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Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere. If this is true, we can say that religion has served an important purpose. This does not suggest, however, that it serves an important purpose now. There is, after all, nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors. That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.

No one deserves brutality because of what they are, their condition of birth, including being born female; and the women in this book are not asking for it—instead they are risking as much as any man risks to live, to love.

Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more—also because the status quo depends on it; but love depends on self-knowledge and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.

Law steps in where nature fails: virtually everywhere. Laws create nature—a male nature and a female nature and natural intercourse—by telling errant, unnatural human beings what to do and what not to do to protect and express their real nature—the real man, the real female, the real hierarchy that nature or God created putting man on top.

It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves- socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically.

Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. it is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor it is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a "point of view" that some people with soft skins find "offensive." It is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity.

Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter's potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering. Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings. This is a fact. The argument from a cell's potential gets you absolutely nowhere.

Society says with the authority of its police power how intercourse will and will not occur. Any act so controlled by the state, proscribed and prescribed in detail, cannot be private in the ordinary sense. Privacy is essentially a sphere of freedom immune from regulation by the state. In that sense, intercourse has never occurred in private.

Women do not know how to be women exactly; men constantly fail to be men.

I have since often observed, how incongruous and irrational the common temper of mankind is, especially of youth, to that reason which ought to guide them in such cases - viz. they are not ashamed to sin, and yet are ashamed to repent. Not ashamed of the action for which they ought justly to be esteemed fools, but are ashamed of the returning, which can only make them be esteemed wise men.

And I add this part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction.

It is never too late to be wise.