Megan McArdle on the Naomi Wolf comment
December 5th, 2007
A moment of thanks for the modern minutemen
Last week Naomi Wolf made a bit of noise when she wrote
Few young Americans understand that the Second Amendment keeps their homes safe from the kind of government intrusion that other citizens suffer around the world; few realize that “due process” means that they can’t be locked up in a dungeon by the state and left to languish indefinitely.
This confused a lot of folks and she responded now to clarify things. But her clarification is, to say the least, a bit confusing. McArdle writes:
I could have done better than this on a freshman composition, spotting Ms. Wolf three beers and an entire day wasted on Law & Order marathons. The most charitable interpretation was that Ms Wolf was a stealth second-amendment absolutist coming out of the closet to announce, in an ill-phrased and opaque way, that she thought that our third and fourth amendment rights were ultimately protected by the right of the public to keep and bear arms, and to rise up against a government that did not abide by the constitution. The second most charitable interpretation was that Ms. Wolf was a closet second-amendment supporter of a slightly hysterical bent, kept awake nights by the worry that without the second amendment, the United States government would long ago have instituted house-to-house searches to seize our guns. The third most charitable explanation, and the one that struck me as the most likely, is that Ms Wolf had made a typo. Since op-eds are generally given more leeway than straight articles, no one caught it.
My initial guess had been that Wolf meant “Fourth Amendment” instead of “Second Amendment”. That the Second Amendment helps enforce, well, just about every right was ironic but unintentional. But Wolf’s explanation of what she really meant is more than a bit weird. Go read.
