Kirsten Powers

I grew up in the Episcopal Church in Alaska, but my belief was superficial and flimsy.

Loving people does not require you to stay silent when you see something that merits being called out.

One question predominates among Democratic voters assessing which candidate to nominate as the Democratic standard-bearer for 2020: 'Can they beat Donald Trump?'

Protesters can't violate First Amendment rights. Only the government can do that.

Trump loves free speech only when he or his supporters are speaking.

Trump may not like the fact that 20-plus anonymous sources provided the 'Times' with an unflattering portrait of his campaign, but that doesn't make it 'false.' Of course, Trump had no problem with news outlets running with his made-up claim in 2011 that President Obama 'doesn't have a birth certificate.'

I sometimes hear Christians talk about how terrible life must be for atheists. But our lives were not terrible. Life actually seemed pretty wonderful, filled with opportunity and good conversation and privilege.

After college I worked as an appointee in the Clinton administration from 1992 to 1998.

From my early 20s on, I would waver between atheism and agnosticism, never coming close to considering that God could be real.

A lack of grace involves much more than critiquing an opponent. It looks a lot more like the ad hominem attacks the president launches nearly daily against all who aren't actively worshiping him. It looks like Trump's relentless attempts to pit Americans against one another.

It's not hard to see how accusations against Trump as a racist and misogynist would be met with eye rolls and knowing murmurs of 'political correctness' by people who have had their worldview constantly caricatured and demonized by the cultural elites in academia, media and politics.

While many liberals have dismissed the idea of political correctness as a right-wing manufactured hysteria, it is in fact a real thing.

People are really nice at Fox.

I had a lot of ideas about conservatives and then I got to Fox and just, I was like, 'Oh, they're not all evil and stupid.'

All my friends were liberals and I grew up in a really liberal family.

American Christians are quite able to organize around issues that concern them. Yet religious persecution appears not to have grabbed their attention, despite worldwide media coverage of the atrocities against Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East.

Rather than teach women how to negotiate with sexists or shrink themselves down to 'likeable' size, perhaps the solution would be for employers to stop being sexist. In the meantime, women will continue to be blamed for their lower salaries.

The root of nearly every free-speech infringement on campuses across the country is that someone - almost always a liberal - has been offended or has sniffed out a potential offense in the making.

Despite frequently mocking anti-abortion activists as anti-science know-nothings, abortion rights absolutists are the ones who play fast and loose with the facts of abortion.

Military action is, of course, sometimes necessary to maintain peace. Kosovo and World War II are good examples.

It's true that Americans are less than thrilled with President Obama and congressional Democrats. Their approval ratings are nothing to celebrate. But electoral politics is a zero-sum game. If one side loses, then the other side wins. Success depends on being just slightly less odious than your opponent.

Obama quickly became an effective advocate for the view that government is a critical part of the solution to society's problems. So effective that he won reelection in the midst of a struggling economy.

Leading up to Election Day 2008, candidate Barack Obama declared, 'We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.' Conservatives heard a menacing threat. For liberals, it was a rallying cry. The battle was on.

For many Americans the term 'speech code' sends shivers up the spine. Yet these noxious and un-American codes have become commonplace on college campuses across the United States.

Campuses should be places where students are able to make mistakes without fear of retribution. If there is no margin for error, it is impossible to receive a meaningful education.

Higher education should provide an environment to test new ideas, debate theories, encounter challenging information, and figure out what one believes.

By all means, if you have a chemical imbalance, use medication. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be allowed to have a broader conversation about the pharmaceutical industry and the deep structural flaws in our economic system.

When illiberal feminists aren't delegitimizing female dissenters from their worldview as fake women, they are portraying them in such a hyper-sexualized way that they are reduced to nonhuman objects.

Strangely, while illiberal feminists treat conservative women as men in drag, men who identify as women are treated as women.

Illiberal feminists turn simple ideological disagreements, whether about the federal budget or the Second Amendment or anything else, into excuses to engage in character assassination, dismissing their opponents as sexists.

The media is not the most Christian-friendly place in the world for the most part. At the same time, a lot of these Christians bring it on themselves.

It was many years until I started meeting other people who were like me: very progressive-minded politically but also very conservative theologically.

If I had a dollar for every time somebody said, 'I don't understand: how can you be a Democrat and be a Christian?' I'd be a millionaire.

I think my whole life had centered on Democratic politics. I was very much in that bubble. I worked in the Clinton administration so I had all these friends from there, and then in Democratic politics in New York, so that's what we sort of bonded over - that was our religion, to a certain extent.

We need to get beyond the stereotypes. Palin has been cast as a right-wing nut job in the media, yet her actual record suggests something more complex. She is a Republican who made herself the enemy of oil companies in Alaska.

Men don't sexually assault women because they are lustful; they do it because they want to dominate, humiliate and abuse women. They do it because they view women as objects.

It's time for some equal-opportunity accountability. Without it, the fight against media misogyny will continue to be perceived as a proxy war for the Democratic Party, not a fight for fair treatment of women in the public square.

Chris Matthews's sickening misogyny was made famous in 2008, when he obsessively tore down Hillary Clinton for standing between Barack Obama and the presidency, something that Matthews could not abide.

Did you know there is a war on women? Yes, it's true. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher, Matt Taibbi, and Ed Schultz have been waging it for years with their misogynist outbursts.

If conservatives are so concerned about black-on-black crime, it is concerning the only time I hear them talking about it is when they want to stick it to the black community.

Domestic policy, foreign policy, I tend to come down more on the liberal side.

Within the paradigm of Democratic politics, even though people probably think I'm a centrist, I'm more a liberal, except for abortion.

I'm a registered Democrat, I've always been a registered Democrat, only ever voted for a Democrats.

Perhaps all of our anxiety is not caused by broken brains but by working nonstop, missing out on time with our friends and families because we are all so busy 'hustling' and 'grinding' just to survive in an immoral economic system skewed to favor a very few at the top while leaving the rest of the country to fend for itself.

White women are themselves oppressed and that they would therefore be able to align themselves with other oppressed people.

I think we have to remember that the white patriarchal system actually benefits white women in a lot of the ways and they're attached to white men who are benefiting from the system that was created by them, for them, and their fathers and their husbands and their brothers are benefiting from the system and so they are also benefiting.

If you support somebody who does racist things, that makes you racist.

In our pugilistic take-no-prisoners era, preaching grace toward those on the other side of the political fence is decidedly countercultural.

Because most journalists are secular, they can be gullible in looking to the religious right as arbiters of biblical interpretation, especially as it relates to hot-button cultural and political issues.

In their ideological zeal, the feminists of the illiberal left don't seem to realize how they've given feminism a bad name.