One Of The Things I've Learned About

Democracy Demands That The Religiously Motivated Translate Their Concerns In To Universal, Rather Than Religion-specific, Values... It Requires That Their Proposals Be Subject To Argument And Amenable To Reason. Now I May Be Opposed To Abortion For Religious Reasons, To Take One Example, But If I Seek To Pass A Law Banning The Practice, I Cannot Simply Point To The Teachings Of My Church Or Evoke God's Will. I Have To Explain Why Abortion Violates Some Principle That Is Accessible To People Of All Faiths, Including Those With No Faith At All.

The Memoir Was A Very Personal Book. I Wrote It As A Personal Journey And Search About Who My Father Was And How My Family Had Come Together And Come Apart - Sorting All That Out, You Know, Issues Of Personal Identity.

You Got Into These Small Towns In Pennsylvania And, Like A Lot Of Small Towns In The Midwest, The Jobs Have Been Gone Now For 25 Years And Nothing's Replaced Them. And They Fell Through The Clinton Administration, And The Bush Administration, And Each Successive Administration Has Said That Somehow These Communities Are Gonna Regenerate And They Have Not. And It's Not Surprising Then They Get Bitter, They Cling To Guns Or Religion Or Antipathy To People Who Aren't Like Them Or Anti-immigrant Sentiment Or Anti-trade Sentiment As A Way To Explain Their Frustrations.

Perhaps I Possess A Certain Midwestern Sensibility That I Inherited From My Mother And Her Parents, A Sensibility That Warren Buffet Seems To Share: That At A Certain Point One Has Enough, That You Can Derive As Much Pleasure From A Picasso Hanging In A Museum As From One That's Hanging In Your Den, That You Can Get An Awfully Good Meal In A Restaurant For Less Than Twenty Dollars, And That Once Your Drapes Cost More Than The Average American's Yearly Salary, Then You Can Afford To Pay A Bit More In Taxes.

You Know, When Trayvon Martin Was First Shot I Said That This Could Have Been My Son. Another Way Of Saying That Is Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Me 35 Years Ago. And When You Think About Why, In The African American Community At Least, There's A Lot Of Pain Around What Happened Here, I Think It's Important To Recognize That The African American Community Is Looking At This Issue Through A Set Of Experiences And A History That Doesn't Go Away.