In Books I Have Traveled, Not Only

The Problem With Freedom Is That You Just Can't Go Back. Once People See What It Means To Be Free People, You Can't Go Back. So They're Going To Keep Nattering On About This And That, And Maybe They'll Make Another Stab At De-funding The Fabulous Planned Parenthood Or Something Of The Sort. To My Mind, It's Just Not Going To Work.

It Is This That, Finally, I Will Try To Teach My Sons About Sex, After I've Explained Fertile Periods And Birth Control And All The Other Mechanics That Are Important To Understand But Never Really Go To The Heart Of The Matter: I Believe I Will Say That When You Sleep With Someone You Take Off A Lot More Than Your Clothes.

The Problem... Is Emblematic Of What Hasn't Changed During The Equal Opportunity Revolution Of The Last 20 Years. Doors Opened; Opportunities Evolved. Law, Institutions, Corporations Moved Forward. But Many Minds Did Not.

I Think At Every Moment In The Last Probably 100 Years, When The Institutional Church Had The Opportunity To Do The Right Thing, They Did The Wrong Thing. They're A Dying Institution In Many Parts Of The World Because They Refuse To Ordain Women Or Married People. And Now They're A Dying Institution Because Some Of Their Members Did Enormous Harm To Young People And Instead Of Responding Aggressively With Humility, And With Love, And With The Confession Of Wrongdoing, They Tried To Spin It As Though They Were A Political Party, And That's Just Deplorable.

I Really Feel Like If You Can Get Past Your Fear, If You Can Say, "uh-uh, I'm Afraid To Do That And I'm Going To Do It Anyhow," That That's Really The Way To Have A Satisfying Life Moving Forward. I Think I Had That Kind Of Fearlessness Even As A Young Person. It Wasn't Tempered By Experience Or Wisdom, But It Took Me A Long Way.