Quotes About Controversy

The perspective of people who truly believe that abortion is wrong. I understand that, I'm empathetic to that, I get it. But the place where I think we need to come to some kind of an understanding is that... you have your ability to have your own beliefs but the government doesn't play a role in that.

I get a little belligerent when not enough protesters show up at my appearances.

The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith--still the religion's focal personage-- married at least thirty-three women and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation.

How can a society actively promote religious faith on one hand and condemn a man for zealously adhering to his faith on the other?

The LDS Church has annual revenues estimated at more than $6 billion, and

Between 1840 and 1844 God instructed the prophet to marry some forty women.

Organized religion is hate masquerading as love.

Emma harangued Joseph so relentlessly about his philandering that the original intent of the revelation canonized as Section 132 seems to have been simply to persuade Emma to shut up and accept his plural wives—while at the same time compelling her to refrain from indulging in any extracurricular sex herself.

Joseph was murdered in Illinois by a mob of Mormon haters in 1844. Brigham Young assumed leadership of the church and led the Saints to the barren wilds of the Great Basin, where in short order they established a remarkable empire and unabashedly embraced the covenant of "spiritual wifery." This both titillated and shocked the sensibilities of Victorian-era Americans, who tended to regard polygamy as a brutish practice on a par with slavery.

Fifty-four-year-old Tom Green is a fat, bearded man with a receding hairline, thirty-two children, and five wives

No Man Knows My History, her magnificent, contentious biography of Joseph

Mormon principles that had been forsaken by the modern LDS Church: plural marriage; the tenet that God and Adam, the first man, were one and the same; and the divinely ordained supremacy of the white race.

The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith—still the religion's focal personage—married at least thirty-three women, and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation.

Historian D. Michael Quinn refers to the Saints' bald-faced dissembling as "theocratic ethics." The Mormons called it "Lying for the Lord."*

Uncle Rulon has married an estimated seventy-five women with whom he has fathered at least sixty-five children; several of his wives were given to him in marriage when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties.

Despite the fact that Uncle Rulon and his followers regard the governments of Arizona, Utah, and the United States as Satanic forces out to destroy the UEP, their polygamous community receives more than $6 million a year in public funds.

the fact that we have arrived at a place in the life of the nation where a grand wizard of the KKK can claim, all too plausibly, that he is at one with the will of the president of the United States seems an unprecedented moment.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal said, "President Roosevelt has committed a blunder that is worse than a crime, and no atonement or future act of his can remove the self-imprinted stigma." Alabama's Geneva Reaper was especially harsh. "Poor Roosevelt!" the paper wrote. "He might now just as well sleep with Booker Washington, for the scent of that coon will follow him to the grave as far as the South is concerned.

When I asked Robert Spitzer about the possibility that he'd inadvertently created a world in which ordinary behaviours were being labelled mental disorders, he fell silent. I waited for him to answer. But the silence lasted three minutes. Finally he said, 'I don't know.

He hosted a series of lunches—les déjeuners du mercredi—for politicians and prominent society people. He'd sit at the head of the table with a bell by his side. If one of his guests said something he disagreed with, he'd pick up the bell and ring it relentlessly until the person stopped talking. All over the world, famous people began declaring themselves LeBon fans.

There's an old Internet adage that as soon as you compare something to the Nazis you lose the argument.

Trump was praising Operation Wetback — a 1954 endeavor in which Mexicans were rounded up and dumped in the wilderness, where they were stranded without food or possessions and 88 of them died in the heat.) These

the Bush family's proclivity for mock human sacrifice. What

Trump might have appointed a less-eerie chief to replace Manafort. But instead he doubled-down, choosing the even eerier Stephen Bannon. Bannon