August 31 - September 7, 2000
![[Don't Quote Me]](/standard/image/headers/dont_quote_me_header.gif)
Flinging the p-word, continued
by Dan Kennedy
Schlussel's accusations have taken attention away from the more interesting question of what kind of columnists Young and Braceras will be.
Loth -- who says they were among a number of conservative writers who applied for the temporary opening created by Jacoby's suspension -- describes them both as voices who will provide an alternative on the Globe's liberal op-ed page through Election Day, after which Jacoby is eligible to return. Yet the evidence seems pretty clear that Young, who has a more extensive track record as a writer than Braceras, isn't all that conservative, especially when compared to the anti-choice, anti-gay-rights, pro-death-penalty Jacoby. Indeed, Detroit News op-ed-page editor Richard Burr says of Young, "I've always viewed her more as a toned-down libertarian than a conservative" -- which would be in keeping with her Cato Institute affiliation.
Young, 37, a Russian immigrant who lives in New Jersey (her column for the Globe this Monday was about a recent tour she took of the former Soviet bloc), is the author of two books: Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces To Achieve True Equality (1999) -- which, coincidentally, received a favorable review in the Wall Street Journal by Jennifer Braceras -- and Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (1989). In conversation as well as in her writing, Young comes across as thoughtful and conservative in a nondoctrinaire sort of way. She favors abortion rights, for instance, but opposes government funding and would support a ban on so-called partial-birth abortions only if there were exceptions for the life or physical health of the mother -- a position not much different from that of Bill Clinton. She favors the death penalty but, like conservative columnist George Will, she also favors a moratorium on executions because of the recent spate of cases in which the fairness of the condemned person's trial -- or even his actual guilt -- was in question. Young opposes gay marriage but says she also adamantly opposes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. She's a moderate on gun control, she favors school vouchers, and she opposes racial preferences.
"My own political views are really somewhat maverick," Young says, but adds that she intends to find topics on which she can challenge the Globe's liberal orthodoxy, explaining, "I don't think there's a whole lot of fun in preaching to the converted."
Braceras, 32, reached at her home in Concord, declined to comment for the record, but her nuanced views appear to be similar to Young's -- the main exception being that she has not expressed an opinion on abortion rights. The daughter of federal-appeals-court judge José Cabranes, Braceras is a graduate of UMass Amherst and Harvard Law School and a lawyer at the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray. She's currently on leave, pursuing a one-year fellowship at Harvard Law. She showed some political smarts in her tryout column for the Globe -- a piece in which she argued that Al Gore shouldn't take the Latino vote for granted -- and is expected to write about the presidential race from a pro-George W. Bush perspective.
If there is a difference between Young and Braceras, it may be that Braceras will turn out to be the more emphatic writer. A perusal of Young's columns for the Detroit News reveals a plethora of "on the one hand . . . on the other hand" locutions that may be intellectually defensible but that make for less-than-gripping reading. Braceras's legal work suggests someone with a sharper edge.
In 1999, for instance, Braceras -- in her capacity as a member of the Independent Women's Forum advisory board -- co-authored an amicus curiae brief on behalf of a Georgia school board fighting a sexual-harassment claim brought by the mother of a fifth-grade girl who had been tormented by a fellow student. The facts of the case were pretty compelling: the boy, accused of repeated sexual advances, was eventually convicted of sexual assault in juvenile court. Yet Braceras argued that to transform such harassment into a federal case "would, in effect, turn Title IX [the anti-discrimination law at issue] into a Federal Student Civility Code, force schools to enact large and unnecessary bureaucracies, and lead schools to institute extreme and inflexible measures that will infringe the liberties of all students." The US Supreme Court ended up siding with the mother and against the school board by a five-to-four margin.
More pungent was Braceras's response to the case of three Latinos who told the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination that a white supervisor at the Everett ironworks company where they worked had harassed them and made death threats because of their ethnic background. Braceras, who was retained to defend the company, told the Globe last year that the workers had invented the charges "to get the white boy."
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.dankennedy.net
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
