Read more“In the middle of one session, Andy put down the toy truck, held onto a Barbie, and said, ‘Mommy and Daddy, you don’t love me when I’m a boy.’ When Andy was 3, his sister with special needs was born, and required significantly more of his parents’ attention. Andy misperceived this as ‘Mommy and Daddy love girls. If I want them to love me, I have to be a girl.’ With family therapy Andy got better. Today, Andy’s parents would be told, ‘This is who Andy really is. You must ensure that everyone treats him as a girl, or else he will commit suicide.'”
Read more“Proposal for the Confederate statues lately removed from public display in New Orleans: Restore them to their places, but with modifications. At the statue to Robert E. Lee, erect a confronting statue of Ulysses Grant, memorializing his victories at Vicksburg (upriver from New Orleans) and at Appomattox. At the statue to Jefferson Davis, erect a statue of Abraham Lincoln cutting the chains off a slave. At the statue of P. G. T. Beauregard, erect a statue to Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court and later became a justice at that court. Also prominently by one of these statues erect a memorial to the four young black girls who integrated the N. O. schools in 1960. Putting the statues into a museum is inappropriate. Old Southern cities like New Orleans and Vicksburg and Savannah are in large part outdoor museums. Keeping the old statues and adding the new ones says, ‘Yes, this is our past. These men were not monsters, but they made monstrous mistakes, and we acknowledge their place in making us what we are. They are part of our history, and our history has turned a corner as indicated by the new statues. We repent of the old mistakes and hope to learn better.'”
Read more“We both thought that the inversion would confirm our liberal assumption—that no one would have accepted Trump’s behavior from a woman, and that the male Clinton would seem like the much stronger candidate [when an actress played Trump’s part in a debate and an actor played Clinton’s part]. But we kept checking in with each other and realized that this disruption—a major change in perception—was happening. I had an unsettled feeling the whole way through. We heard a lot of ‘now I understand how this happened’—meaning how Trump won the election.”
Read more“The office is so powerful that you need God even more because your decisions are no longer ‘Gee, I’m gonna build a building in New York.’ These are questions of massive life and death, even with regard to health care.”
Read more“Senator, the primitive and often, even, atavistic aspects of the battlefield test the physical strength, the mental agility of everyone, but most of what it tests is the courage and the spiritual side of the troops we put in harm’s way. And oftentimes it’s only unit cohesion, leadership, and the belief in themselves and their comrades that allows them to go through what they have to go through and come home as better men and women, and not as broken. And so, The ‘warrior ethos’ is not a luxury, it is essential, when you have a military.”
