Leonard Pitts Jr.

Recent stories written by Leonard Pitts Jr.

'Honor killing' an act of cowardice and fear (11/9/2009)

We don't know why Faleh Hassan Almaleki came to this country in the mid-'90s, and it's unlikely he'll be able to tell us anytime soon. He's in jail in Maricopa County, Ariz., at this writing, in lieu of a $5 million cash bond. It hardly seems far-fetched, however, to suppose he emigrated from his native Iraq for the same reason immigrants typically seek these shores: America promises opportunity and freedom.

'Good hair' is not the source of beauty (11/2/2009)

An open letter to African-American women:It's about the need to be beautiful, I know.As goals go, that one is neither extraordinary nor gender-specific. But it's different for women, isn't it? A man's sense of self worth is seldom endangered by crow's feet. On him people will say they convey "character." On a woman, they convey wear.

Heenes reflect fame-obsessed society (10/25/2009)

For hours, the fear was the boy would be found smashed to jelly somewhere, so my first emotion upon learning 6-year-old Falcon Heene was actually safe in his family's Fort Collins, Colo., attic was relief.

Conservatives build a bubble for belief (10/19/2009)

So we may soon have ourselves a conservative Bible. Besides Fox News, I mean.This new Bible is from Conservapedia, a Web site that bills itself as a conservative alternative to the perceived liberal bias of Wikipedia, the user-edited online reference.

Unconstitutional isn't necessarily wrong (10/12/2009)

Christmas is probably unconstitutional.I'm no lawyer, but the logic seems unassailable to me. Consider: Santa Claus aside, Christmas is an explicitly Christian holiday and the only holiday of any religion to be observed by the federal government. Which would seem to violate the First Amendment edict that Congress "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Yet to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, no one has ever sued Christmas before the Supreme Court.

Fox has surrendered its claim to credibility (10/5/2009)

Perhaps you are familiar with an old saying: even a broken clock is right twice a day. I've found that maxim valuable as I wade through the recent hand-wringing and recrimination among journalists and their critics over the fact that most mainstream media were slow to pick up on the story of corruption at ACORN.

DeLay representing Beneses everywhere (9/28/2009)

"Do you love me, now that I can dance?" – The Contours, 1962Well, no.

Pop 'outlaws' are just rebels without a clue (9/21/2009)

I blame Elvis.Along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard and other icons from rock's first generation, he pioneered an incendiary idea: that music could be more than a medium of entertainment, that it could and should also be a tool of cultural revolution. It was not, after all, just music that moved town fathers to ban rock concerts and angry men with sledgehammers to smash jukeboxes containing rock records.

A minority's bigotry is just as loathsome (9/14/2009)

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Good luck hiding out in a wired-up world (9/7/2009)

Back in May, I flew to Los Angeles. My cell phone did not.I left it in the car, a fact I only discovered as I was lining up at security. Had I found myself standing there in my underdrawers, I don't think I'd have felt more naked. There was this panicky sense of isolation, this disconcerting feeling of being cut off. Whenever I confessed my plight, I got looks of stark pity like you'd give someone with a terminal disease.

Half-kept promises can be worse than lies (8/31/2009)

Back in April, the U.S. government snatched Raymond Azar out of Afghanistan.His waist, wrists and ankles were shackled, he was stripped naked and photographed, made to wear headphones, blindfolded, hooded, stuffed into an executive jet and flown to the United States. Azar says his eyeglasses were taken and he was left in an ice cold room, denied food for 30 hours and told he might never see his wife and children again.

It's more than miles that separate us (8/23/2009)

Our story so far:Last year, Barack Obama was elected president, the first American of African heritage ever to reach that office. If this was regarded as a new beginning by most Americans, it was regarded apocalyptically by others who promptly proceeded to lose both their minds and any pretense of enlightenment.