Free for All Defending Liberty in America Today

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.

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