Writing courses will tell you that you need to construct a sentence that will express your main point in a clear, easy to understand fashion. It's quite an art to be able to capture an entire article in a single sentence. It's not very easy to do it in an opening paragraph.
I think I may have discovered a technique for approaching the problem. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to look for your escape clause:
...the Taliban’s plans for women far exceed the darkest imaginings of the Southern Baptists...Really, that's the whole article right there. The qualifier put in to avoid objections neatly captures everything she wanted to say. 'The Taliban are far worse than the Baptists, but they're along the same line.'
Things are getting better recently, though, she finishes:
There’s no doubt that many women’s lives are better than they were a century, even a half century, ago. Women can vote and own property. Abortion has been legalized in many countries, at least for the moment. But organized religion, and the anxieties and terrors it encourages and employs as a means of social control, have fought—and continue to fight—these positive changes, every step of the way.I'm not familiar with the Baptist effort to prevent women owning property. As for abortion, you know, I used to feel as Bthun said yesterday: it was a topic I wanted to avoid at all costs. My longstanding philosophy was that I was opposed to abortion, but would excercise that opposition purely within my private sphere of action. I was content to not cause any abortions, and to leave others their full range of choices as well.
More and more, though, I'm not sure that's tenable.
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