Some campaigns are not worth waging if you can't win; others have to be fought on grounds of principle regardless of the chances for success.
I want to organize so that women see ourselves as people who are entitled to power, entitled to leadership.
The way to be a man if you're a little boy is to be willing to throw your weight around.
I don't think you lead by pessimism and cynicism. I think you lead by optimism and enthusiasm and energy.
When I started law school I was shocked to learn that our legal system traditionally had the man as the head and master of the family. As late as the '70s and '80s when we were fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, states like Louisiana still had a head and master law.
More than 10,000 ballots in Miami-Dade County have been rejected by some machine without any opportunity for a human being to take a look. That is just not right.
We have to stop this violence. We have to make the political nature of the violence clear, that the violence we experience in our own homes is not a personal family matter, it's a public and political problem. It's a way that women are kept in line, kept in our places.
We always knew when we took on the issue of violence against women that somehow our opposition would come after us.
The opposition has moved from a blaming the victim to blaming the victim's advocate's statistics. Irrespective of what the numbers are, it's far too many.
I've talked to law enforcement officials at the state and local level who say that violence against women is going up. In any case, we think that it's an important issue whether it's going up or not. And we are determined to stop it.
When I hear traditional family values raised, I hear that effort once again to re-establish the man as head and master of his family. Who had the, not only the right, but the obligation to discipline his wife and children to keep them in line?
And of course we are familiar with the English common law rule of thumb that said a man could in fact use a stick no bigger than his thumb to discipline his wife and family.
The Violence Against Women Act is so important. It provides money to train the cop on the beat, to train the judges that this is a new day, that we won't tolerate this violence and to know how to deal with it.
Some of us may just, in one-on-one conversations with our family, with our friends, over the back fence with our neighbors, talk about the reality of our lives and realize that we're not alone, that we have a right to be physically safe and emotionally safe in our own homes.
I know that it isn't just violence against women, it's how do we support ourselves and our families, how do we deal with health care for ourselves and our families? It's a bigger picture.
Violence may be a good focus to organize around, but we have to look at women's lives in our entirety.
Some of those men in power, we just have to change their faces because we're not going to change their minds.
Jesus never said anything about homosexuality.
My answer to those who oppose my appointment as CEO is that this is really a decision of the YWCA. They want to strengthen their grassroots to advocate on behalf of women's and children's empowerment and ending racism.
I come from a Christian faith. I am not going to give you insight into my particular beliefs.
