Justice

The issue that a political campaign would make a human life into - you know - a political football, is unsettling.

[Michelle] Obama has the strength to make her needs known, and...if she has - for now - chosen motherhood, that it is the role she wants. She is a black woman, free to make that choice. These things are revolutionary for black women, even if some white women see business as usual.

I’m tired of the naked, raped, beaten black woman body. I want to see an image of black femaleness that alters our universe in some way.

This is the way it has to be. The Senate has changed.

I believe the gun has no power because a gun can only kill, but a pen can give life.

This country's obsession with the private lives of famous people is tragic. It's tragic in the sense that it is so clearly a projection of people's frustration about their government, their economy, their own spiritual bankruptcy. You have no voice in Washington. In Washington, or in any statehouse, no one actually cares what you think. So you post online, you vote with a Roman-esque thumbs up or down on the celebrity debacle of the day. That is your right. It's also fatal misdirection of your voice and need to judge. Occupy Wall Street, on their worst day, had more integrity than the comments page of this website ever will.

Did I ever tell my constituents that if they liked their plan they could keep it? I would have if I ever met anybody who liked his or her plan, but that was not my experience, that was not my experience. And it was not my experience as a mother of five, who occasionally has a bad back and the rest of that. I was considered a poor risk, even though I had some resources and thought I was quite strong for having five children. But the insurance company didn’t see it that way.

While it’s possible to recover from fiscal bankruptcy, we will never recover from the moral bankruptcy in Washington. We will never build a free and prosperous country built upon the ruins of the civil society. But this week in Washington, Harry Reid’s Senate will spend the entire week using the power of government to infringe upon our liberty and destroy the civil society.

Recently in Washington, unfortunately, we have seen examples of the wrong kind of leadership -- when politicians choose scorched earth over common ground, when they operate in what I call the ‘evidence-free zone,’ with ideology trumping everything else.

If we truly believe we can end all abortion, then we must also address the fact that many of those children will end up orphans.

The speaker said there aren't the votes on the floor to re-open the government. Let me issue him a friendly challenge. Put it on the floor Monday or Tuesday. I would bet there are the votes to pass it.

And in a year that saw the internet invalidating the issues of women of color, excluding them from important conversations about feminism, and - frankly - excluding them from feminism period (remember @Karynthia’s #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen and Michelle Cottle’s FLOTUS is a Feminist Nightmare), Beyonce came through with the power of Jesus Christ himself and did quite the opposite on a public stage.