Moving advice ( why we all MUST work for John Kerry this fall)

If you are female, or you're a heterosexual male who doesn't want anyone but yourself having any say over what your partner does with her body (and obviously I think even men shouldn't have any coercive power over reproductive choice), do yourself a favor and don't take a job in South Dakota-- where the state House just passed a slyly anti-abortion bill proclaiming that life begins at conception.

And while you're at it, please do everything you can to make sure the seemingly-inevitable John Kerry (who actually is the only candidate in our field to specifically pledge that upholdiing Roe v. Wade will be a pre-condition for his Supreme Court appointees) gets elected in November--, as this law seems specifically designed ("Supporters hope the measure will prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to finally decide when life begins") to be a vehicle for reconsidering Roe fairly soon.

To be perfectly blunt, if you're willing to write-in Dean, or even vote for Kerry but not put any real energy into his campaign, you are essentially saying that, like Ralph Nader (who constantly downplays the significance of court appointments and abortion rights as an important issue specifically), making some sort of quixotic political statement is more important to you than maintaining a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body. That might be fine by you, but as someone whose mother has told him tales of friends who had to seek back-alley abortions pre-Roe, I personally can't countenance that kind of a blase stance on this one. Just remember-- four more years of Bush means a lifetime appointment for Scalia-clones onto the Supreme Court.