nomination, Romero gushed, because he is also Puerto Rican and shares a "similar 'pedigree' of… More »

When I say that Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry demonizes abortion providers, I'm not speaking metaphorically. "George Tiller was a murderer and he was doing something that was literally demonic," Terry explained on NPR's Morning Edition. "So how can you not demonize something that is intrinsically evil." You can condemn Terry's remark as hate speech (and many will,) but I prefer not equating it with the absurdly broad assortment of criticisms… More »

Karl Rove should be forgiven for countering assumptions about Sonia Sotomayor's intelligence by claiming to know "lots of stupid people who went to Ivy League schools." When Rove entered college in the late 1960's, stupidity was not necessarily a bar to an Ivy League diploma. Admission was, in no small part, a function of social class, and schools maintained stringent exclusionary quotes for women and déclassé minorities, along with exceedingly generous… More »

Shortly after FBI memoranda detailing post 9/11 detainee abuses were released in December 2004, pursuant to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act case, an ACLU official observed that the FBI had welcomed the organization's demand for documents: they implicated the Defense Department and exculpated FBI agents, revealing their strong opposition to torture and including claims that, in 2003, DOD interrogators at Guantanamo had impersonated special agents of the FBI.… More »

Sonia Sotomayor is either an injudicious advocate of identity politics or candidly realistic about the possibility of entirely objective decision-making. "Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences ... our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging," Sotomayor observed in a now widely quoted 2002 speech at U.C. Berkeley law school. " ... I simply do not know exactly what that difference will… More »

All-female schools are "models of equivocation," the author, a Smith graduate, writes. They "reinforce regressive notions of sex difference" while at the same time helping women into the professions

The most effective backlash against feminism comes from within

A critique of a movement that is winning new recruits among politicians and on college campuses—a movement that appeals to the widespread loathing of pornography, that promotes a view of men as lubricious brutes, and that has united authoritarians on the left and the right in an assault on free speech