While Bristol Palin was enjoying another prime time moment making her ambassadorial debut as the Candie's Foundation's abstinence spokesperson—Meghan, you're right, what dizzy come-hither-hypocrisy is at work there!—you probably missed the Obama administration's low-key unveiling, in the budget, of its teenage pregnancy prevention approach. Mature discretion in tackling this hot-button issue: Now there's a style that seems to send the right sober signals. In a minimal, and carefully muted, paragraph in the budget blueprint, the administration emphasizes its support of "evidence-based" programs while clearly aiming not to get both sides all riled up right away. Thus you won't find such phrases as "comprehensive sex education" and "abstinence-only." Instead, you'll find references to "medically-accurate" information and to the "importance of abstinence."

But don't bet on the success of efforts to avoid the rhetoric of arousal. Already some reproductive health advocates are complaining that the formulations fudge too much. And it's not clear that abstinence proponents, whose funding is being cut, are going to buy the administration line, reported in the Wall Street Journal, that they could qualify for funds set aside in a pot for developing and testing "innovative strategies." They surely can't hope for a penny if Bristol is their idea of innovation.

Tags: abstinence education, Bristol Palin, Candie's, comprehensive sex education, Obama, teenage pregnancy

In the heady afterglow of Obama's inauguration, I accepted a bet from Ann Althouse. She bet that the president, in the end, would not fulfill his promise to close Guantanamo within a year, by next January. Testing my hope that Obama could be counted on, I bet that he'd come through. Now I'd say Ann is looking more prescient than I am.

How is Obama going to close Guantanamo in eight months when his lawyers just asked for a four-month extension (the second one) in the legal proceedings against the detainees? It's hard to square the promise with the developing facts. Nor is it a happy sign that the president is decorating Bush's military tribunals with more detainee rights rather than swearing them off in favor of federal court. As a New York Times editorial argued on Sunday, tribunals have a place, but it's for trying prisoners of war captured on the battlefield, not anyone we picked up after 9/11 who we don't know what to do with, which describes the detainees.

Congress refused to give Obama the $80 billion he asked for to relocate the Gitmo detainees because he has laid out no plan for which of them are going where. It's time to make that plan. Try as few of the detainees as possible in the Bush-Obama tribunals and get the rest either into the federal criminal system or on a plane home, like the Supreme Court litigant Lakhdar Boumediene, who flew to France last week. When you set your own deadline, it matters much more that you meet it. No one forced Obama to promise, by executive order, to close Guantanamo by next January. But he did, and he got a lot of mileage out of it. Don't blow past this one, Mr. President.

Tags: Ann Althouse, detainees, Guantanamo, Lakhdar Boumediene, Obama

Regarding President Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame, I pretty much agree with Hanna that he said all the right things about abortion. I especially related to his anecdote about the Christian doctor who wrote Obama to complain that his campaign Web site referred to all pro-lifers as right-wing idealogues. I’m about as pragmatic as you can get and still be a pro-lifer, so I’m right with the president on his call “to reduce the number of women seeking abortions … reduce unintended pregnancies” and make adoption easier.(Other pro-lifers are not swayed so easily, as 40 protesters were arrested trying to get onto Notre Dame’s campus Sunday.)

What I’m curious to see now is whether that talk turns out to be just that. Finding “common ground” means both sides have to give a little. Obama promised a “sensible conscience clause,” but he has long supported the Freedom of Choice Act, which would toss out any limitations on abortion up to the time of viability and could even “invalidate the freedom-of-conscience laws on the books in 46 states,” as Melinda Henneberger pointed out in Slate last fall. True, he did say recently that FOCA is not his “highest legislative priority.” But one of his first acts in office was to restore funding to overseas family-planning groups that provide abortions, and he’s working to reverse the conscience clause that President Bush pushed through before leaving office. If it’s really common ground he’s looking for, he could impress a lot of us on the right by vocally dropping his support for FOCA.

Tags: abortion, FOCA, Freedom of Choice Act, Notre Dame, Obama, obama notre dame speech

This week, Hanna, Meghan, and I inaugurated the Double X weekly podcast, called the "XX Gabfest" in tribute to some of our Slate offerings, the "Political Gabfest" and the "Culture Gabfest." We hashed out our thoughts about Obama's speech on abortion at Notre Dame, Nancy Pelosi's troubles, and this spring's slew of mommy and daddy books. Like everything else about our dear beta site, we're feeling our way, but you can check out our first effort, or subscribe to the podcast RSS feed, or sign up for it on iTunes. And tell us what you think.

Illustration by Deanna Staffo

Tags: abortion, Ayelet Waldman, Michael Lewis, Nancy Pelosi, Obama

Meghan, I agree that the issue isn't really one of reverse-discrimination, even if think Hanna is right that Sotomayor's views on affirmative action may sound dated to some contemporary ears. Rather, the issue, I think, is similar to one that arose during last year's Democratic presidential primary. Then the election was often portrayed in terms of identity politics, much as Sotomayor's nomination is now. It was black (Obama) v. woman (Hillary), with criticisms of either dismissed as so much racism or sexism. But to me, the far more distinguishing characteristic of both candidates, and of Sotomayor, has less to do with their sex or skin color than with their respective ages. Indeed, it's nearly impossible to understand how race or gender played out in their lives until you know when they were born.

Obama, crucially, is 14 years younger than Hillary. As a result, he wasn't part of the civil rights movement. He was a beneficiary of the civil rights movement—and there's a big difference. For all the genuine obstacles he overcame, he enjoyed a kind of ease and place in the world that for many black men (or women of any color) would have been unfathomable even 15 years earlier. By the time he reached adulthood, for example, it wasn't unusual for an accomplished man to marry a graduate of Princeton (which didn’t admit women until 1969). This, in turn, surely informed his and Michelle's relationship and marriage going forward.

By contrast, Hillary wasn’t the beneficiary of the women's rights movement. Being so much older, she was the women’s rights movement—and as a result, her life and career are necessarily messier and full of more contradictions than for younger women, for whom she helped blaze a trail. Much of what people criticized her for during the election—her stridency, her career and romantic choices, her voice and ever-changing hairstyles, even her privilege—always struck me as largely a function simply of her having come first.

Sotomayor is almost exactly seven years older than Obama and seven years younger than Hillary—a lifetime, in many ways, in both directions. She could attend Princeton (as Hillary could not), but was in only the fourth class to admit women—a far cry, presumably, from Michelle’s experience nearly a decade later, when women and minorities were no longer such a novelty. In sum, part of the diversity Sotomayor will bring to the court, if confirmed, is not merely her sex or ethnicity, but how both have interacted with the particular age in which she grew up—which is as different from mine as it is from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s and Sandra Day O’Connor’s. To that older generation of women, Sotomayor's outspokenness that Dahlia and Emily have alluded to is probably as unfamiliar as it is to women in their 20s. In the confirmation process, it will be interesting to learn how Sotomayor's perspective has adjusted, over the years, as the world has changed around her. But in asking that her present temper her past (rather than the other way around), I hope we won't deny, as I sometimes felt we did with Hillary, the age-related uniqueness of her story.

Tags: ageism, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Obama, Princeton, racism, sexism, Sonia Sotomayor

With all this talk of Sotomayor, we've neglected the other big story from yesterday: Proposition 8 was upheld in California. Maybe this makes me a cynic, or even close to a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if Obama deliberately announced her nomination yesterday so that Sotomayor would dominate the news cycle, and he wouldn't be forced to comment on the gay marriage ban.

Obama has been relatively mum about gay marriage recently. According to a New York Times article from earlier this month:

While Mr. Obama has said he is “open to the possibility” that his views on same-sex marriage are misguided, he has offered no signal that he intends to change his position ... Anything substantive he might say on same-sex marriage—after the Iowa ruling, the White House put out a statement saying the president “respects the decision”—would be endlessly parsed. If Mr. Obama were to embrace same-sex marriage, he would be seen as reversing a campaign position and alienating some moderate and religious voters he has courted.

What do you think, ladies? Was the announcement of Sotomayor timed so that Obama could ignore the California conundrum, or was it a coincidence? Tobias Wolff, a law professor and Obama's campaign advisor on gay rights, told the Times about Obama's gay-marriage stance: "I think [Obama] has a genuine sense ... that in order to move these issues forward you need broader buy-in than you are going to get if you poke a stick in too many people's eyes." But is he pulling the wool over those eyes instead?

Tags: Barack Obama, conspiracy theories, gay marriage, Obama, Prop 8, Sonia Sotomayor, Sotomayor

If the Daily Telegraph is right that the unreleased detainee-abuse photos include graphic images of rape, Obama must have been lying when he said the photos are “not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.” For all the pain of those earlier images, what they depicted were not generally criminal acts in the same way that rape is. They showed violation, humiliation, the horrific power differential between prisoners and their jailors—war crimes, to be sure—but they tended to document the effects and aftermath of violence more than its actual commission. Gourevitch, who writes that he has seen “many—if not most” of the unreleased photos, also gives no indication that they depict sex crimes.

I wouldn’t put it past Obama—or any president—to lie about the content of images that he thinks the public will never see. But what about these photos, which may well be released soon if judges continue to rule as they have recently in favor of the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request? Wouldn’t that be a big risk for the president to undertake? Is it possible that he hasn’t seen the photos of rape, but is referring only to the 40-some images that are part of this particular lawsuit? (Activists say there are as many as 2,000 others that we haven’t yet seen—maybe those are the ones depicting sexual violence.) And does Gourevitch think that if indeed these pictures document rape, that doesn’t even merit a mention in an article arguing against their release? Maybe this would make no difference to his larger point, but it makes a difference to me as a reader to at least acknowledge this content, which as Susannah points out, may complicate matters for some.

Yet even if these unreleased images do depict rape, I still agree with Major General Antonio Taguba's position in the Telegraph piece that they shouldn’t be published. If we have in written form the evidence needed to frame a criminal prosecution, why do we need, as a society, to look at photographs that would further violate the victims by their release? Article 13 of the Geneva Convention notes that prisoners of war must be protected not just against violence and intimidation, but “public curiosity.” When does our need to see the vivid imaes of abuse trump our effort to enforce the very codes whose violation the photos document? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag rightly notes that “most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest” and “all images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic.” We have already seen the pornography of this war. If we don’t know by now that detainee abuse in all its forms is real and appalling and must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, more pictures won’t convince us.

Tags: abu ghraib, Obama, politics, torture, torture photos

The murder of Dr. George Tiller in his church this Sunday sent a special chill down my spine; not the kind one gets when someone young, or important, or defenseless is gunned down in cold blood, but the kind one gets when domestic terror strikes. I don't mean to be too alarmist about the first killing of an abortion provider since 1998. Of course, any such assassination is illegal and wrong. But the lawlessness and vigilantism of this particular murder—or, as the anti-abortion zealout who allegedly shot him might put it, judgment—is very worrisome. Is total anarchy just around the corner?

Michelle Goldberg finds a reason to be worried. At The Daily Beast, she narrates how a strengthening pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-progress consensus (otherwise known as a Democratic president) has left anti-abortion and religious groups embittered at the loss of political power. Goldberg flags the infamous Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing fringe groups, and speaks with a hate crimes specialist who sees the far right becoming, as it had been under the last Democratic administration, "restless, apocalyptic, and ready for action."

Earlier this spring, conservatives went into paroxysms of outrage after a leaked report from the Department of Homeland Security warned of the possibility of right-wing violence. “Paralleling the current national climate, rightwing extremists during the 1990s exploited a variety of social issues and political themes to increase group visibility and recruit new members,” the report said. “Prominent among these themes were the militia movement’s opposition to gun control efforts, criticism of free trade agreements (particularly those with Mexico), and highlighting perceived government infringement on civil liberties as well as white supremacists’ longstanding exploitation of social issues such as abortion, inter-racial crimes, and same-sex marriage.”

Tiller's slaughter may thus be seen as the result of growing radicalism combined with growing political impotence. Goldberg continues:

That’s especially true with regard to abortion. “They see the mainstream anti-abortion leadership as being traitorous or emasculated at best,” Levin says of the radical anti-abortion movement. After all, Rick Warren gave the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. Notre Dame gave him an honorary degree and invited him to speak at commencement. A recent Gallup poll showed that, for the first time ever, more Americans identify as “pro-life” than “pro-choice,” but the anti-abortion movement still can’t find momentum. “They feel like their leadership is not carrying the ball on this and has basically become patsies or traitors,” says Levin.

Jonathan Chait thinks he's found "a unified theory of Obama"—which is that, while negotiating touchy issues both foreign and domestic, Obama likes to assume good faith, and thereby alienate individuals who are obviously pissing in the legislative or diplomatic soup. This may be true (Mark Schmitt has written persuasively on this subject as well); but warring over reproductive rights is something different entirely. If true villians exist, they create a moral space in which they must be stopped. And anti-abortion activists, including prominent hit men like Bill O'Reilly, had made Tiller, who performed therapeutic late term abortions and saved many women's lives, a villain.

We saw the seeds of this entropic, extralegal movement in the Republican men and women who yelled "terrorist!" at then-candidate Obama during campaign rallies. So while Obama has tried conciliation (the Notre Dame speech is a great example), the "common ground" he seeks may not exist—Tiller was the latest victim of this Manichean world view. What's worse, the search for common ground, however clever and symbol-laden, may actually encourage murder.

So, I'm sad to say, domestic terror is back.

UPDATE: Adam Serwer at TAPPED offers a working defintion of terrorism. Ann Friedman lays out Obama's policy options.

Tags: abortion, Bill O'Reilly, George Tiller, Notre Dame, Obama, Terrorism

Without question, this was the first serious foreign policy speech Obama has made as president. In giving it, he broke a number of taboos and slid over several potential minefields, reaffirming America's commitment to Israel as well as to Palestinian statehood in front of an Egyptian audience, and going out of his way to make statements about democracy, womens' rights, and religious freedom. If the speech were the dawn of a new age of public diplomacy then I'm all in favor.

Two things worried me about it, however. For my taste, there was too much "on the one hand, on the other hand" about the language, including (I'm agreeing with Meghan here) on women. He didn't have to start that particular riff by declaring that "there is debate about this issue," as if the repression of some very fundamental rights of half the human race were somehow "debatable." And he could have spared us the comment about the "struggle for womens' equality' in America," as if we were all in this together, us and the regimes who stone women for adultery. He did a similar thing on religious freedom, noting that there are some legal difficulties for Muslim charities in America, as if that problem was somehow comparable to the absolute ban on Christian practice in Saudi Arabia. I could go on. In fact, if you look carefully at the different sections of the speech you'll see that he did this kind of thing on every issue.

I assume this equivocation was a deliberate rhetorical tactic, designed to soften the message. And under normal circumstances, I'd be bothered. But in this case, it hardly matters, since almost no one in Cairo, or anyone almost anywhere in the world, is going to remember the details of what Obama said anyway. The importance of this speech was in the imagery, in the impression of a new opening, in the hint of new kinds of partnership to come, in the fact that it was made in downtown Cairo, at a real Egyptian university and not at some diplomatic conference center. Which gets me to the other thing that bothers me: To date, the Obama administration has shown a striking lack of interest in what we used to call "democracy promotion" such as courses for judges and journalists,or radio debates about human rights—mundane programs which we used to be rather good at designing and lately seem not to be. Other than a few references to student exchanges and the like, I didn't hear anything that made it sound as if the Obama administration has thought a lot about how to follow up on this speech, and that worries me. "Dialogue" is all very well, as long as the president doesn't believe that "dialogue," by itself, will fix anything at all (and sometimes I worry that he does). As an opening shot, this was a good one. What's next?

Tags: cairo, muslim women, Obama, obama's speech in cairo, women's rights

What is it with Obama and the Jews? Ever since he chose Rahm Emanuel, the child of an Israeli, as his chief of staff, conspiracy theories have raged about Obama's connection to the Jews. Jeffrey Goldberg writes about the number of conspiracy nuts who insist that Tim Geithner, and not just "jew Summers" and "jew Bernanke" is a Jew. (He is not.) Even Obama's own pastor, Jeremiah Wright, blamed "them Jews" for not letting "him talk to me." Surely James von Brunn waited 88 years to act on his inane, murderous thoughts because until now, the connection never seemed so real.

Tags: conspiracy theories, holocaust museum killer, james von brunn, Obama