Month: March 2006

Long-term contraceptives are getting easier to use and more women are using them; the morning-after pill is gaining in popularity (Wal-Mart just caved); earlier abortions are becoming more feasible. Technology is helping make abortion rarer and earlier. Money quote in an excellent new piece by Will Saletan:

"In 1973, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, fewer than 40 percent of abortions took place before the ninth week of gestation. By 2000, the latest year for which data have been analyzed, the percentage was nearly 60 and rising."

For those who believe that a zygote is a human person no different than an adult, none of this matters. For those who think women should have little or no legal autonomy over their own bodies during pregnancy, none of this matters. For the rest of us, it’s time to think seriously of a post-Roe world, and one in which far fewer and much earlier abortions become the norm.

Here’s another moderate Muslim manifesto, but, like Locke’s Letter on Toleration, it insists on tolerance not as a secular but as a religious value:

"While we understand the feelings of our co-religionists, we strongly urge them to refrain from rage and violence. A zeal for Allah is rightful only when it is expressed in an enlightened manner, since Allah himself has ordained a restrained response…. No state, community or individual has a right to impose Islam on others. People should accept and practice Islam not because they are forced to do so, but because they believe in its teachings."

Keep sending me moderate Muslim statements. They matter. And they are too often drowned out. (Hat tip: Blackwell.)

A reader writes:

That ‘give me Librium or give me meth,’ is a great line from the 60s days. (I first heard it in ’74), about the same time the schtick of, ‘My name is Timothy Leary.’ ‘MY name is Timothy Leary.’ ‘MBND hoinjlnme lsie mbmbjb.’"

Another comments:

"That ‘Give me librium’ line is older than you are. Or close. It was used in Mart Crowley’s play and film ‘The Boys in the Band,’ which played on Broadway in the sixties, and, like ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,’ was probably a Greenwich Village gag before Crowley picked it up.

Thanks for the context. It’s still a great line.

"My views of the Christian religion are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from the anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity, I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wanted anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other," – Thomas Jefferson, in correspondence with John Adams Benjamin Rush.

One aspect of today’s Republicanism: an intermittent contempt for rules, safeguards, procedures and means. Anything for political advantage. Exhibit A: the man who declared Terri Schiavo all but fine and dandy from an edited video. Bill Frist must be one of the most mediocre men ever to have held the position he does. But he just sank another notch.

"Give me Librium or give me meth," – just a little throw-away from Jack Shafer. But it’s the little things that count.

Poor Arthur Miller. This is the kind of review you can do without:

"It is the most terrible embarrassment. Who could possibly thought it a kindness to stage a play that can only do grievous damage to the dramatist‚Äôs posthumous reputation? … I doubt whether the Old Vic has seen quite such a fiasco since Peter O‚ÄôToole gave his notorious Macbeth at this address 25 years ago. This is a production for the kind of people who slow down and gawp when passing a car crash. Altman‚Äôs direction clunks and many of the cast seem downright apologetic about their lines ‚Äì that is on those occasions when they can remember them. I have rarely seen a professional production in which there was such a stiff awkwardness about so much of the acting, as if almost all those on stage fervently wished they were somewhere, anywhere, else."

Clive Davis chuckles.

They disown and denounce the violence.

Danish Liberal party spokesman, Jens Rohde, claimed last Thursday that one of the children of one of the Danish cartoonists had been threatened by twelve Muslim men at her school. I linked to the claim here. It appears that claim is unfounded and Rohde has retracted it. The issue was no more than schoolgirl shenanigans. The hyperbole was a dumb move on Rohde’s part. The fate of the cartoonists is scandalous enough without larding it up with inaccuracy and exaggeration.

They’re ticketing people for handing out anti-Bush t-shirts? In Katrina-land?