Katha Pollitt
Katha Pollitt
Katha Pollittis an American feminist poet, essayist and critic. She is the author of four essay collections and two books of poetry. Her writing focuses on political and social issues, including abortion rights, racism, welfare reform, feminism, and poverty...
teacher exercise thinking
In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.
baby motherhood thinking
Why 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.
thinking people process
... on the whole 'blasphemy' has been a force for good in human history. It is part of the process by which millions of people have come to reject theocracy and think for themselves.
lying thinking deception
We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie.
culture lad later ten victims women
Ten years of misogynistic lad culture later and women victims are still on trial.
brave deal fit flak given imperfect men people themselves throwing ton
She's very brave the way she tackles this in the book. She's been given a lot of flak from the right, saying, 'Who'd want you?' But she does deal well with the imperfect fit between men and women. If she was a man, she'd have a ton of people throwing themselves at her.
knowing
knowing that it's there for them if they really need it.
hate believe garden
funny how ready people are to believe that counseling, which even when voluntary takes years to modify garden-variety neuroses, can work wonders in months with resistant patients who hate each other.
prayer hate school
Right now religion has the romantic aura of the forbidden - Christ is cool. We need to bring it into the schools, which kids already hate, and associate it firmly with boredom, regulation, condescension, makework and de facto segregation ... Prayer in the schools will rid us of the bland no-offense ecumenism that is so infuriating to us anticlericals: Oh, so now you say Jews didn't kill Christ - a little on the late side, isn't it?
christian country teaching
As 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.
prayer believe school
I'm anticlerical, not antireligion. If somebody believes there is God, I'm not interested in trying to persuade that person there is no intelligent design to the universe. Where I become interested and wake up is about the temporal power of religion, things like prayer in schools, or Catholic-secular hospital mergers.
feminism broadway novel
Like Broadway, the novel, and G-d, feminism has been declared dead many times
humble pie enemy
For me, religion is serious business - a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.
feminist feminism answers
For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question 'Are women human?' with a yes.