Summary

A lawyer, social critic, and columnist atThe American Prospect,Wendy Kaminer has said that she likes to think words have power but knows they don't cast spells. She argues with her readers and expects them to argue back. Her taste for liberty, her legal training, wit, and innate contrarianism help her elude the usual political labels and inform her writings on censorship, feminism, pop psychology, religion, criminal justice, and a range of rights and liberties at issue in the culture wars. In this new collection, Kaminer has her sights set on the fate of civil liberties in America. Opening with a powerful overview of liberty's tenuous hold on this "land of the free," Kaminer offers incisive, original investigations of political freedom in our frightened, post-September 11 world and reviews perennial threats to sexual and religious liberty, free speech, privacy, and the right to be free from unwarranted, unprincipled prosecutions.

Author Biography

Wendy Kaminer is the author of many books, including I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-help Fashions; A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight from Equality; It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture; True Love Waits; and most recently Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety. Her articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and Newsweek, and her commentaries have aired on National Public Radio.

Introduction
Author’s Note

1. Homeland Offense, Post-9/11
Patriotic Dissent
Safety and Freedom
Fear Itself
An Imperial Presidency
Ignorant Bliss

2. No Place to Hide
Someone to Watch over Me
Public Lives

3. Can We Talk?
Toxic Media
Toxic Media vs. Toxic Censorship
Screen Saviors
Courting Unsafe Speech
Virtual Offensiveness
Grand Old Rag
Freedom’s Edge
The Root of All Speech
The War on High Schools
Don’t Speak Its Name
Virtual Rape

4. Whose God Is It, Anyway
The Joy of Sects
Faith-Based Favoritism
Good News?
American Gothic
Sectual Discrimination
The AG Is Their Shepherd

5. Criminally Unjust
Ordinary Abuses
Victims vs. Suspects
Pictures at an Execution
Secrets and Lies

6. Women’s Rights
Equal Rights Postponement
Reproductive Emergency
Abortion and Autonomy

7. Women’s Wrongs
Feminists, Puritans, and Statists
Feminists, Racketeers, and the First Amendment
Sexual Congress
Sex and Sensibility
Reproductive Entitlement
Fathers in Court

8. Anti-individualism/Left
American Heritage
Politics of Identity
Gun Shy
Guilt of Association

9. Anti-individualism/Right
When Congress Plays Doctor
Law and Marriage
Gay Rites
Bad Vibes in Alabama

10. Homeland Offense, Pre-9/ll
Author’s Note
Taking Liberties
Games Prosecutors Play

Acknowledgments

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

Introduction Love of liberty is supposed to come naturally to Americans. It's supposed to be transmitted through our culture-like love of shopping; it's supposed to be instilled in us in childhood. When I was in grade school, we started our days by singing to our "sweet land of liberty" and pledging allegiance to the flag that stands for liberty, and justice, for all. We learned about the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Emancipation Proclamation. A child of the Cold War, I felt lucky to be an American, because, unlike "Red" Chinese or Soviet children, I was free. I'm still pleased to be an American and still feel relatively free, but I've discovered freedom's fragility; I've learned much of what I wasn't taught in grade school. While I was saluting liberty, African Americans were systematically denied the right to vote (or eat at "white" lunch counters); McCarthyism raged and the House Un-American Activities Committee was persecuting people who held unpopular political views or were associated with unpopular organizations. Our lessons in America's love of liberty were incomplete; we weren't told that Americans sometimes loathed liberty, or feared it, and fell prey to the temptations of political repression. Our lessons in liberty were also self-defeating: When you force children to salute the flag and recite the "Pledge of Allegiance" you don't teach them to exercise freedom so much as you accustom them to the imposition of political orthodoxies. America's disloyalty to liberty is disheartening but predictable. Liberty leashes power and, right and left, people who find themselves in possession of power tend to resist restraints upon its use. Cynics don't care if they abuse power to advance their own interests; people who take pride in their own virtue generally manage to convince themselves that they exercise power virtuously (even when they exercise it harshly) to serve the public good. Powerful people convinced of their own goodness are as dangerous to individual liberty as powerful people for whom goodness is irrelevant. So concern for liberty often has a disproportionate relationship to proximity to power. The more protected you feel by your own power or the power of your friends, the less threatened you imagine your own rights. But if you're concerned about the rights of other people, including those you disdain or whose views you abhor, you're apt to be wary of power, even when you or your friends possess it. You're likely to put less faith in power as a means of forging a just society and more faith in fairness. Of course, many people claim to value fairness over power, but in practice, few of us do. Few people are willing to extend the same rights to their enemies that they extend to their friends; indeed, you can usually rely on people across the political spectrum to use whatever power they possess to defeat their enemies, partly by denying them rights; most would probably consider it politically naive to do otherwise. Liberals lambaste civil libertarians when they defend the rights of Skinheads or Klansmen. (In 1978, the ACLU lost considerable support for defending the right of a neo-Nazi group to march in a community of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois.) Conservatives attack the civil libertarian defense of religious minorities who are expected to adopt the majority's religious practices in public schools. (Insisting on their right to pray, proponents of official school prayer also insist upon the power to impose their prayers on others.) Liberals and conservatives alike favor restricting the rights of criminal