A Plea for Filibuster

Last week I found a bumper sticker for my car. “The last time we mixed politics and religion,” it said, “people were burned at the stake.”

Yes, I bought it. No, I don’t think we’re near there — yet. But I am scared (a serious step up from worried) that President Bush and the religious right are at the cusp of controlling all three bodies of government. Judge Alito is a penultimate, if not the final plank in this ship of nightmares.

There are 11 states where women need to be rich, have friends, or be very brave in order to have even Roe-protected, first trimester abortions. As the father of a young teenager, I agonize now over whether I’d need (as opposed to want) to know about my daughter seeking an abortion. And what is at stake here is the freedom for me, as a parent, to decide that agony.

As a writer of fiction, of political commentary and on the Middle East, I look up articles and download information from the darker side of the Internet. I e-mail people that I don’t know that I’d want to meet in real life. These communications feed my art. I suspect that they are also grist for the NSA mill, and the basis for assumptions they might then make about people I know. And their friends. And others.
Cartoon by Richard Bartholomew

It’s because of my passion for freedom, for an unbiased judiciary, that FISA makes sense. And precisely for the same reason that Judge Alito’s penchant for fawning at the office of the President makes be believe that he is not the right choice to be one of the nine among equals, to sit at the country’s highest bench.

Let’s not kid ourselves; a liberal candidate is not in the cards. And a wise and balanced (or is it ‘fair and balanced’?) conservative is a better choice than a wild-eyed game changer.

I guess the core of my concern is that Samuel Alito is not his own man, does not represent the American citizen, and would not give the individual the rights they deserve especially in the face of the corporate Goliath.

Please help stop Judge Alito from assuming a throne from which he will help rule for the rest of his life, against the People’s common and secular interests.