As you know, I’m trying (not always successfully) to resist having the Weekly Sift turn into an all-presidential-politics blog. The presidential election is important and the race is addictive once you start paying attention to it. But figuring out who will (or even should) be the next president isn’t the be-all and end-all of what the Sift is for.
On the other hand, the presidential race does focus the public’s attention, and so occasionally provides a good hook for discussing something that has independent value. That’s what I’m doing with this week’s first featured post: “Crime and Punishment: Did Trump Spill the Beans on the Pro-Life Movement?”
As you probably already know, this week Donald Trump first said that after he outlaws abortion (as he wants to do for all but a few exceptional cases) women who get abortions will have to be punished. That caused an uproar not just from feminists, but from pro-lifers who usually deny that they want to punish women. And so something rare happened: Trump had to walk back one of his headline-making statements.
There’s a whole political angle on whether that was a good thing to do and how it will affect his chances in the Wisconsin Primary tomorrow and so on, but other people have that covered already. To me, the interesting question is: Did he have it right the first time? Whatever pro-lifers might say now, won’t the inevitable logic of their position lead to punishments for women who seek abortions? And if that’s true, why do they say otherwise? That post is just about done, and should be out shortly.
The other featured post will be “Where North Carolina’s New Law is Going”. North Carolina’s hastily passed LGBT-rights-restricting HB2 is close enough to laws the Supreme Court has already thrown out that the issues involved are pretty clear. There’s only one facet of the situation that needs new Supreme Court guidance, and it’s already obvious how all the justices will vote. Or at least that’s how it looks to me.
I’m still looking for a cartoon to illustrate that article, so let’s say it gets out by 10 EDT.
That doesn’t leave much space of the weekly summary. I’ll check in with the presidential race, get annoyed with the WaPo for yet another false alarm about Hillary’s emails, and maybe do a few other things. That still needs work, so let’s predict it for noon.
The Weekly Sift 