In the last "Contrarian" I mentioned lessons from my mother. This week, while it's tempting to gloat a bit about the Supreme Court's decision in Paula Jones's harassment case against the President, I'll instead share a clipping my father sent me from The San Francisco Chronicle. Endearingly tattered and marked up with yellow highlighter, the article summarized the Senate debate over the bill to ban all partial birth abortions.

No matter where you stand on the debate over partial birth abortion, the dialogue on the Senate's floor raises fascinating questions about how we legislate "women's issues" in particular, and all policies in general.

What had my father particularly up-in-arms was a comment by Senator Carol Mosely-Braun of Illinois. Joining in the efforts of the two women senators from California to derail the Republican bill, Mosely-Braun said: "I mean no disrespect, but (male senators) cannot know how it feels to be pregnant. . .They cannot know how it feels to carry a troubled pregnancy." Therefore, according to Ms. Mosely-Braun, male legislators have no business making policies about reproductive medicine.

The message of her comments is a warning to all male legislators: if you don't have mammary glands, back off, for you know not where you tread.

Mosely-Braun's comments should set off a major alarm. One wonders if all the female senators, and all female legislators for that matter, do in fact know how it feels to be pregnant. I would submit that, regardless, very few of them actually know how it feels to carry a seriously troubled pregnancy. According to her own logic, unless Mosely-Braun is one of the small minority of mothers who suffers from an egregiously difficult pregnancy, she should recuse herself from the issue.

The point is, if the standard for legislating or regulating national policy issues is to be direct personal experience, we are going to have a lot of problems. These are the dangers of identity politics, as writer and professor Shelby Steele has termed them.

For example, should only veterans deal with military affairs? Should farmers legislate subsidy levels? Should welfare bureaucrats and recipients draft welfare reform? Should only convicted criminals legislate issues of criminal justice? The possibilities are limitless and frightening.

The same sort of logic was applied in the debate over preference programs in California. Opponents of preference programs were dismissed as not understanding the experience of the less fortunate whom these programs were intended to benefit. Because I was neither poor nor black, opponents claimed I had no business working on civil rights; only my gender rescued me from total dismissal.

The case for ending preference programs based on race and sex is simple: it is wrong to discriminate against one person in favor of another -- no matter what your color or sex. This principle is the same reason so many women voted to support the California Civil Rights Initiative; though they may have reaped some benefits under the old system, they saw how their husbands, fathers and sons may have suffered.

The question of women deciding "women's issues," like the issue of partial birth abortion, leaves many male legislators cowering; to be against such a proposition is to be branded a chauvinist or a patriarchal pig by leading women's groups like NOW and the Feminist Majority. The politics of identity have scared our leaders into a defensive position -- instead of fighting for what's right, people like Newt Gingrich are still running scared.

What's at stake here is much more than the issue-of-the-moment. The Founders may not have envisioned partial birth abortion, but they certainly planned for a difference in opinions. Unfortunately, until our legislators have the backbone to expose the man behind the curtain in the Oz of identity politics, the splintering will continue unchecked.

-Katherine Post, Public Policy Fellow