LANGUAGE

N-word has no place in society

Dear Chris Rock: I apologize in advance for the language that will shortly follow. And yes, there is a certain irony there, given that you are one of the most profane men on the planet.

Compassion, certainly, but justice, too

The first time, Troy Davis came within 24 hours of death. The second time, he came within two. Last year, it was a Georgia clemency board that stepped in to block his execution. Last month, it was the Supreme Court. Davis, the 39-year-old convicted killer of Mark MacPhail, a Savannah, Ga., police officer, was granted a stay to allow the court to consider whether to hear his appeal for a new trial. A decision is expected on Monday.

CREATION

For some, faith is about caring for others

In a moment, I will say something you've probably never read in an opinion column. Last week, you see, I wrote about Sarah Palin's attempt to ban books when she was a small town mayor. In the process, I noted that ''we all have questions'' for Palin. Among them: ``Does she really take the parable of Adam and Eve as literal truth?''

Lost credibility leads to lost leadership

Memo to the next president: There's an old fable I'm sure you know. It's usually credited to Aesop, and the version I found online at storyarts.org, goes like this:

OBAMA

The meaning of black

black \'blak\ adjective 1: of the color black; 2: of or relating to the African-American people; 3: dirty, soiled; 4: thoroughly sinister or evil;

Do yourself a favor -- read a book

Of course, we all have questions for Sarah Palin: Does she actually think living across the Bering Strait from Russia constitutes foreign policy expertise? Does she really take the parable of Adam and Eve as literal truth? How, exactly, does one field dress a moose? And why would one want to?

LEONARD PITTS JR. | COLUMNIST

There is no truth to the rumor . . .

``Be careful what you do, 'cause the lie becomes the truth.'' -- Michael Jackson For the record: Sarah Palin did not call dinosaurs ''lizards of Satan.'' Barack Obama is not a Muslim. That list of books that Palin supposedly wants to ban is a fake. Obama doesn't refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The picture of Palin wearing a flag bikini and hefting a gun is a fraud. Obama is, too, a U.S. citizen. Palin doesn't want Alaska to secede.

Wake-up time for `real conservatives'

So it seems George W. Bush is not really conservative. Nor are Mitt Romney, John McCain and, indeed, the vast majority of the Republican Party. Or so I'm told by a number of readers who took exception to a recent column lambasting Romney for his speech at the GOP convention. In it, Romney declared that the way to fix Washington is to turn it over to conservatives. If you didn't know any better, said I, you'd think conservatives had not been in charge most of the last decade. This kind of babblespeak...

Leonard Pitts Jr.: We'll go forward from this moment

This column by Leonard Pitts Jr. was published in The Miami Herald on Sept. 12, 2001, and received an extraordinary response from readers worldwide.

DETROIT MAYOR

Being black doesn't mean innocence

If Kwame Kilpatrick were white, don't you think he'd have been thrown out of office a long time ago? Heck, he'd be out of jail by now and shopping his memoirs.

LEONARD PITTS JR. | COLUMNIST

Gov. Palin and Sen. Clinton 'could hardly be less alike'

You know what bugs me most about Sarah Palin? It isn't that John McCain spent weeks claiming Barack Obama was unready to lead, then chose her as his running mate -- and potential leader of the free world -- a woman who until six years ago was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population: 5,469.

Separating obscenity from art

You can't blame Karen Fletcher for deciding not to fight. Had she lost, she faced the possibility of five years in prison. Under the plea agreement she accepted in early August, she got six months of house arrest, five years on probation and a $1,000 fine. But if the agreement allows Fletcher, of Donora, Penn., to avoid the more onerous punishment, it also allows us to avoid what surely would have been a violent collision between morality and the Constitution.

BARACK OBAMA

Vision of a better America becoming a reality

He spoke of the promise before he spoke of the dream. In the first part of the momentous speech he gave at the Lincoln Memorial, the part school children don't memorize and pundits never quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded a watching world that in writing the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the founders were ``signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

LEONARD PITTS JR.

Children of Katrina still bear the scars

You cannot watch Laura Belsey's movie without ruminating upon the myriad ways we fail our young. There are many wrenching scenes in Katrina's Children but arguably the most wrenching is not the girl crying because the hurricane left her so fearful of water she can no longer swim, or the boys touring the wreckage that once was home, or the children recalling how corpses floated by, writhing with maggots, bursting open. No, the most wrenching scene comes when Tyronieshia tries to read.

SADDLEBACK FORUM

Thoughtful questions, candid answers

First I spent long moments trying to decide upon my greatest moral failing. Then I spent longer moments asking myself whether I'd really want to share that failing with an audience of millions.

'Real' America has been here all along

A few words about the search for America. Meaning not the piece of land bounded by Atlantic and Pacific but, rather, the one that exists as a fixed point in the communal psyche, the one that registers true north on our shared moral compass. It is the America where Beaver Cleaver lived, the America of manicured lawns and neat three-bedroom homes bordered by fences made of white pickets. It is the monochromatic America where dad worked and mom kept house and the family went to church together every...

IN MY OPINION | LEONARD PITTS JR.

John Edwards is the new Clinton, Spitzer, Craig

There is obviously no way to quantify this, but I regard Bill Clinton as the most thoroughly humiliated person in all of human history. Who else even comes close?

Museum of black history in peril

First James Cameron died and now they've closed his museum. If it had to happen, I'm glad it happened in that order, glad Cameron did not live to see them padlock the institution to which he dedicated his life. I met Cameron in 1994 when I went to Milwaukee to interview him about his book,

`Politics as war is not pretty'

I haven't read Robert Novak's column in 10 years. Back in 1998, he made a comment on CNN -- what it was is not material here -- that I considered beyond the pale. I decided I could henceforth do without his opinions and insights. He impressed me as a distinctly disagreeable man. And that was well before he outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.