The issue is not that morals be applied to public policy, it's that conservatives bring public policy to spheres of our lives where it should not enter.
There were a lot of Romneys. There's the Romney who was going to be better on gay rights than Ted Kennedy; now there's a Romney who checks with Rick Santorum on that issue.
We do know that a percentage of LGBT people avoid and delay screening and care because of fear about or experience of stigma, discrimination or simply lack of knowledge about LGBT people and their health amongst providers. If you avoid or delay screening and care and you have an issue that may be precancerous, by the time you get into screening and care you’re there because it has become acute and you already have a progressed disease.
On the most recent battles on health insurance reform, the women led the battle to end gender discrimination by the insurance companies [where] women paid more and got less of a benefit, and also the whole issue of prevention.
Everything has happened before - not once, but over and over again. We may not be able to solve our problems through what are pompously called "the lessons of history," but at least we should be able to recognize the issues and perhaps avoid some of the solutions that have failed in the past. And we can take heart in our own dilemma by realizing that other people in other times have survived worse.
[It is] one of the most complex and emotional issues of out time.
Who knows when Donald Trump will have a press conference? Maybe he's just going to stay in Trump Tower and issue tweets - you know, gold-plated tweets to the American people. It's scary.
There's an effort on the part of many people to attack women's rights, women's health, and the ability to control our own lives. No doubt about it. And it is not a majority of the country, in any way, shape, or form. I know on the contraceptive issue, 70 percent of the country agrees with me. Will that stop my opponents? No. Because they are so radical. They chip away and chip away.
Each issue has to be looked at as to whether or not it threatens a woman's health or her life, and if it does, you can't support it. And if she just wants to have her legal right to an abortion, she should be able to do it.
I think my most important advice is to understand what are the foundations of a healthy democracy and how we have to engage in citizenship continuously, not just when something upsets us; not just when there's an election or when an issue pops up for a few weeks. It's hard work.
What I would advise, what I advised before the election, and what I will continue to advise after the election, is that elections matter; voting matters; organizing matters; being informed on the issues matter.
Climate change is one of the issues I worry most about because its impacts are enormous. But they're gradual, they're not immediate.
It's the reason why I am always interested in engaging in people who are pushing us and pushing against the status quo. But having been an activist, the only thing that I'm always encouraging activists to do is, once you have raised the issue, and even through controversial means, you have to come behind it with an agenda and the possibility of reconciliation if power meets your demands.
I think that the issues we have with science these days are not restricted to what's happening with respect to religion. There are a lot of very religious scientists around.
I think we're at a place wherea woman's health is danger because of whether this family planning or contraception or any issues that relate to women's health, there's an assault on that in the Congress.
The Supreme Court had the choice not only which way to rule, pro- or anti-gay marriage rights, but also how they were going to rule. They could have ruled just federalism, saying, "This isn't a matter for federal; this isn't a federal issue at all. States should decide it." Or they could decide it on equal protection grounds and say that, "Gay discrimination is wrong."
I'm not going to Wall Street [after the presidency]. The amount of time that I'll be investing in issues is going to be high. But it'll be necessarily in a different capacity.
When you see a Donald Trump and a Bernie Sanders, very unconventional candidates, have considerable success, then obviously there's something there that's being tapped into; a suspicion on globalization, a desire to reign in it's excesses, a suspicion of elites and governing institutions that people feel may not be responsive to their immediate needs. And that sometimes gets wrapped up in issues of ethnic identify or religious identity or cultural identity, and that can be a volatile mix.
We do have to balance this issue of privacy and security. Those who pretend that there's no balance that has to be struck and think we can take a 100-percent absolutist approach to protecting privacy don't recognize that governments are going to be under an enormous burden to prevent the kinds of terrorist acts that not only harm individuals, but also can distort our society and our politics in very dangerous ways.
One of the great qualities of Chancellor Merkel is that she is steady. She analyzes a situation. She's honest. Sometimes we've had disagreements, but when we do, it's very constructive. And we are consistently open with each other about how we should approach these issues.
We have to have better intelligence. We have to have better interdiction capabilities. And so the issue is not how much we spend or how hard we try; the issue is are we doing it the right way? Are we being smart about it?
Essentially, Iran was sanctioned because of what had happened at Fordow, its unwillingness to comply with previous U.N. security resolutions about their nuclear program, and as part of the package of sanctions that was slapped on them, the issue of arms and ballistic missiles were included.
There are institutional obligations I have to carry out that are important for a president of the United States to carry out, but may not always align with what I think would move the ball down the field on the issues that I care most deeply about.
Back in the '50s and '60s, most politicians were concerned about not talking about faith, partly because there were consequences you had to deal with - (for instance) Catholicism had been made an issue.
A lot of the issues that I see, it is not an either-or situation.
