Thank goodness for Wendy Kaminer. A consistent thinker in the midst of our culture of conflict between fabricated absolutist alternatives.

This book is a collection of short essays on the state of American liberties which previously appeared in the "The American Prospect" over the past two years. They have been updated with additional material to confront the issues in civil liberty which have appeared after 9/11.

Censorship, religious freedom, women's rights, and homeland security are just some of the topics covered in these bite-size essays. The author's pen spares no sacred cows of either the Right or the Left. The feminist movement's campaign against pornography is vilified with as much fervor as is the conservative effort to criminalize flag burning. Both efforts are attempts at limiting unpopular speech. Kaminer shows them both to be the silly shibboleths of sanctimonious speech suppressors.

I don't agree with the author's opinions on every issue covered in the book. Her take on the criminal justice system, immigration, and social equality are a bit too left of center for my tastes. However, I am proud of her right to her opinions and her courage to care about the rights of others with whom she disagrees. If only we could all care with this much eloquence.

Social conservatives, Stalinist feminists, and political correct Democrats (not to mention the Christian soldiers of the Bush administration) will find no comfort here. Wendy Kaminer is going to come down on the side of individual freedom against governmental power whatever the issue at hand.

In this collection of essays, mostly from her column in The American Prospect, Kaminer looks at issues ranging from anti-terrorist encroachments on civil liberties to anti-abortion protests, and invariably comes down on the side of individual liberty, even when she has to share close quarters with the likes of NAMBLA or "pro-fetal life" abortion clinic demonstrators. Her justification is a fine restatement of the civil libertarian position: "If the First Amendment only protected sensible speech, we'd inhabit a very quiet nation indeed." (p. 80)

Because she writes with passion and wit, and because now more than at any recent period in our nation's history, there is the danger of "An Imperial Presidency" (p. 13), we need her and others like her--whether we agree completely with them or not--as a counter to the anti-civil libertarian designs of Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and Bush. Kaminer represents in these pages the loyal opposition that largely went into hiding after September 11th.

Her main concern is for the health of the Bill of Rights, which suffered from cardiac arrest as the Twin Towers fell. Kaminer sees the resulting struggle between the Bush administration's desire to increase its power, and the individual's desire for privacy and due process, as a struggle between our collective need for security and our desire for freedom. When people are in fear they will let go of some of their liberties in order to feel secure. Consequently today is a time of particular danger because many Americans are understandably afraid.

Kaminer also addresses free speech on high school campuses, media censorship, abortion rights, victim's and defendant's rights, gay rights, Bush's faith-based program, and other cutting edge issues. Her style is readable, thoughtful and penetrating. She comes from a position of considerable authority as a social critic, a lawyer, and best-seller author (e.g., I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional). She knows the facts and she knows the law, but more than anything she knows how to express what she feels in an engaging manner. Consider how she makes this very delicate, but true, observation: "I don't imagine that he welcomed it, but September 11 was not a bad day politically for George Bush."

Or, note her observation that we don't need a first Amendment to protect popular, inoffensive speech. We need it to protect speech that a "Lynn Cheney or Joe Lieberman" might consider demeaning and degrading. She adds, "Censorship campaigns often begin with a drive to protect children (or women), but rarely end there." (p. 40) My only nitpick is that Kaminer didn't devote some space to the farcical, hypocritical, and disastrous "war on drugs" that is also eroding our liberties. Maybe that will be the subject of her next book.

Threats to civil liberties are greater than ever since September 11, 2001. Due process rights are the most obvious casualties, but privacy, church-state separation, and other civil rights are being eroded, particularly for groups outside the mainstream.

Wendy Kaminer's latest book, "Free For All: Defending Liberty in America Today", is therefore extremely timely and relevant. Kaminer is a lawyer, author, and social critic, whose previous books include "Sleeping With Extraterrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety", and "I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions". "Free For All" is a collection of her essays on civil liberties from the past several years, both before and after 9/11. Most of the pieces appeared in "The American Prospect", though a few are included from other publications such as "Free Inquiry" and "Dissent".

The topics she addresses include freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to privacy, defendant's rights, women's rights, and many related issues. A number of themes crop up repeatedly, including the following: When people favor giving up rights, they usually have in mind other people's rights. Civil libertarianism requires applying the Golden Rule to people you dislike. Civil liberties (freedom to X) often conflict with civil rights (freedom from X). Threats to civil liberties tend to come from those who want people to "be good," whether according to Christian morality on the right, or political correctness on the left. We should be especially wary of expansions of government power, especially prosecutorial power, which are likely to lead to erosion of individual freedom. And sadly, Americans tend to pay only lip service to liberties that are supposedly inalienable.

Kaminer is politically liberal, but she does not shy away from positions that make liberals queasy, because they are required by a strict civil libertarian interpretation of the Constitution. Some of her possibly controversial positions include:

* Free speech rights of abortion protesters must be protected. Furthermore, trying to shield abortion patients from protest undermines the feminist position that women can and should make autonomous decisions about abortion.

* Groups such as the Boy Scouts do have the right to discriminate against gays and atheists (and face the social consequences of doing so). Their rights to free speech and free association trump the desire to enforce equal treatment by non-government groups.

* Evangelism in schools (that is not endorsed by the school) should not be prohibited in the name of protecting children. "Sectarian religious groups that seek access to public schools are unlikely to compare themselves to pornographers, but they do rely on First Amendment rights." (p. 101) In both situations, it is the job of parents, not the state, to protect children.

These essays are necessarily snapshots in time. Most of the pre-9/11 pieces have been rewritten in the past tense, to reflect the changing face of civil liberties since that date. Two pre-9/11 essays are left in the present tense, to underscore the fact that civil libertarians were already alarmed well before the terrorist attacks. Many of the restrictions currently being used by the Bush/Ashcroft regime were enabled by the Counter-Terrorism Act of 1996. The attacks of 9/11 simply provided the first opportunity to apply them on a wide and well-publicized scale. The "USA PATRIOT" Act is merely icing on the cake.

"Free For All" is well worth reading if you interested in civil liberties in general. It provides a wide-ranging, thorough, and entertaining exploration of current issues. If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, then Wendy Kaminer is standing guard, and letting us know that all is not well.

If, like me, you've been simultaneously fascinated and appalled by the wares of the "self-help" or "psychology" sections of your local bookstore (or ubiquitous cyberbookstore), you'll enjoy seeing it dissected and skewered by Wendy Kaminer, the rare person to have applied her brain to this stuff (and someone who has even attended a variety of [fill in this blank] Anonymous meetings and other non-events).

Nowhere does Kaminer deny that actual people get seriously screwed up by abusive parents, booze, dope, etc. What dismays her are the lack of perspective and the rejection of any use of a critical intelligence. What worries her are the tendencies of the therapists, gurus and quacks to reinforce and play on the helplessness of their paying customers.

Kaminer is surprisingly generous to people whose activities she finds generally obnoxious, for example conceding that the most moronic TV shows occasionally illuminate real problems. This is an even-handed book from a writer who refreshingly says at the start:

"I have only opinions and ideas; so although I imagine myself engaging in a dialogue with my readers, I don't imagine that we constitute a fellowship, based on shared experiences. Nor do I pretend to love my readers, any more than they love me and countless other strangers."

It's a sad state of affairs when a writer feels compelled to say something this obvious.

Many people will be dismayed by Kaminer's principled refusal to provide platitudinous or trite answers to the problems (real or imagined) of the day. They'll be happier with such opuscules as *Seven Habits of Highly Effective People*. Of this book, Kaminer asks, "what are the seven habits?" and quotes Covey:

"In harmony with the natural laws of growth, they provide an incremental, sequential, highly integrated approach to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness.... They become the basis of the person's character, creating an empowering center of correct maps from which an individual can effectively solve problems, maximize opportunities, and continually learn and integrate other principles in an upward spiral of growth."

-- and Kaminer comments:

"I doubt that many readers know what this means (I don't), but they know how it makes them feel. Covey seduces them with all the right buzzwords: harmony, integrate, interpersonal, maximize, effectiveness, empowering (eventually he gets around to synergy). His peroration, the 'upward spiral of growth' (a phrase he repeats often), is uplifting, if you don't mind feeling like a corkscrew. Covey has a useful talent for saying nothing inspiringly; he should write commencement speeches."

This wasn't the only point where I laughed out loud. *I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional* is a worthy successor to Mark Twain's *Christian Science*.

A sizeable majority of the books published in the U.S.contribute nothing to our intellectual culture and don't deserve publication. Wendy Kaminer's important book is a notable exception. Kaminer takes on the American penchant for the (spiritual) quick fix and exposes the New Age movement for what it is: an intellectually empty commercial fad that has darker political implications. A must read.

Ms. Kaminer's superb trashing of the self-help movement is a much-needed book, even if readers have to suffer through the usual secular-humanist misreading of religion. The writer's primary crime in this department consists of the absurd comparison of 12-step meetings to revivalist meetings. Elsewhere, Kaminer simply reads too much into popular culture, searching for a significance that isn't there. "Maybe it's possible to use someone else's jargon to express your own thoughts. Maybe the jargon shapes the thought," she writes in regard to the common language of self-help meetings. Such mundane musings, fortunately, are redeemed by any number of devastating, on-target missiles aimed at the various idiocies, lies, psychobabble cliches, moral contradictions, and logical misfires of the monumentally moronic modern self-help movement.

By the way, I spotted this title in the self-help section of a large bookstore chain. Talk about irony.

Ms Kaminer becomes a bit strident and her humor a bit tart because as an intellectual, agnostic fellow at Radcliffe she has become deeply concerned about some of her fellow Americans' belief systems. While understandable that 95% of the populace believes in God, it is disconcerting to the rational skeptic that over 90% believe in angels; 66% endorse ESP; 50% see value in psychic healing; 40% endorse astrology; and 25% subscribe to beliefs in reincarnation and channeling. By the same token, in another survey, 71% of those interviewed felt that atheists should not be allowed use of an auditorium to give a speech against God or religion. Freedom of religion means simply that you must believe in religion or your views not only don't count, they should be suppressed.

Today if you believe in rational thinking you are viewed as someone who is not evolved. WK states that we have forsaken logic to view sincerity as adequate evidence to establish truth. Ubiquity of belief also seems sufficient to establish truth. She refers to one book, Ask Your Angels, that asserts that the frequent references to angels in our culture constitutes definite evidence of their existence. She cringes at the unquestioning acceptance given to authoritative statements of modern gurus. At one conference an angel expert was queried about the speed at which angels travel. The response was that angels travel at the speed of light. No one in the audience questioned his response. No one asked where he obtained that information (My own personal theory -if forced to come up with one- would be that angels would not be part of the space/time continuum, and thus their movements from point A to point B would be instantaneous).

The author feels that people gravitate to pop spirituality movements because they do not understand or trust science, and the gurus give them a way of ordering their lives that is not intellectually challenging. Strangely, however, while their followers steer clear of the complex laws of science, they buy books that lay out strictly ordered formulas for living happy lives. Ms Kaminer spends some time on junk science, criticizing those like Deepak Chopra who, in meaningless ways, appropriate the language of quantum physics.

A lot of her wrath issues forth in a chapter on the recovery movement. She details the damage done by the repressed memory therapists. During the heyday of dredging up false memories of abuse 70% of people surveyed by Redbook had actually come to believe in the widespread existence of satanic cults. Her other main essay deals with cyberspace and its strengths and weaknesses as a medium of exchange of ideas.

You may not agree with all that Ms Kaminer has to say, but she makes many points worthy of consideration. Yes, she is an agnostic, but if there is room in this country for the thoughts of Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and Marianne Williamson, surely we can examine the views of one Ivy League intellectual without succumbing to a fit of apoplexy.

Wendy Kaminer delivers a wonderfully sardonic attack on the masses of Americans who eagerly rush to embrace the latest form of irrationalism. She targets new age spirituality, public religious piety, junk science, and cyberculture fanatics. In many ways, the tone of this book suggests Wendy quietly observing people declaring their allegiances to the bizarre and unfounded, her arms folded and patiently waiting for any small scrap of credulity, and then rolling her eyes knowingly at the reader. That's the entertaining aspect of this book.

Unfortunately, this effort strikes me as another example of "preaching to the converted." Kaminer is actually tackling topics so diverse (under the umbrella of irrational thought) that the reader may find herself/himself wishing that she had undertaken several separate books, not one. She defends rational thought, but I think she needs to state more explicity what its advantages are, and why it is crucial to the human condition. Then too, she seems to overlook many of the ironic connections between the rational and the irrational. For instance, a drug addict may embrace an irrational belief in a "higher power" but is not the end result -- changing self-destructive behavior -- a very rational outcome? And then there is the issue of rationalism's shortfalls -- with all our rational and scientific progress, we find such malaises like alienation, loss of meaning, and decline in civility. Perhaps the irony is that irrational realities like myths and spiritual beliefs are somehow a core component of a balanced social world.

Okay, now back to the great things about Kaminer's book: She very effectively points out the absurdity and hypocrisy of many irrational belief systems. For instance, she appropriately condemns the "double standard" that exists when those in the traditional Juedeo-Christian camp poke fun at religions that make "irrational" claims, forgetting the irrational basis of their own beliefs. She bravely defends atheists and their right to reject belief in God, and questions whether an all-powerful God would even care about such things as whether or not he/she/it is believed and worshipped: "My favorite God is the one who looks down on us and says, 'I wish they'd stop worrying about whether or not I exist and start obeying my commandments (p.49).' She questions the folks who zealously advocate prayer in school, believing that religion necessarily nurtures virtue, and forgetting all the human terrors committed in the name of religious belief: "History testifies to a consistent human propensity to be good, but it provides little reason to believe that we are better when we consider ourselves to be allied with God (p.249)."

It is perplexing to see that some readers are so eager to bash Kaminer, because they feel their own religious or other "irrational" beliefs are being attacked. Real faith, I would think, would be strong enough to invite critical reflection and spririted (a pun, I guess) debate. Kaminer, I'm convinced,would welcome that. She is not anti-religion, nor anti-God, as many wrongly presume; she is just very pro- critical thinking. And now that I wind down here, heck, maybe I was a bit unfair at the start... there may be more enlightening stuff here than at first meets the eye... or funnybone. A good, challenging read!

Hate the title, loved the book. Every young person in the world should have this book placed in their hands as a coming of age gift, before the "world" of belief systems both secular and religious deadens their minds to free inquiry. As Wordsworth expressed, sometimes, "the world is too much with us". But let us hope that is a world of reason and not one of false imaginings that diminish us as human beings.

As a freethinker, I have attempted to test the process of reductionsim when it comes to the inherent benefits religious belief systems have provided to humanity since the first glimmerings of a need to understand the world around us, emerged in the human species. I have in my final analysis always found those belief sytems wanting and humanity none the better for their infliction upon us. Thank you Wendy for enunciating more eloquently and humorously these views better than anyone I can recall in recent memory. Even with her homeopathic confession...

If you're tired of being intellectually embarrassed by your faith in "whatever", here's the antidote for nagging religious constipation. If you're a recovering theist, and still have that urge for a little something, check out Deism, you'll be glad you did. But my god, (pun intended) do something about that title!