Nothing makes 150 years fall away quite like seeing the blood of Abraham Lincoln. Visiting a friend in rural northeastern Pennsylvania a few years back, I was ushered to the local historical society in the town of Milford. A dark patch on the 36-star wool flag displayed there...

This piece was co-authored with William N. Eskridge, the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School.

The death of influential former judge Robert Bork marks the conclusion of a career in conservative advocacy, on and off the bench, and the closing of an era in American politics.

Call it the defeat of the bullying style in American politics. Election 2012 marked a turning point when the Republican Party strategy of stigmatizing various groups of voters as outsiders and rallying majority sentiment against them finally met its demise. Instead of winning through wedge politics, the GOP faced payback...

There are rare episodes when legislative debate in America is both personal and profoundly political at the same time. One happened last month in Michigan, where a maneuver smacking of chauvinism, repression, and hypocrisy showcased the right-wing war on women, and the stakes of the Nov. 6 election.

Insistence by...

Seniors, Disabled, Those Who Fought for Voting Rights Face New Hurdles to Voting

For more than two years, the far-right Tea Party and its cast of Republican admirers have wrapped themselves in the trappings of patriotism. Along with eagles and flags, conservatives have made liberal use of the image of...

Tight federal and state budgets at a time of heightened reliance by low- and middle-income families on available services would seem to make every taxpayer dollar for public education more precious these days. But this isn't the message received by many on the far right.

Religious...

A music teacher in rural Wisconsin, my cousin Becky can hardly be mistaken for a shirker or a cheat. Warm and outgoing, blessed by a smile as open as a cornfield on a spring morning, she exudes competence and care for her students, the very image of a trustworthy educator...

Any talk of redeeming acts in public life tends to focus on individuals. Character and career are the arcs of this familiar story line, punched up by celebrity and smudged, perhaps, by cynicism. So unaccustomed are reporters and players in national politics to an act of collective redemption that it...

It is often the least of these who have the most at stake in elections. Nov. 2, 2010, was a night of reckoning for advocates of working people, immigrants, and civil rights for gay people, who faced many hard-fought losses. As the altered landscape became clearer for Democrats, a few...

Not long ago, a passing familiarity with Bible verses, a flair for rhetoric, and hunger for a following could be enough to land someone in a small-town pulpit. Today, it seems, they are the right stuff for a top-tier Republican candidacy, perhaps even for President.

This defining downward, and...

Four years ago, Seattle designer Charlene Strong lost her wife of 10 years, Kate Fleming. A world-renowned narrator of audio books, Kate drowned in her basement recording studio in their home during a tragic flash flood.

Two injustices compounded the loss: that a spouse would be barred from seeing her...

Call it a case of Googling while gay. In late February, Khadija Tribble brought her appetite and her laptop into a Denny's restaurant in northeast Washington, D.C. As she had in past visits, she took a seat, placed an order, and, like other patrons, logged into the diner's Wi-Fi network....

It is easy to be cowed by mere numbers in the immigration debate. More than 12 million undocumented people reside in the United States. But whether you are a conservative who insists on small government, a progressive who prizes due process and nondiscrimination, or someone who steers by all these...

April is the cruelest month, wrote poet T.S. Eliot. Some students and their parents in Mississippi recently did their best to prove it. The dust-up highlights an alliance that has deepened in the past two decades while changing American politics.

Earlier this month in Itawamba County, a lesbian teen sought...

Today marks Emancipation Day in the District of Columbia. The holiday commemorates President Lincoln's signing of the law in 1862 that paid for the liberation of more than 3,000 slaves and ended human bondage in the capital. The event this year has added resonance.

Coming so quickly upon the end...

In the ten weeks since a Supreme Court majority opened the door further for corporate and union-led drives to sway elections, the most important critique of the Citizens United ruling is not President Obama's during the State of the Union. It's that of a former justice with a stellar Republican...

It was a telephone call so urgent that it echoes across borders. In early December, Honduran human rights activist Walter Trochéz was kidnapped while walking near his home in the capital, Tegucigalpa. Since the June 2009 coup in his country, Trochéz had documented a pattern of disappearances and killings of...

A wave of protests and litigation over California's vote to deny same-sex couples the freedom to marry have shifted public attention forward from the circumstances surrounding Prop 8's narrow passage on Nov. 4.

But the gay community and its friends would do well to dwell a moment on why the...