I know I cannot expect too much at the beginning of the semester, so it shouldn’t have taken me by surprise when a young woman in my class asked “Isn’t the Bill of Rights intended to protect our civil liberties until we infringe the rights of the majority?” Of course, she had it exactly backwards: the right of the majority to instruct government to act on its behalf is constrained by the Bill of Rights, which limits the right of those majorities to infringe individual freedom.
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Category Archives: Gay Rights
A Double-Edged Sword
Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”That pronouncement from Margaret Mead, widely quoted, is true. But its truth makes it a double-edged sword.
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Defining Families
In 1960, 44.2% of Americans lived in “Ozzie and Harriet” households, defined as a married couple living with their own children under eighteen. (Okay, so maybe mom was hitting the bottle in her suburban kitchen and dad was smacking the kids around when he came home from golfing with his buddies, but in Ozzie and Harriet time we didn’t ask such impertinent questions. They were married, the kids were theirs, God was pleased. End of story.)
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Justice
My religious tradition has a lot to say about justice. Beginning with the Talmudic injunction “Justice, Justice, thou shalt pursue,” the nature of our obligations to ourselves and others has been an abiding preoccupation of Jews..
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Poor Doctor Laura
My husband was doing the innately male “surfing” thing with the remote control when we happened upon one of the current crop of interchangeable, pompous pundits. He was barking questions at a panel that included a representative of the Human Rights Campaign fund and Michael Medved.
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