If believers feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give religious imperatives special wei… - Ellen Willis

The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the "legitimate" votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the "real" Americans the Democrats must pursue.

There were secularists, democrats, liberals, and feminists in Iran before Khomeini killed or exiled them; there are secularists, democrats, liberals, and feminists in other Islamic countries; and there are immigrants like Salman Rushdie, who have voted with their feet for a freer life. Are they all tools of Western imperialism, poisoned by Satan, as the ayatollah would say? (“In Defense of Offense”)

Most of us felt about the sexual revolution what Gandhi reputedly thought of Western civilization-that it would be a good idea. (“Coming Down Again” 1989)