Easy Targets

The Plight of Migrant Women

Kristin Heyer

When people like Rick Santorum think of undocumented immigrants, they often think of the men waiting for day labor outside a Home Depot—“illegals” who take advantage of American generosity while taking jobs from U.S. citizens. That’s not the whole picture.

Seeing Green

Is Mitt Romney right about envy?

Gordon Marino

Mitt Romney thinks grumbling about inequality is really about envy. Progressives say that vitriol about the wealth gap is not the voice of envy but instead expresses a concern about distributive justice. But Romney is right—justice and job prospects are not the only motivations behind the placards and chants of the occupy movements. Envy is also an engine, just as it was the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions.

Compromised

Obama owes more on religious freedom

E. J. Dionne Jr.

One of Barack Obama's great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health-care law.

Game Over?

The Editors

President Barack Obama wisely rejected a proposal to construct a seventeen-hundred-mile oil pipeline that would run from western Canada to the Gulf Coast. Does his decision signal that the federal government may finally be able to say no to Big Oil?