While women certainly have made great strides toward pay parity in the past 30 years, there is still a gap in earnings between men and women in equivalent professions.

While all of these are important and significant events, it is the United States' foreign policy that furthers the advancement of freedoms and rights for women that is the most striking for me.

For centuries, the world has heard the oppressed, the downtrodden and the vulnerable cry out for their freedoms, for their rights and for a chance to emerge from the shadows of the tyranny and bloodshed that they had lived with.

First, women are more likely to live in poverty during their retirement years than are men.

There is no better time than now, this very Christmas season, for all of us to rededicate ourselves to the principles taught by Jesus the Christ. It is the time to love the Lord, our God, with all our heart - and our neighbors as ourselves.

To properly prepare to receive personal revelation, we must repent, ask through prayer, be obedient, search the scriptures, fast, think pure thoughts, and develop a spirit of reverence.

What I'm saying is that government doesn't work for people. There is a perception of it and a reality of it.

The American experiment with representative democracy has been a great success, but we need to realize that it needs to be a genuine representative democracy where ordinary people have a vote, have a voice in choosing the candidates who represent them.