An undue burden ...

Just what is an undue burden? Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said today that requiring the National Security Agency to seek court approval before allowing them to secretly wire tap US citizens would present an undue burden.

Let's think about that for a moment. As the law stands right now the NSA can eavesdrop on the private conversations of US citizens for up to 3 days (72 hours) without seeking a warrant.

The President and his Attorney General don't think that's good enough. They want to be able to spy on US citizens secretly, and apparently indefinitely. Even though the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is said to almost never refuse a request -- which brings me back to the question of undue burden.

As a lifelong feminist, I think it's an undue burden for women to have to wait 24 hours before they can have an abortion. I think it's an undue burden for a young woman to need approval from her parents before she can seek an abortion. For women who must travel sometimes as much as 100 miles to get to a doctor who provides abortion, asking them to wait 24 hours after consulting with the doctor seems like an undue burden to me.

I have an idea! Why don't we let women and young girls go ahead an have an abortion, and then give them 72 hours to decide whether or not to let their boyfriend/ husband/ parent(s) know!

In Memoriam: Betty Friedan

Feminist Author Betty Friedan Dies at 85

By Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, her birthday. She was 85.

Friedan died at her home of congestive heart failure, according to a cousin, Emily Bazelon.

Friedan's assertion in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals, was highly unusual, if not revolutionary, just after the baby and suburban booms of the Eisenhower era.

The feminine mystique, she said, was a phony bill of goods society sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from "the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.

"A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty, `Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children," Friedan said.

In the racial, political and sexual conflicts of the 1960s and '70s, Friedan's was one of the most commanding voices and recognizable presences in the women's movement.

As a founder and first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, she staked out positions that seemed extreme at the time on such issues as abortion, sex-neutral help-wanted ads, equal pay, promotion opportunities and maternity leave. (full story)

Time to Play Hardball with Matthews

Matthews: Maybe liberals and gays burned down churches in the south

From Crooks and Liars
February 3, 2006

On his TV show tonight Chris Matthews suggested, without any proof at all, that maybe liberals or gays were responsible for a series of terrible church burnings last night in central Alabama. Here's what Matthews had to say about it tonight on Hardball (see the video here):

MATTHEWS: Is there anything in the papers down there where a Baptist church has taken a position on some social issue, gay marriage, something that's hot, where that would have aroused somebody?

ATF AGENT CAVANAUGH: I haven't seen that Chris, but it's very viable because we had an arson at a Unitarian church in rural Virginia, back in the summer, and it was right after the church at a national level had embraced gay members. There was an attack on this church in Staunton (?), Virginia, so things like that can happen.

MATTHEWS: That's why I'm thinking like that because the more liberal churches would drive some people on the right crazy and maybe a more liberal person, who's gay for example, would feel that they've been terrorized by the beliefs of another church too. We don't know.

No, we don't know, Chris, so why suddenly suggest that liberals might be the felons? (full story)

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Email Chris Matthers at Hardball -- hardball@msnbc.com -- to demand an apology!