Как публиковать символы Юникода с помощью httplib?

Я пытаюсь опубликовать данные в формате Unicode с помощью функции httplib.request:

s = u"עברית"
data = """
<spellrequest textalreadyclipped="0" ignoredups="1" ignoredigits="1" ignoreallcaps="0">
<text>%s</text>
</spellrequest>
""" % s

con = httplib.HTTPSConnection("www.google.com")
con.request("POST", "/tbproxy/spell?lang=he", data)
response = con.getresponse().read()

Однако это моя ошибка:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Scripts\iQuality\test.py", line 47, in <module>
    print spellFix(u"╫á╫נ╫¿╫ץ╫ר╫ץ")
  File "C:\Scripts\iQuality\test.py", line 26, in spellFix
    con.request("POST", "/tbproxy/spell?lang=%s" % lang, data)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\httplib.py", line 955, in request
    self._send_request(method, url, body, headers)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\httplib.py", line 989, in _send_request
    self.endheaders(body)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\httplib.py", line 951, in endheaders
    self._send_output(message_body)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\httplib.py", line 815, in _send_output
    self.send(message_body)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\httplib.py", line 787, in send
    self.sock.sendall(data)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\ssl.py", line 220, in sendall
    v = self.send(data[count:])
  File "C:\Python27\lib\ssl.py", line 189, in send
    v = self._sslobj.write(data)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 97-102: or
dinal not in range(128)

Где я не прав?