Why are white men so screwed up? If you can believe the polls, they
identify by a huge margin with George W. Bush as one of them. What gives
with these delusions of grandeur in which Joe Six-Pack puts himself in
the same boat with a pampered son of the super-rich? Did average white
males grow up in the lap of luxury and get to squander funds invested by
family friends in failing oil ventures? Can they fashion a well-greased
political career based solely on their fathers' names?

Obviously not, but what has traditionally bound white males to men
like Bush is that they, too, like to think of themselves as being
winners simply as a perk of birth. That way, if they also got poor
grades in college, they could still think of themselves as smart enough
to be president, when even the brightest women couldn't. Not that all
white males are actually winners, but they don't have to feel like
losers, since they can still feel superior to women and minorities.

But now, with equality growing between the sexes and even the
races, white males feel their privilege threatened by the prospect of an
even playing field. They blame this on the Democrats for pushing
affirmative action, which started to break up the old-boy network. So
they tend to vote for Republicans in large numbers, thinking that
progress can be held back and traditional values restored, meaning that
women will be put back in their place.

Such a reversal of white female fortunes would be a disaster for
white males, if they would only stop to think about it, but being white
males, they don't. The brute truth of the statistics on the boom in
American family prosperity is that it is based on females entering the
work force and obtaining better pay. Particularly white females, who
have been the main beneficiaries of efforts to make the job market a bit
less biased.

White men are inclined to think that a rise in women's pay means a
decline in males' standard of living. That's because white males have
not grasped the fact that women tend to intermarry--with men--meaning
that their incomes are shared with husbands and male offspring and even
fathers, whom they occasionally help support.

But beyond the economics of equal pay for equal work, there are
those other "women's issues," which the Democrats support and to which
men are indifferent, most significantly the issue of "choice." If males
would just ponder for a second how women get pregnant, they might not be
so quick to define abortion as a "women's issue."

Let's say that George W. gets to make good on his expressed desire
to pick U.S. Supreme Court justices in the mold of Anthony Scalia and
Clarence Thomas, who then overturn Roe vs. Wade. Where does that leave
men who have gotten women pregnant and decide they are not ready for
fatherhood? Well, in the bad old days, it left them accompanying fearful
women on a trip to Tijuana or some back-alley abortion mill in this
country, in the process not only betraying the health needs of a woman
they claimed to love but incurring legal risks as well.

It's perplexing how a host of other issues that would seem to
affect men equally with women got to be gender-defined in polls. Why are
women more pro-environment, pro-children and pro-health care, or more
concerned about saving Social Security? Is it that Darwinian nesting
thing? Women want the civilizing effect of government to protect the
vulnerable. Men see themselves as cowboys at war on the frontier in need
of personal arms and a strong cavalry at the fort to back them up.

Do men not know that if Social Security gets wrecked with this
privatization gamble Bush is hustling, they will be hurt? Even younger
men who might have to cut into their discretionary income to take care
of their aging parents. As for the environment, one has to assume men's
lungs are not gender-protected from the poisonous fumes that now make
Houston the pollution capital of the nation. Surely males can appreciate
the wonders of hunting and fishing in the pristine environment of Alaska
that is threatened by the Bush-Cheney team's promise to rape its energy
resources and turn it into another Texas.

If being pro-choice, pro-environment and in favor of the security
of older people makes Al Gore a wimp, shouldn't we men reexamine our
macho standards? Remember that limp cigarette in the mouth of the cowboy
in those anti-tobacco ads that link smoking with impotency? Macho men
are a dying breed.

Every five years the psychologist Judith Wallerstein updates her ongoing
study of 131 children whose parents were going through divorce in Marin
County, California, in 1971, and every five years her warnings about the
dire effects of divorce on children make the headlines, the covers and
the talk shows. Her new book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce,
ups the ante: She now believes that parents should grit their teeth and
stay together, so traumatized were her interviewees even into their 20s,
contending with drugs and drink, bad boy-friends, unsatisfactory jobs,
low self-esteem and lack of trust in relationships. Before you young
cynics out there say welcome to the club, remember: This is not a
moralistic sermon dreamed up by Dr. Laura, the Pope, your relatives or
even Judith Wallerstein. This is science.

But what if it isn't? Scholars have long been critical of Wallerstein's
methods: She had no control group--kids just like the ones in her study
but whose unhappily married parents stayed together. (In her new book
she has attempted to get around this flaw by interviewing a "comparison
sample" of people from intact families who went to high school with her
subjects, but the two groups are not carefully matched.) She generalizes
too quickly: Can sixty Marin County families really stand in for all
America? Are the seventies us? Doesn't it make a difference that fathers
today are more involved with their kids both before and after divorce,
that mothers are better educated and better able to support themselves,
that divorce is no longer a badge of immorality and failure? It never
occurs to Wallerstein, either, that the very process of being
interviewed and reinterviewed about the effects of parental divorce for
a quarter-century by a warm, empathetic and kindly professional would
encourage her subjects to see their lives through that lens. "Karen" may
really believe divorce explains why she spent her early 20s living with
a layabout--blaming your parents is never a hard sell in America--but
that doesn't mean it's true.

The media tend to treat such objections rather lightly. Wallerstein's
critics "don't want to hear the bad news," wrote Walter Kirn in
Time's recent cover story. The real bad news, though, is the way
Wallerstein has come to omit from her writings crucial information she
herself presented in her first book about her research, Surviving the
Breakup, published in 1980.

How did Wallerstein find her divorcing couples, and what sort of people
were they? In her new book, she writes that they were referred by their
lawyers "on the basis of their willingness to participate." Surviving
the Breakup gives quite a different picture: "The sixty families who
participated in this study came initially for a six-week divorce
counseling service. The service was conceptualized and advertised as a
preventive program and was offered free of charge to all families in the
midst of divorce. Parents learned of the service through attorneys,
school teachers, counselors, social agencies, ministers, friends, and
newspaper articles." In other words, Wallerstein was not just offering
people a chance to advance the cause of knowledge, she was offering free
therapy--something she today vehemently denies ("Naturally I wanted to
be sure that any problem we saw did not predate the divorce. Neither
they [the kids] nor their parents were ever my patients"). Obviously,
people who sign up for therapy, not to mention volunteering their kids
for continuing contact, have problems; by choosing only therapy-seekers,
Wallerstein essentially excluded divorcing couples who were coping well.

Today, Wallerstein provides no information about the psychological
well-being of the parents before divorce, but in her 1980 book, she is
very clear about how troubled they were. Only one-third displayed
"generally adequate psychological functioning." Fifty percent of the men
and almost as many women were "moderately troubled"--"chronically
depressed, sometimes suicidal individuals...with severe neurotic
difficulties or with handicaps in relating to another person, or those
with longstanding problems in controlling their rage or sexual
impulses." Fifteen percent of the men and 20 percent of the women "had
histories of mental illness, including paranoid thinking, bizarre
behavior, manic-depressive illnesses, and generally fragile or
unsuccessful attempts to cope with the demands of life, marriage, and
family." Some underwent "hospitalization for severe mental illness,
suicide attempts, severe psychosomatic illnesses, work histories ridden
with unsatisfactory performance, or arrests for assault." It's not for
me to say whether a sample in which two-thirds of the participants range
from chronically depressed to outright insane represents the general
public--but attributing all their children's struggles to divorce is
patently absurd.

The way Wallerstein describes her sample has changed also. In a table in
her 1980 book, she places 28 percent of the families in the two lowest
of five social-class rankings, as defined by the Hollingshead index, and
23 percent in the highest. In the new book, these figures are mentioned
in passing, but at the same time she calls all the families "middle
class"--including a famous wife-beating TV executive and his former
spouse, a wealthy travel agent who spent her life globe-trotting. All
are now "educated," as well, including the substantial percentage of
parents (24 percent of the mothers and 18 percent of the fathers at
initial contact in 1971) who hadn't been to college. Gone too are such
relevant facts from the earlier book as that one-third of the couples
had "rushed into a precipitous marriage because of an unplanned
pregnancy" and that half the wives, "because of their age and lack of
job experience, were viewed realistically as unemployable."

In short, what we have here are not generic white suburbanites who threw
away workable marriages in order to actualize their human potential in a
Marin County hot tub. We have sixty disastrous families, featuring crazy
parents, economic insecurity, trapped wives and, as Wallerstein does
discuss, lots of violence (one-quarter of the fathers beat their wives;
out of the 131 children, thirty-two had witnessed such attacks). How on
earth can she claim that divorce is what made her young people's lives
difficult? The wonder is that they are doing as well as they are.

It took twelve years for the FDA to approve mifepristone--also known as
RU-486--and most of that time had less to do with medicine than with the
politics of abortion. Still, the late-September decision was a
tremendous victory for American women. In approving RU-486, the FDA
showed that science and good sense can still carry the day, even in an
election year.

The long delay may even backfire against the drug's opponents. In 1988,
when mifepristone was legalized in France, it was a medical novelty as
well as a political flashpoint. Today, it's been accepted in thirteen
countries, including most of Western Europe; it's been taken by more
than a half-million women and studied, it sometimes seems, by almost as
many researchers. By the end of the approval process, the important
medical professional organizations--the AMA, the American Medical
Women's Association, the American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists--had given mifepristone their blessing; impressive
percentages of Ob-Gyns and family practitioners said they would consider
prescribing it; thousands of US women had taken it in clinical trials
and given it high marks, with 97 percent in one study saying they would
recommend it to a friend. Against this background of information and
experience, the antichoicers' attempt to raise fears about the drug's
safety sounds desperate and insincere.

In a normal country, RU-486 would simply be another abortion method, its
use a matter of personal preference (in France it's the choice of 20
percent of women who have abortions, while in Britain only 6 percent opt
for it). But in the United States, where abortion clinics are besieged
by fanatics and providers wear bulletproof vests, mifepristone's main
significance lies in its potential to widen access to abortion,
especially in those 86 percent of US counties that possess no abortion
clinic, by making it private--doctors unable or unwilling to perform
surgical abortions could prescribe it, and women could take it at home.

It is unlikely, however, that Mifeprex, as the drug will be known when
it comes on the market, will prove to be the magic bullet that ends the
war on abortion by depriving antichoice activists of identifiable
targets. The nation has been retreating from Roe v. Wade for a
quarter-century, and a good portion of the patchwork of state and local
regulations intended to discourage surgical abortion will apply to
Mifeprex as well: parental notification and consent laws (thirty-two
states), waiting periods (nineteen states), biased counseling and
cumbersome reporting and zoning requirements. States in which
antichoicers control the legislatures will surely rush to encumber
Mifeprex with hassles, and small-town and rural physicians in particular
may find it hard to prescribe Mifeprex without alerting antichoice
activists. Doctors are a cautious bunch, and the anticipated flood of
new providers may turn out to be a trickle, at least at first. Abortion
rights activists should also brace themselves for a backlash from their
hard-core foes: Just after the FDA's decision was announced, a Catholic
priest crashed his car into an Illinois abortion clinic and hacked at
the building with an ax.

But in the long run, Mifeprex will make abortion more acceptable. In
poll after poll Americans have said that when it comes to terminating a
pregnancy, the earlier the better. Mifeprex, which has been approved for
the first forty-nine days after a woman's last menstrual period--when
the embryo's size varies from a pencil point to a grain of rice--may
well prove not to arouse the same kinds of anxieties and moral qualms as
surgical abortion. Then, too, Americans are used to taking pills. That,
of course, is what the antichoicers are afraid of.

Let's give up some applause for Dick Cheney for affirming in deed, if not words, that homosexuality is perfectly consistent with traditional family values. The decision for a Republican candidate for the vice presidency to have an avowed homosexual at his side through virtually every hour of his campaign is a bit risky. It means taking on the forces of intolerance on the right wing of his party, a wing that at one time included Cheney and, more prominently, his wife.

However, now that Cheney has granted his lesbian daughter a major role in his campaign, is it not time for the candidate to distance himself from a Republican platform that would deny equal rights protection to all homosexuals? Evidently homosexuals can be reliable workers, and it should be illegal to discriminate against folks like Mary Cheney simply because of their sexual orientation.

"I think of her as sort of my aide-de-camp," candidate Cheney said in paying tribute to his daughter Mary in an interview last week with the New York Times: "She keeps all the paper flow coming to me; everything sort of funnels through her. More than that, she knows me. She has no qualms about telling me when she thinks I'm wrong, or when I need to do something. Mary will always come in and lay it right on me. My experience over the years is that's invaluable in a campaign. Everybody wants a good relationship with the candidate--not everybody will level with you. Mary levels with you."

One would accept such excellent skills to be valuable to any employer not biased by prejudice against gays. Yet anti-discriminatory laws are needed precisely because not all employers have had the opportunity to learn from their own offspring that homosexuals are indeed normal people.

Given that Mary Cheney is proving so valuable in the campaign, would Cheney, the person who'd be next in line to become commander in chief of the armed forces if George Bush wins, still stick to his oft-expressed view that homosexuals not be allowed to serve in the military? Would his daughter be more inclined than heterosexuals in the military to undermine morale by acting in indecorous ways?

The Republican platform declares that homosexuality is "incompatible" with military service and even stands "united" with the Boy Scouts in that organization's avowed policy of excluding gays. Does Dick Cheney believe that the Girl Scouts are amiss in not following the example of the Boy Scouts, and would he be in favor of excluding his own daughter from playing a role in that organization?

These questions are not intended to be cute or to pull the candidate's chain. They go directly to the hypocrisy in which we treat homosexuals as dangerous freaks unless we happen to be friends with, or related to, one.

Ignorance is the essential ingredient in hate. Dick Cheney probably didn't know his daughter was gay when he compiled one of the most viscously anti-gay voting records in Congress. He was one of only 13 representatives in 1988 who voted against funding for AIDS testing and research at a time when that was conveniently thought to be an exclusively gay disease, and one of only 29 that same year to vote against a Hate Crimes Statistics Act.

Perhaps he would vote differently now that his daughter, whose judgment he trusts in all important matters, has determined that she is indeed a homosexual. Should a woman of such sound thought and strong moral principles not be the best judge of her essential sexual nature? Or should we continue to be guided by the bigotry of legislators and religious proselytizers? It is still against the law in Texas to perform homosexual acts; does Mary Cheney have to retreat to Colorado to legally make love?

Yes, it would be best if such decisions could be left in the private realm, as the Cheneys now ask in refusing to discuss their daughter's sexuality. But it's too late for such niceties because the hate-mongers and their respectable allies in the Republican Party have for decades exploited homosexuality as a hot political issue. It is they who have thwarted every legislative effort to grant to homosexuals the same rights afforded all other citizens.

One can understand why Mary Cheney does not now want to become a poster woman for gay rights. But she is, by her father's witness, living proof that being gay is perfectly compatible with leading a moral, public-spirited and fully enriched family values life. She is a role model that even the political right might be forced to respect.

The Supreme Court opens its new term with a case that raises the stakes dramatically in the politics of fetal rights. At issue in Ferguson v. City of Charleston is whether a public hospital violates the Constitution when it tests pregnant women for drug use and turns over positive results to the police without so much as obtaining a search warrant.

Medical professionals and the general public agree that it is not desirable for pregnant women to use drugs. But this case raises a different question: Do women forfeit basic constitutional rights to equal treatment, due process and protection against unreasonable searches and seizures when they become pregnant?

South Carolina has been a leader in the movement, building ever since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, to establish rights for fetuses. No state has done more to target pregnant women who use drugs. Starting in 1989, the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) invited the police and local prosecutor to help implement a policy directed at prenatal-care patients. Women who came to MUSC, the only facility for indigent patients in Charleston, were threatened with arrest if they tested positive for drugs. Some were jailed for the duration of their pregnancies (surely not an optimal environment for pregnant women's health), and others were jailed after giving birth, still in their hospital gowns. All but one were black. The crimes they were charged with--drug possession, child neglect and distributing drugs to a minor--carried penalties of two to twenty years.

South Carolina Attorney General Charles Condon has said, "There is no constitutional right for a pregnant mother to use drugs." True enough. But the Constitution does guarantee rights of personal liberty and due process, which in turn require that all people, regardless of race or gender, be treated fairly and equally under the law. And the Charleston police department has never arrested a male hospital patient and charged him with possessing drugs on the basis of a positive urine test.

The real issue is how to respect pregnant women's constitutional rights while improving their (and their future children's) chances of a good outcome. The state maintains that the "stick" of criminal intervention is necessary to make its policy of "encouraging" pregnant women to get treatment effective. But at the time the policy took effect, there was not a single residential drug-abuse-treatment program for women in the entire state. MUSC itself would not admit pregnant women to its treatment center. And no outpatient program in Charleston provided childcare so that pregnant women with young children could keep their counseling appointments.

Finally, arresting women after they give birth does nothing to promote a healthy pregnancy or newborn. This practice also hinders the basic goals of keeping families together and promoting family stability through the provision of rehabilitative services instead of punishment.

Condon has made plain his desire to challenge the premise underlying abortion law: that a fetus is not a person in the constitutional sense and has no rights of its own. In 1998 he told the Washington Times that he would be "proud" and "very pleased" to defend his policies, "even in terms of reversing Roe v. Wade."

Faced with sanctions and the loss of federal dollars when the federal government investigated MUSC for ethics violations and discrimination against African-American women, the hospital suspended its policy in late 1994. But the program's architects got a boost when the State Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that a viable fetus is a person under the children's code, a ruling that the US Supreme Court allowed to stand. Condon then instructed district attorneys around the state to prosecute for "child abuse" women who take drugs during pregnancy.

Because most women in the United States get pregnant at least once in their lives, the practical and political implications of the Supreme Court's decision in Ferguson v. City of Charleston will be enormous. Fetal rights advocates recently scored a victory in Massachusetts when a judge entered an order of protection on behalf of a fetus and took a pregnant woman into state custody. The state alleges that the woman let her last baby die shortly after birth but has not charged her with any crime. If the Court upholds South Carolina's policy, it will encourage similar actions, effectively putting American women on notice that if they become pregnant, their lives are no longer their own.

A recent decision reminds us that true equality for gay people will arrive only when the Supreme Court is not controlled by Justices whose moral view of gay people is negative.

Christina Hoff Summers is hot with righteous indignation on boys' behalf.

Right now, there are three votes on the Court to get rid of Roe altogether and often four or five to impose costly, chilling and burdensome regulations on the exercise of that right by the patient and her doctor.

I still think third-party politics is mostly a crock, but then, so is two-party politics.

So, a bunch of really old guys were sitting around the Senate cloakroom shooting the breeze when one of them brought up the latest fountain-of-youth gimmick.