I applaud the professional athletes using their platform to voice their opinions.

I've been privileged to coach a lot of great people, high-character guys, and I don't think I've ever coached a better professional than Joel Anthony.

I was raised in a home where we grew up where we discussed issues. I've always been really politically aware. My wife and four kids are very aware. They make me more attuned to a lot of things I would not think about. Especially women's issues.

Athletes have the same rights everybody else does. If there is a strength in our democracy, it's that we are encouraged to exercise those rights and speak out and hold people in power in check.

I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.

The truth is that at age 19, I was a teenage mother living alone with my daughter in a trailer and struggling to keep us afloat on my way to a divorce. And I knew then that I was going to have to work my way up and out of that life if I was going to give my daughter a better life and a better future, and that's what I've done.

I don't keep people around me that aren't family. You don't get to stay. Unless you're eating at the table with us, you're not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.

I guess I'm a fun-loving teddy bear. I've got two sides to me. Obviously, there's the football side that a lot of people see - the mean, ferocious, coming-after-the-quarterback guy. But off the field, I'm a calm, cool, collected guy.