Kirsten Powers
Higher education should provide an environment to test new ideas, debate theories, encounter challenging information, and figure out what one believes.Collection: Education
Because most journalists are secular, they can be gullible in looking to the religious right as arbiters of biblical interpretation, especially as it relates to hot-button cultural and political issues.
All together now: Women don't cause sexual harassment, harassers do.
Illiberal feminists turn simple ideological disagreements, whether about the federal budget or the Second Amendment or anything else, into excuses to engage in character assassination, dismissing their opponents as sexists.
By all means, if you have a chemical imbalance, use medication. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be allowed to have a broader conversation about the pharmaceutical industry and the deep structural flaws in our economic system.
Hypocrisy, something Jesus railed against, has become perhaps the most prominent feature of the religious right in the Trump era.
In our pugilistic take-no-prisoners era, preaching grace toward those on the other side of the political fence is decidedly countercultural.
If you support somebody who does racist things, that makes you racist.
I think we have to remember that the white patriarchal system actually benefits white women in a lot of the ways and they're attached to white men who are benefiting from the system that was created by them, for them, and their fathers and their husbands and their brothers are benefiting from the system and so they are also benefiting.
White women are themselves oppressed and that they would therefore be able to align themselves with other oppressed people.
We need to get beyond the stereotypes. Palin has been cast as a right-wing nut job in the media, yet her actual record suggests something more complex. She is a Republican who made herself the enemy of oil companies in Alaska.
I'm a registered Democrat, I've always been a registered Democrat, only ever voted for a Democrats.
Within the paradigm of Democratic politics, even though people probably think I'm a centrist, I'm more a liberal, except for abortion.
Domestic policy, foreign policy, I tend to come down more on the liberal side.
If conservatives are so concerned about black-on-black crime, it is concerning the only time I hear them talking about it is when they want to stick it to the black community.
Did you know there is a war on women? Yes, it's true. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher, Matt Taibbi, and Ed Schultz have been waging it for years with their misogynist outbursts.
Chris Matthews's sickening misogyny was made famous in 2008, when he obsessively tore down Hillary Clinton for standing between Barack Obama and the presidency, something that Matthews could not abide.
It's time for some equal-opportunity accountability. Without it, the fight against media misogyny will continue to be perceived as a proxy war for the Democratic Party, not a fight for fair treatment of women in the public square.
Men don't sexually assault women because they are lustful; they do it because they want to dominate, humiliate and abuse women. They do it because they view women as objects.
In Trump's mind, women derive their primary value from how they look, which is probably why he owned a major beauty pageant for so many years.
Women likely are rejecting Trump because they know the presidential race isn't just about taxes or ISIL or immigration. It's about their place in society and how a Trump presidency would drag women back a half-century.
Women cannot be equal participants in a society that views sexual assault and sexual harassment the way Donald Trump and his defenders do.
It is a lot harder to write a good book or a good column in a persuasive way without making fun of someone or ridiculing them.
I know I deal with it, I'm sure a lot of other people deal with it: you have that little funny dig you want to give on Twitter or you want to put in your column. Don't do it. it always undermines your argument.
Women should be able to 'friend' a married - or unmarried - congressman on Facebook or follow him on Twitter without fear of being the recipient of lewd talk or behavior.
Anthony Weiner lied to the country about his sexual misconduct online. He also lied to me.
Women are often forced to maintain good relations with men who abuse them precisely because those men have power.
I've been harassed or on the receiving end of sexist and inappropriate behavior almost every place I've ever worked.
Frankly, the idea that exposed legs are some sort of sexual provocation is an argument one would expect to hear from a religious fundamentalist, not a feminist.
Whereas Hillary is continually reinventing herself and her campaign, throwing things against the wall to see what sticks, Sanders appears to be driven by core values. He's running because he wants to upend a broken system. She's running because she thinks it's her turn.
Bernie is a problem Hillary can't figure out how to solve, perhaps because he's not the problem. She is.
I derided Christians as anti-intellectual bigots who were too weak to face the reality that there is no rhyme or reason to the world.
The average religious person has their beliefs, but they're not trying to get people fired who don't have their beliefs. But zealots do do that. It's not enough for them to believe it; they can't tolerate other people who don't believe what they believe, and they have this absolute certainty that they're right.
Any sentient being knows that pharmaceutical companies are predatory and not to be trusted.
Perhaps all of our anxiety is not caused by broken brains but by working nonstop, missing out on time with our friends and families because we are all so busy 'hustling' and 'grinding' just to survive in an immoral economic system skewed to favor a very few at the top while leaving the rest of the country to fend for itself.
Rather than teach women how to negotiate with sexists or shrink themselves down to 'likeable' size, perhaps the solution would be for employers to stop being sexist. In the meantime, women will continue to be blamed for their lower salaries.
American Christians are quite able to organize around issues that concern them. Yet religious persecution appears not to have grabbed their attention, despite worldwide media coverage of the atrocities against Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East.
All my friends were liberals and I grew up in a really liberal family.
I had a lot of ideas about conservatives and then I got to Fox and just, I was like, 'Oh, they're not all evil and stupid.'
People are really nice at Fox.
While many liberals have dismissed the idea of political correctness as a right-wing manufactured hysteria, it is in fact a real thing.
It's not hard to see how accusations against Trump as a racist and misogynist would be met with eye rolls and knowing murmurs of 'political correctness' by people who have had their worldview constantly caricatured and demonized by the cultural elites in academia, media and politics.
I grew up in the Episcopal Church in Alaska, but my belief was superficial and flimsy.
From my early 20s on, I would waver between atheism and agnosticism, never coming close to considering that God could be real.
After college I worked as an appointee in the Clinton administration from 1992 to 1998.
I sometimes hear Christians talk about how terrible life must be for atheists. But our lives were not terrible. Life actually seemed pretty wonderful, filled with opportunity and good conversation and privilege.
Donald Trump has a curious understanding of what freedom of speech means.
Trump may not like the fact that 20-plus anonymous sources provided the 'Times' with an unflattering portrait of his campaign, but that doesn't make it 'false.' Of course, Trump had no problem with news outlets running with his made-up claim in 2011 that President Obama 'doesn't have a birth certificate.'
Trump loves free speech only when he or his supporters are speaking.
Protesters can't violate First Amendment rights. Only the government can do that.