As a native Mississippian, I don't like to see my state end up in the national papers over some idiotic thing that a public official, paid with my tax dollars, has decided to do.

I saw it happen last year when Wesson officials risked a lawsuit because they didn't want to let Ceara Sturgis wear a tux in her yearbook picture. Great publicity for Copiah County superintendent Rickey Compton, who has now scored enough points with anti-gay activists to guarantee a bright political future, if he wants one. Not such a great idea from a civil liberties perspective, though--and he promoted himself at the expense of Sturgis, a brilliant young woman who didn't really plan on national celebrity status.

Now we're seeing it happen again as anti-gay administrators target 18-year-old Constance McMillen in Itawamba County. Superintendent Teresa McNeece has apparently decided that getting her own name in the paper as somebody who won't let students bring same-sex dates to the prom is well worth whatever a free speech lawsuit would cost. Who needs dropout prevention programs, anyway?

Here's a novel idea, folks: Do the jobs you're actually paid to do--which means supporting the kids in your district, not bullying them at state expense.

Related: How to Start a Gay/Straight Alliance at Your School

Abortion is legal in the United States in part because, as a 2007 World Health Organization study shows, abortion bans don't actually prevent abortions. Women can terminate their pregnancies whether it's legal or not; all the government can do is make the procedure more dangerous by banning medical supervision.

When countries go the extra mile and try to ban women from altering their own bodily functions to prevent a pregnancy, the results are Orwellian--as we see in much of Latin America, where forensic vagina specialists investigate hospitalized women for suspicious-looking miscarriages.

Or Utah or Kentucky, where proposed legislation would criminalize miscarriages in cases where prosecutors do not feel that survivors have done enough to protect their pregnancies. The situation in Utah is particularly dire: the bill has passed both chambers of the legislature, and currently awaits a signature or veto by the governor.

Women's rights groups, including National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), are working to fight bills that violate the civil liberties of pregnant women. But as long as conservative legislators see embryos and fetuses as citizens, and pregnant women as property of the state, pregnancy regulation is likely to remain an integral part of the pro-life movement.

Related: Falling Down Pregnant Can Get You Arrested in Iowa

The ACLU reports on John Ashcroft's recent statements in favor of civilian court trials for suspected terrorists. This is not the first time we've had evidence of Ashcroft's civil libertarian streak: in 2004, he stood up against the Bush warrantless surveillance program--and abruptly resigned shortly after it took effect.

History will not remember Ashcroft as a champion of civil liberties because of the administration he served in, but he illustrates the principle that a person of conviction, no matter how conservative he might appear to be, is always a potential ally on human rights issues.

Related: The Torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

There are different ways of looking at the Tea Party movement.

The media narrative I hear most often is that it's a movement full of independents who aren't beholden to the Republican Party, but emerged out of nowhere after Obama got elected. Our U.S. Conservative Politics Guide sums up this narrative pretty well:

In the past year, the Boston Tea Party has taken on a new meaning for conservatives in 2009. The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 ushered in a new European socialist model of governance in the US, creating a backlash among taxpayers on the right ...

People previously uninvolved in the political process have become active in it ...

The trouble is that there has been no dramatic shift in poll data to indicate that new voters and protestors are coming out of the woodwork. They seem to be rank-and-file conservatives upset about the election of Obama, just as the Patriot movement of the 1990s was made up of rank-and-file conservatives upset about the election of Clinton. Supporters of the opposition party always seem to grow in number after a new president takes office, because they tend to be louder and more passionate dissenters, and they always seem to be energized by the shift in power, which is why the party of a new president nearly always loses seats in the subsequent congressional midterm.

But there's nothing in the Tea Party movement to indicate that it isn't made up of disgruntled Bush supporters who don't like having a president who doesn't share his priorities, and Exhibit A in favor of my theory is Sarah Palin's keynote speech at the February 6th Inaugural Tea Party Convention. I parsed it carefully for references to civil liberties; her most striking statement on the matter, which generated applause, was her argument that acknowledging the civil liberties of a terror suspect after arrest is just as "disturbing" as allowing a terror suspect to board a plane with a bomb:

[Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab] passed through airport security with a bomb, and he boarded a flight hell-bent on killing innocent passengers. This terrorist trained in Yemen with Al Qaida, his American visa was not revoked until after he tried to kill hundreds of passengers. On Christmas Day, the only thing that stopped this terrorist was blind luck and brave passengers. Really, it was a Christmas miracle, and that is not the way that the system is supposed to work.

What followed was equally disturbing. After he was captured, he was questioned for only 50 minutes. We had a choice in how to do this. The choice was, only question him for 50 minutes and then read his Miranda Rights. The Administration says then, there are no downsides or upsides to treating terrorists like civilian criminal defendants.

This is independent of what other Tea Party Inaugural speakers had to say. Opening speaker Tom Tancredo, for example, argued in favor of Jim Crow voting laws, while fellow speaker Roy Moore turned to the usual gay-bashing and theocracy.

I recognize that there is at least the perception that the Tea Party movement doesn't reflect the same orthodox, old-school right-wing agenda we've been seeing from Republican national politicians for several decades--but all it is, at this point, is a perception. If you look at who speaks for the Tea Party, and what Tea Party protestors actually write on their picket signs, there's not really anything to see here except the usual frustration we see from a minority party when a new president takes office. If you consider yourself part of the Tea Party movement, and you disagree with this assessment, then it's certainly within your power--and the power of others in your movement--to prove me wrong by showing that this movement actually does have something to do with civil liberties. You'll forgive me if I don't hold my breath.

Related: Pleading the Tenth