Free Republic

A revealing reminder of the provincial, bubbled leftists that run our media can be found in an NBC News piece profiling Olympic gold medal skier David Wise. NBC informs us in its headline that what led Wise to Olympic gold was his "alternative lifestyle." NBC was apparently surprised to learn that, at 23-years-old, Wise is already a husband and father. At such a young age, Wise has the lifestyle of an adult. He wears a Baby Bjorn baby carrier around the house. He also attends church regularly and says he could see himself becoming a pastor a little later down...

On the heels of a public university censoring a pro-life club comes word of a public high school attempting the same. Intervention by pro-life attorneys helped the University of Alabama quickly see the error of its ways. I expect the same will prompt Wilson High School in Tacoma, Washington, to come to its senses as well. Wilson Students for Life has been having trouble with censorship ever since its founding last year. But when school administrators rejected two Students for Life of America posters WSFL chose to promote its club last fall, the group turned to the Thomas More Society...

Just read this and weep for our future. David Wise is at the top of his sport. He’s always smiling among his friends and competitors, however, he’s not like the rest of the field. He is mature. Not to say the rest of the freestyle skiers of halfpipe are not mature, but Wise is mature far beyond his years. At only twenty-three years old, he has a wife, Alexander, who was waiting patiently in the crowd, and together they have a two-year-old daughter waiting for them to return to their home in Reno, Nevada.At such a young age, Wise has...

A San Diego council member has become the first openly gay Republican to include his same-sex partner in a campaign advertisement. Carl DeMaio, who is currently attempting to win the Republican primary, and challenge Democrat Rep. Scott Peters, has featured footage of his partner, Johnathan Hale, and himself at a pride parade in 2012 in a campaign spot that was released on Thursday. GOP campaign officials and Elizabeth Wilner, who tracks campaign ads for the nonpartisan firm Kantar Media, told The Wall Street Journal that to their knowledge this was the first political advertisement from either party which included a...

North Carolina's anti-abortion license plate is unconstitutional because the state doesn't provide the same forum for motorists on the other side of the contentious issue, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. A three-judge panel of the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a federal judge's ruling that the "Choose Life" license plate is unconstitutional. Lawmakers approved the anti-abortion plates in 2011 and rejected proposals to offer plates with messages "Trust Women" and "Respect Choice." That constitutes "blatant viewpoint discrimination squarely at odds with the First Amendment," wrote appeals court Judge James A. Wynn, who is from North...

Restrictions, harassment, and intimidation towards people who practice their religion increased in every major region of the world in 2012 except the Americas, with Christians the major target, says a new report by the Pew Research Center. “Muslims and Jews experienced six-year highs in the number of countries in which they were harassed by national, provincial or local governments,” the study found, but Christians continue to be the world’s most oppressed religious group, with persecution against them reported in 110 countries. A recent report by the Christian group Open Doors noted that “North Korea remains the world’s most restrictive nation...

"The children belong to all of us," Paul Reville, an education professor at Harvard and former Massachusetts secretary of Education, said Friday in explaining why states should adopt the Common Core State Standards Initiative. "What we're doing at the national level ... is what a lot of our states thought made sense individually. Why should some towns in cities or states have no standards or low standards and others have extremely high standards when the children belong to all of us and would move. And the same logic applies to the nation," he said, making the case for national standards....

The data breach that struck our company spotlighted the sophistication of criminal hacker networks operating across the globe. We know the attack created significant concerns for millions of customers. We will learn from this incident and we will work to make Target, and the wider business community, more secure in the future. One step American businesses could now take that would dramatically improve the security of all credit and debit cards: adoption of chip-enabled smartcards. The technology is already widely used throughout the world. For many reasons, the United States has been slow to embrace the technology at home. We...

HOLLYWOOD, CA, January 30, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Hollywood loves an underdog – unless, it seems, that underdog is a Christian. That's the reaction of one Christian film expert to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' decision to strip the family-friendly motion picture Alone Yet Not Alone of its Oscar nomination for best song. “It's hazing,” Dr. Ted Baehr, the founder and publisher of the pro-family Movieguide and chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, told LifeSiteNews.com. Alone Yet Not Alone is based on a true story about how a family's Christian faith helped them survive after being...

Liberals only enforce laws they support. Check it out: In what appears to be the latest example in a trend of attorneys general refusing to defend laws passed by legislatures and voters, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring announced Thursday that he will no longer defend his state’s constitutional amendment defining marriage solely as the union of one man and one woman. But a leading traditional marriage advocate is blasting Herring for casting aside the duties of his office to pursue a partisan agenda. As a member of the state senate, Herring voted for the 2006 state constitutional amendment that defines...

Police would be able to tap into private video camera recordings from San Jose residents who agree to provide access to authorities under a new proposal that would expand investigators' watchful eye over the city but already is raising big brother-type privacy concerns.

Ford's Global VP/Marketing and Sales, Jim Farley, said something both sinister and obvious during a panel discussion about data privacy today at CES, the big electronics trade show in Las Vegas. Because of the GPS units installed in Ford vehicles, Ford knows when its drivers are speeding, and where they are while they're doing it. Farley was trying to describe how much data Ford has on its customers, and illustrate the fact that the company uses very little of it in order to avoid raising privacy concerns: "We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it....

Parents are threatening legal action against a Southern California school district after their six-year-old son was told he could not pass out candy canes with religious messages taped to them because "Jesus is not allowed in school." Isaiah Martinez, a six-year-old student at Merced Elementary School in West Covina, Calif., arrived to school on Dec. 13, planning to pass out candy canes with religious messages to his fellow students in celebration of the upcoming Christmas season. After the boy's teacher consulted with the school principal, he reportedly told the student that he could not pass out the religious messages because...

by John Urban | Top Right News Religious freedom advocates are calling on the West Covina Unified School District to adopt policy changes and issue a formal apology after an alleged incident involving bullying against a Christian student.Advocates for Faith & Freedom, an Irvine-based nonprofit law firm, issued a letter Monday on behalf of Isaiah Martinez, a first grader at Merced Elementary School who took traditional candy canes as Christmas gifts for his teacher, Valerie Lu, and classmates on Dec. 13, 2013, according to attorney Robert Tyler. Each candy cane came with a message attached that recited the history...

“[A security camera] doesn’t respond to complaint, threats, or insults. Instead, it just watches you in a forbidding manner. Today, the surveillance state is so deeply enmeshed in our data devices that we don’t even scream back because technology companies have convinced us that we need to be connected to them to be happy.” — Pratap Chatterjee, journalist What is most striking about the American police state is not the mega-corporations running amok in the halls of Congress, the militarized police crashing through doors and shooting unarmed citizens, or the invasive surveillance regime which has come to dominate every aspect...

A church is in a clash with Nevada County after being told to take down a sign with an American flag and a message to support the troops. Simple Truth Church put up the sign to cover an old, rundown billboard. However the “Support Our Troops” sign is becoming quite controversial. If the church doesn’t remove the sign, it could be fined.

Don’t say Christmas. That’s the message that was conveyed to a group of soldiers at Camp Shelby by an equal opportunity officer from the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, according to a soldier who attended a recent briefing. “It’s unbelievable that the Army would ban ‘Christmas’ like it’s a bad word,” said Michael Berry, an attorney with the Liberty Institute, a legal firm representing the unidentified soldier. Two weeks ago, a routine meeting was held at the Mississippi base with various leaders of the 158th Infantry Brigade. During the meeting, they discussed an upcoming Christmas football tournament. The equal opportunity...

Christian baker in Colorado refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. A judge is now ordering him to do so or face financial penalties. Surely there are plenty of bakers who would bake a cake for David Mullins and Charlie Craig, the gay men who wanted the cake. But they went to Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver, CO. When Phillips declined because of his religious beliefs, Mullins and Craig went to the ACLU, which in turn complained to the state that Phillips was discriminating. There will be no accommodation between gay rights activists and those seeking...

It happened Dec. 2, 2013, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. LifeSiteNews.com broke the story with the headline: “Violent mob of topless pro-abort feminists attacks praying men defending cathedral.” The raw footage is disturbing to the extreme (warning: viewer discretion advised for nudity, lesbian lewdness, and violence. A censored version is available in this WND story.) Both the video and the story have since gone viral. WND summarizes the attacks as follows: “Chanting, ‘Get your rosaries out of our ovaries,’ a mob of pro-abortion feminists – many of whom were topless with Nazi swastikas on their chests and foreheads – attacked and...

Imagine if an activist group blanketed a major city with 55 billboards urging that illegal aliens go back to their own country. Or that homosexuality is a crime against nature. Or that Muslims are responsible for most of the world’s terrorist attacks. The mainstream media would be all over the story. Organizations – like La Raza, like GLAAD, like CAIR – would organize protests. President Obama would publicly condemn the billboards (while defending illegals, homosexuals and Islam). And the sponsors of the billboards would be branded a “hate group.” Yet, there has been little outrage over the 55 billboards that...