Nan Aron in The Huffington Post: Supreme Court to women: Father knows best

From AFJ President Nan Aron's latest column in The Huffington Post:

This is a very bad time for American women in the Supreme Court.

Three big cases were decided right at the end of its term that will profoundly affect women’s lives, subject them to conditions that are never applied to men, and damage their ability to control their own lives and health.

In McCullen v. Coakley, the Court in a “faux-nanimous” decision in which the four moderate-liberals clearly played defense, found that a 35-foot buffer zone around the entrance to abortion clinics in Massachusetts was a violation of the First Amendment. The Commonwealth had established the zones in reaction to the brutal murder of two people at a Boston clinic in 1994 and the endless harassment of women and their families attempting to enter reproductive health clinics.

But Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court, swept aside reality, superimposed his own view of what happens outside clinics, and somehow found that so-called “sidewalk counselors” need to be protected more than the people who work at or make use of the clinics.

Read the full column here