Word: term
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Obscenity. This week the court will review a Dallas ordinance that imposes strict licensing and zoning requirements on sexually oriented businesses. Later this term an Ohio case will ask whether there is a First Amendment right to possess lewd photographs of children. In last term's dial-a-porn and flag- burning cases, the Justices maintained a tolerant free-speech stance; court watchers are waiting to see what change may occur...
This is precisely what seems to be happening. Abortion, which was thrown out of the judicial closet by last term's decision granting states more regulatory power, is fast blossoming into a major electoral issue in state and local races around the country. The matter is expected to play an important role in the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey this year. State legislatures, meanwhile, are being hit with a flood of pro-choice and pro-life proposals...
Civil rights groups have also been planning a political assault. The upshot of last term's rulings, says University of Miami law professor Mary Coombs, was that everyone "exists as a separate, individual, raceless, genderless person who is allowed to succeed or fail in terms designed for middle-class white men." Several U.S. Senators are drafting legislation to try to overturn some of those discrimination rulings...
...frailty, Mickey is in some ways fortunate -- he's in the process of being adopted. That makes him an exception among "special-needs" children, to use the innocuous term for kids who don't find permanent homes easily -- and most often don't find them at all. They include blacks and other minorities, the physically or mentally handicapped, and any group of siblings who must be adopted together. The term also applies to children who are simply too old for a market that favors infants. In the beauty contest that is adoption, it is never wise to turn five...
...even when adoptive parents come forward, the foster-care and adoptive system can keep the children tantalizingly out of reach. Designed to be a short-term arrangement ending in either adoption or the child's return to a competent parent, foster care has become a kind of indeterminate sentence. Only about half of all foster children return home; many of the rest are suspended in a legal limbo by parents who make little effort to regain their children but refuse to relinquish them fully. Although federal law mandates that a child whose mother shows no inclination to plan...