Free Republic

The people of North Carolina and the alumni of N.C. State University deserve an apology. Administrators at the school have implemented a patently unconstitutional policy, which forces students to apply for a permit in order to share the gospel on a public university campus they fund with their hard earned tax dollars. To make matters worse, the permit policy is being used to target Christians specifically while others are being allowed to exercise their rights unfettered. Now that a federal judge has called their bluff, the lawless North Carolina attorney general continues to defend the indefensible. Roy Cooper had the...

Noah Feldman is a Harvard law professor and a prolific author. In an op-ed in The Post and Courier, Noah Feldman has penned an article that grudgingly admits that the Second Amendment is a fundamental right deserving as much respect as the First Amendment.  Feldman gets much wrong.  For example, he declares that the Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment is an individual right for the first time in 2008.  From bloomberg.com: The evolution of gun rights has an internal legal logic to it. The contemporary story starts in 2008 with the case of D.C. v. Heller, a 5-to-4...

Facebook censorship of individual member pages is not just limited to the United States. On Wednesday, Facebook deleted the personal account/page of Ingrid Carlqvist, the Gatestone Institute's Swedish expert. Her offense was posting a video news report she created for Gatestone that discussed an almost 1,500% increase in rapes in Sweden. Ms. Carlqvist suggests the increase of rapes may be attributable to the mass influx of immigrants coming mainly from Muslim countries such as Iraq, Syria and Somalia. Gatestone Institute is a non-partisan; not-for-profit international policy think tank run by former UN Ambassador John Bolton. Carlqvist's video (embedded below) is...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Following controversy over undercover videos filmed by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) into the practices of Planned Parenthood, a lawmaker in California has introduced a bill that would make secretly recording inside abortion facilities punishable by up to a year behind bars. “It is the intent of the legislature to enact legislation to prohibit any person from intentionally video recording a confidential communication, or disclosing or distributing that video-recording communication, without obtaining the consent of all parties to the communication,” A.B. 1671, introduced by Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez ,reads. It criminalizes any person who “intentionally discloses or...

A landmark California bill gaining steam would make it illegal to engage in climate-change dissent, clearing the way for lawsuits against fossil-fuel companies, think-tanks and others that have “deceived or misled the public on the risks of climate change.” The first-of-its-kind legislation — Senate Bill 1161, or the California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016 — is scheduled for floor action Thursday after clearing Senate committees in April and May. The measure would allow state and local prosecutors to pursue claims against climate-change skepticism as a violation of the state’s Unfair Competition Law [UCL], as well as extend...

The National Press Club president expressed alarm on Tuesday about Donald Trump’s dangerous attitude toward the First Amendment. At a press conference earlier in the day, Trump had said “the press should be ashamed of themselves” for investigating his fundraising for veterans. Trump at one point called an ABC News reporter a “sleaze.” “You know my opinion of the media,” Trump said, “it’s very low.” Two days before, Trump had told a crowd on the National Mall that reporters are “liars” and “lowlifes.” Trump had previously called for making it easier for public figures to sue news organizations for libel,...

State Rep. Anthony Kern said he handed out materials as part of a church group on the Glendale Community College campus for several years without any trouble. But one year, “all of a sudden they came up with this free speech zone which was way away from the people,” the Republican told the Arizona Capitol Times. That inspired Kern to introduce House Bill 2615, which broadens campus “free speech zones” to the entire public college campus as opposed to designated areas. It provides students the right to exercise their First Amendment rights without concerns about the time, place and manner...

It's Sunshine Week, so perhaps some enterprising White House reporter will ask press secretary Jay Carney why President Obama rewrote the Freedom of Information Act without telling the rest of America. The rewrite came in an April 15, 2009, memo from then-White House Counsel Greg Craig instructing the executive branch to let White House officials review any documents sought by FOIA requestors that involved "White House equities." That phrase is nowhere to be found in the FOIA, yet the Obama White House effectively amended the law to create a new exception to justify keeping public documents locked away from the...

Bicycles instead of cars? Dense apartment clusters instead of single homes? Community rituals instead of churches? "Human rights" instead of religious freedom? The UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) which met June 3-14 [1996]in Istanbul, painted an alarming picture of the 21st century community. The American ways-free speech, individualism, travel, and Christianity-are out. A new set of economic, environmental, and social guidelines are in. Citizenship, democracy, and education have been redefined. Handpicked civil leaders will implement UN "laws", bypassing state and national representatives to work directly with the UN. And politically correct "tolerance"-meaning "the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism"...

The United Nations Security Council wants a global "framework" for censoring the Internet, as well as for using government propaganda to "counter" what its apparatchiks call "online propaganda," "hateful ideologies," and "digital terrorism." To that end, the UN Security Council this week ordered the UN "Counter-Terrorism Committee" — yes, that is a real bureaucracy — to draw up a plan by next year. From the Obama administration to the brutal Communist Chinese regime, everybody agreed that it was time for a UN-led crackdown on freedom of speech and thought online — all under the guise of fighting the transparently bogus...

Reps. Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.) and Bobby Scott (D-Va.) introduced the Do No Harm Act Wednesday, which would amend the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to specify that religious exceptions should not apply to “protections against discrimination or the promotion of equal opportunity” and “access to, information about, referrals for, provision of, or coverage for, any health care item or service.” The legislation is intended to “clarify that no one can seek religious exemption from laws guaranteeing fundamental civil and legal rights.”

Maryland-based Flying Dog Brewery is using money it was awarded in a 2015 case against the Michigan Liquor Control Commission to make a point about free expression. The brewer will create an organization called the 1st Amendment Society to promote free speech and civil liberties after the liquor agency tried to ban the sale of one of its beers in the state of Michigan. A six-year legal battle ended in March 2015 when the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the brewery. The court said the commission violated the company's freedom of expression rights in 2009...

HOOD RIVER, Ore. (KATU) - The view from the Belmont Drive Missionary Baptist Church is beautiful, but many say the messages outside the church are downright ugly. The reader board now displays two messages. The first reads, "Wake up Christians. Allah is not our God. Muhammad not greater than Jesus." The second says, "Only the Bible is God's word. 'Holy book.' Koran is just another book." "I literally had to stop and back up and make sure I saw what I saw, and I was profoundly offended and upset by it," Eric Cohn said. [Snip] "I was really annoyed...

11 Dec 2015 Thursday night on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposed ban Muslim for entering the Untied States would violate the First Amendment of the Constitution. Giuliani said, “I think we have to be very careful about who we let in. I don’t think we should let any of the refugees in. I think they should be put in a safe zone in Syria, but if you do a ban on all Muslims, I have no question that you violate the first amendment. The reality is if you...

A DOTD project manager has informed a citizen committee that they must limit their discussion to DOTD's selected proposals for the Interstate 49 extension or resign from the committee. The order, issued in an Tuesday email to the Community Working Group, came from Toby Picard, the engineer who is project manager for the proposed connection of Interstate 49 with U.S. 90 south. There currently are 14 versions of the connection, all of which include at least a partially elevated highway through the heart of Lafayette. These are the only options that are acceptable for discussion by the committee, Picard's email...

  Q.  Which came first, the chicken or the egg?                         A.  Does it really matter if you believe believe in gay marriage? The outpost of left wing totalitarianism raised it’s [trigger warning] ugly little head again in NYC. Mayor de Blasio joined Councilman Danny Dromm from Queens in calling for a boycott of Chick-fil-A restaurants in the city. As a rationale Domm issued the following statement: “Chick-fil-A is anti-LGBT.” This group imparts a strong anti-LGBT message by forcing their employees and volunteers to adhere to a policy that prohibits same-sex love,” he said. “It is outrageous that Chick-fil-A is quietly...

Could the next president of the United States be neither Clinton, Trump, Cruz, or Kasich ... but Thomas Perez? It’s far more likely than you might think. Even before any candidate definitively secures either party’s presidential nomination, 2016 is looking more and more like 1912 all over again. In that fateful year, Theodore Roosevelt -- after four years of bored retirement -- decided that he wanted to be president again. However, Roosevelt’s handpicked successor William Howard Taft refused to yield. Because of the split, even though the Democrats’ dour, arrogant Woodrow Wilson won fewer popular votes than perennial failed...

I knew it! Civil Rights do indeed trump (no pun or endorsement intended) religious freedom! So unless your religion also qualifies as a bona fide minority don’t expect much protection from the Bill of Rights any more. In a rare entrance into a politically charged controversy, first lady Michelle Obama used a commencement speech Saturday at Jackson State University in Mississippi to directly target the state’s recently-passed "religious freedom" bill. "We see it right here in Mississippi -- just two weeks ago -– how swiftly progress can hurtle backward," Obama said. "How easy it is to single out a small...

NEW YORK CITY, New York — Billionaire and 2016 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump told Breitbart News that GOP establishment consultant Karl Rove is so “dishonorable” that the Wall Street Journal should stop him from writing future columns for the publication. “This guy is such a dishonorable guy,” Trump said in his latest exclusive phone interview last week with Breitbart News. “He shouldn’t be allowed to write for the Wall Street Journal.” Rove, earlier that day, had published a piece in the Wall Street Journal, titled: “Vanity Will Be The Donald’s Undoing.” Throughout it, Rove quotes from various interviews that...

Judicial Watch & Allied Educational Foundation to Supreme Court: Protect the Laws that Keep Public Officials Honest Defending the First Amendment against the Obama IRS Only 3 U.S. Airports Require Employee Security Checks JW Gets Props in The Wall Street JournalJudicial Watch & Allied Educational Foundation to Supreme Court: Protect the Laws that Keep Public Officials Honest With a notorious Democrat in the White House, it bears repeating that there are corrupt politicians in both the Republican and Democrat parties. The “corruption caucus” in the political world is both bipartisan and growing. True to our non-partisan educational mission, we...