Our family arrived in England in 1960. At that time I thought the war was ancient history. But if I think of 15 years ago from now, that's 1990, and that seems like yesterday to me.

People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.

I'm very fortunate in that I don't have money problems. I have lunch with my wife at home. I don't have to commute, so I have much more time with my family.

No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.

To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

I know the type of demons they have to fight and I am going to help them, because it's the only way I can keep them from getting to my family. I have to clean up my friends because they are around my boys. It's upsetting.

The whole thing means such a great deal for me, and hopefully one day it will be there. But my friends and my family mean a little more. I would rather be helping them, even if it hurts that.

In January of 1995, my family and I moved to Seattle. Pearl Jam did the first of their live radio broadcasts, Monkey Wrench Radio, along with many other Seattle musicians.

When I started law school I was shocked to learn that our legal system traditionally had the man as the head and master of the family. As late as the '70s and '80s when we were fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, states like Louisiana still had a head and master law.

When I hear traditional family values raised, I hear that effort once again to re-establish the man as head and master of his family. Who had the, not only the right, but the obligation to discipline his wife and children to keep them in line?

We have to stop this violence. We have to make the political nature of the violence clear, that the violence we experience in our own homes is not a personal family matter, it's a public and political problem. It's a way that women are kept in line, kept in our places.

And of course we are familiar with the English common law rule of thumb that said a man could in fact use a stick no bigger than his thumb to discipline his wife and family.

Some of us may just, in one-on-one conversations with our family, with our friends, over the back fence with our neighbors, talk about the reality of our lives and realize that we're not alone, that we have a right to be physically safe and emotionally safe in our own homes.

My family gave me values that have sustained me through situations that would challenge any person. My personal relationship with the Lord inspires me in all I do.

With millions of family wage manufacturing jobs lost since 2001, we need an energy bill that takes bold action to tap into American ingenuity in order to lead the world in new clean energy technology, rather than playing catch-up to the Japanese, Danish, and Germans.