A feminist is a person who answers 'yes' to the question 'Are women human?' Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men...It's about justice, fairness, and access to the broad range of human experience.
Katha PollittWhy must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.
Katha PollittWhen it comes to ideas - and religions are, among other things, ideas - there is no right not to be offended. ... In fact, if you need laws ... to protect your faith, maybe your faith is weak.
Katha PollittEvery gain women have made in the past two hundred years has been in the face of experts insisting they couldn't do it and didn't really want to.
Katha PollittAs Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.
Katha Pollitt