Human Rights
Page 13
- 50 years later we need to have a conversation…not just about civil rights, C-I-V-I-L, but about silver rights, S-I-L-V-E-R. That is to say: economic rights, economic freedoms. Black folk lag behind in every leading economic category 50 years later, even in the Obama era. And the bottom line is this: if you don’t have economic freedom, you really ain’t free.
- We’re definitely blessed to get a scholarship to our universities, but at the end of the day, that doesn’t cover everything. We do have hungry nights that we don’t have enough money to get food.
- Prostitution thrives in the United States. We focus in this country on punishing the girls. For every brothel owner or pimp or male customer, there are 50 girls who are arrested for being prostitutes. Other countries have tried the other way around, and it works beautifully…they bring the charges against the brothel owners and the pimps and the male customers, and they do not prosecute the girls, who quite often are brought into that trade involuntarily. It works quite well, by the way.
- It's time to create an organization that's fully devoted to safeguarding the security of Internet users – even if that might make life harder for government hackers.
- The huge thing about mental health treatment and mental health care is that you’re encouraged to suck things up and deal…There’s a lot of attention on injury or physical problems, but when they’re invisible wounds or mental health issues, then it’s a personal issue.
- There’s a reason survivors choose not to go to the police, and that’s because they’re treated as the criminals. The rapists are innocent until proven guilty, but survivors are guilty until proven innocent - at least in the eyes of the police.
- We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington’s elites — politicians and intellectuals — miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today’s world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe.
- In battle, combatants engaged in war against America get no due process and may lawfully be killed. But citizens not in a battlefield - however despicable - are guaranteed a trial by our Constitution. No one argues that Americans who commit treason shouldn’t be punished. The maximum penalty for treason is death. But the Constitution specifies the process necessary to convict.
- If you are passed out drunk or if there is a gun to your head, it is the same crime. It is a crime where there is not consent. It is a felony. And we need to start making sure victims understand that, so they don’t do the self blame.
- There would be some price to pay for this country and our allies…But there is a huge price to pay for allowing aggressive bullying behavior to continue…History teaches us that we have to stand up to such bullying behavior from one state on to another.
- There is no safe place in Gaza right now. Bombs can land at any time, anywhere. A small metal shack with no electricity or running water on a jetty in the blazing seaside sun does not seem like the kind of place frequented by Hamas militants - the Israel Defense Forces’ intended targets. Children, maybe four feet tall, dressed in summer clothes, running from an explosion, don’t fit the description of Hamas fighters, either.
- Our country was born out of a desire to be free. And every day since, it’s been protected by our men and women in uniform – people who believed so deeply in America, they were willing to give their lives for it.