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Fighting Words: Framing the Constitution

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Date and time
Thursday, October 5, 2006

Robin Morgan discusses her book, *Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right*, which overturns notions of the Founders as a bunch of dusty, pompous old men in powdered wigs, and resurrects them as the revolutionaries they were: a hodgepodge of freethinkers, deists, agnostics, Christians, atheists, Freemasons, and all of them radicals. Morgan argues that the religious right is gaining enormous power in the United States, thanks to a well-organized, media-savvy movement with powerful friends in high places. Many Americans, both observant and secular, are alarmed by this trend, especially by the religious right's attempts to erase the boundary between church and state and re-make the US into a Christian nation. But most Americans, Morgan contends, lack the tools for arguing with the religious right, especially when fundamentalist conservatives claim their tradition started with the Framers of The Constitution. *Fighting Words* is a a toolkit for arguing, especially for those of us who may not have read the founding documents of this nation since grade school. Morgan has assembled a lively, accessible, eye-opening primer and reference tool, a "verbal karate" guide, revealing what the Framers and many other leading Americans believed in their own words.

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An award-winning poet, novelist, political theorist, feminist activist, journalist, editor, and best-selling author, Robin Morgan has published more than 20 books, including the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful (Random House, 1970) and Sisterhood Is Global (Doubleday, l984; updated edition, The Feminist Press, 1996); with the recent Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for A New Millennium (Washington Square Press, Simon & Schuster, 2003). A founder/leader of contemporary US feminism, she has also been a leader in the international women's movement for 30 years. An invited speaker at every major university in North America, she has traveled--as organizer, lecturer, journalist--across Europe, to Australia, Brazil, the Caribbean, Central America, China, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Pacific Island nations, the Philippines, and South Africa; she has twice (1986 and 1989) spent months in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, West Bank, and Gaza, reporting on the conditions of women.
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