Free Republic

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Two Tennessee abortion clinics will not have to shut down on July 1 after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order. The Tennessean reports (http://tnne.ws/1REsBmk) U.S. District Judge Kevin Sharp issued an order on Friday that blocks the state from enforcing a new law requiring clinics to be licensed as ambulatory surgical treatment centers. The clinics claimed in a hearing there was no way they could obtain the licenses in time to comply with the new law.

ALBANY - Days after getting the right to marry people, Gov. Cuomo will officiate a same-sex marriage Sunday morning an hour before marching in the city gay pride parade. Cuomo will marry David Contreras Turley, 36, and Peter Thiede, 35. "It’s hard to believe everything that’s happened in the last 24 hours,” Turley told the Daily News on Saturday night. “The opportunity arose for us to get married by the governor, and we couldn’t be happier.” Longtime gay rights activist Edie Windsor, who was part of a landmark Supreme Court decision, will deliver the opening remarks at the ceremony, which...

The GOP-majority Supreme Court saved President Barack Obama's bacon Thursday with a political ruling that papered over his signature Affordable Care Act. Writing for the majority in the 6-3 King v. Burwell decision, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that the 900-page law was written behind closed doors with little debate or amendment and thus was "inartfully" drafted. It was the court's obligation, he wrote, to translate bill language limiting the government subsidies to enrollees in "an exchange established by the State" as meaning enrollees in federal exchanges also can get subsidies. Roberts always has been a consummate politician in his...

Scott Walker on Saturday night said that if it were necessary to repeal President Obama's healthcare law, he would urge Republican senators to use the so-called nuclear option to end the filibuster. After formal remarks at the Western Conservative Summit, Walker sat down with talk radio host and author Hugh Hewitt for an onstage interview. "I heard you say Obamacare will be repealed and replaced," Hewitt said. "There are a lot of Republican senators who love the filibuster. Rick Santorum told me you don't need to break the filibuster to repeal Obamacare. But if it's necessary to do so, will...

Spiking the ball. It’s not Barack Obama’s style to win a victory with any sort of humility, you understand. That’s not in his makeup. And there’s really little point in mentioning that he was “opposed” to gay marriage as recently as 2012 when he announced his big evolution on the issue, because everyone knows he wasn’t really opposed at all. He pretended to be until he sensed correctly that the politics of the country were changing and it was OK to admit he was for it - which he had been all along. Anyway, if you’re a Christian who is...

You know,as soon as I read the title of the article written by Andrew Sullivan I was totally steamed. They got what they wanted and now this moaning diatribe,this haranguing and fulsome whining just really crisped my toast days ago when I read this. The mountain was given to them and they now want what? I'm just so totally disgusted by the whole thing & I thought I'd share my disgust. If any conservatives had a bad week with decisions that came down from the Supreme Court on Obamacare ,sanctioned gay marriage & their little legal eagles they want, the...

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday praised the Supreme Court's ruling declaring same-sex couples have a right to marry and suggested that her Republican opponents were being left behind by history. In one of her most partisan speeches since announcing her presidential campaign, Clinton criticized the field of more than a dozen Republican candidates for opposing gay marriage, gun control, immigration reform and women's reproductive rights. "We can sum up the message from the court and the American people in just two words: Move on," she said in a fiery speech to Democratic activists gathered in Northern Virginia...

A district judge in Kansas blocked the state’s ban on “dismemberment abortion” – the first ban of its kind in the United States – on the grounds that prohibiting the procedure would create an “obstacle” for women who want to terminate their pregnancies with brutal dismemberment. Dismemberment is a late-term abortion procedure in which an unborn, living baby is torn to pieces and removed from the uterus. The new law would have prohibited abortionists from using forceps, clamps, scissors and other instruments to cut the unborn baby into pieces prior to removing its remains from the uterus. Lawmakers in Kansas...

Thousands of people across Maryland could lose their Medicaid if they don’t act soon. The deadline to re-enroll is around the corner. […] “I beg you because your life and health may very well depend on it,” said Congressman Elijah Cummings. An urge for Marylanders to be proactive about their Medicaid coverage. By the end of June, more than 13,000 people need to re-enroll—and another 13,000 by the end of July. “Everyone who is enrolled in Medicaid in the old insurance system needs to re-enroll in Maryland Health Connection,” said Lena Hershkovitz. Throughout the year, that’s a total of 300,000...

Justice Anthony Kennedy, being a Roman Catholic, will likely approach the altar for Holy Communion if he attends Mass tomorrow. This is a defining moment for the Roman Church. Will Anthony Kennedy be denied holy communion, based on his attrocious sin of sodomizing marriage?

Dutch campaigners have used a drone to fly abortion pills into Poland. The group, Women on Waves, flew the aircraft from Germany to highlight Poland's restrictive laws against terminating pregnancies. Waiting for the drone on the other side were two Polish women who took the pills, used to induce a miscarriage in the early stages of pregnancy. Abortion was legal in Poland in the Communist era, but outlawed in most cases in 1993. It is only permitted in cases of rape or incest, in cases of irreversible foetal malformation, or if the mother's life is at risk. The drone took...

Full title: Antonin Scalia is unfit to serve: A justice who rejects science and the law for religion is of unsound mind Readers of this column already know that faith-derangement syndrome has stricken the highest levels of the executive branch of government, afflicting President Obama and virtually all his potential successors. Now we have evidence that it has spread to the top organ of the judiciary, the Supreme Court. But first, a clarification. Sufferers of faith-derangement syndrome (FDS) exhibit the following symptoms: unshakable belief in the veracity of manifest absurdities detailed in ancient texts regarding the origins of the cosmos...

When it comes to American Catholic opinions about climate change, a recent poll shows a major gap between whites and Latinos. The Public Religion Research Institute reports that by margins of approximately 20 percent, Latino Catholics are likelier than white Catholics to believe that there is such a thing as global warming; that it’s “due to human activity”; and that it “constitutes a crisis or a major problem.” What’s causing this discrepancy? A false god, suggests writer Patricia Miller. “White Catholics don’t accept the scientific consensus on climate change because it clashes with their other god: the free market,” declared...

There are many ways to spot a fanatic, but a particularly damning one is when, on the rare instance where one admits to acting fanatical, it’s still somehow the victim’s fault. This was on full display in a recent Salon column by Catherine Landis, a Planned Parenthood of Middle & East Tennessee board member and Knoxville Advocates of Reproductive Rights community action team leader. In a piece that stunningly alternates between confessions of abominably unjustified incivility and suggesting it was totally justified, Landis recounts an encounter with a pro-lifer at Tennessee early voting station last November in which she “didn’t...

The nation’s oldest abortion rights advocacy group attacked Gov. Scott Walker and his presidential aspirations on June 18, 2015 with a TV ad called "Crazy Ideas." In it, NARAL Pro-Choice America, formerly the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, made a claim about comments Walker made about abortion and transvaginal ultrasounds. Walker, according to the group, "said that forcing women facing abortion to get invasive ultrasounds was 'just a cool thing.' " Let’s see if that’s what he said. Forced ultrasound law The ad, which NARAL said would run statewide in Iowa and New Hampshire for a week, begins...

In the United States, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act requires abortionists and staff to give medical care to a child accidentally born alive during an abortion. However, Live Action has discovered through undercover investigations that many abortionists ignore this law. Babies are also born alive after abortions in Europe. The ACLJ, which is promoting legislation to protect these infants, has compiled testimonies from nurses and midwives. MK, a student nurse in France, tells the following story: The child was born alive, and to prevent it from crying, the doctor quickly covered his face. He was then taken into a...

Earlier this week, religious employers suffered another loss at the hands of the coercive Obamacare Health and Human Services mandate. A U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit panel ruled against East Texas Baptist University and a group of other non-profit religious employers in their challenge to the Obamacare requirement that they facilitate health care coverage for employees that includes contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs and devices, or fill out a form notifying the Department of Health and Human Services that they have a religious objection to providing such coverage. This so-called “accommodation” then initiates the process of the government...

Earlier this week, the head of the Democratic party attempted to force Americans,including churches, to pay for abortions. On Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee considered the bill making appropriations for Labor, Health and Human Services and Education. The legislation contains a number of important pro-life policies and Democrat Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz filed an amendment to strike the conscience protections contained in Sec. 530 of the appropriations bill. The language in that section comes from a pro-life bill, H.R. 940, the Healthcare Conscience Rights Act, and provides relief from the conscience violations imposed by the HHS Preventive Services Mandate. It...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell guaranteed a vote on a bill imposing a federal ban on abortions after 20 weeks of gestation, telling a conservative crowd in Washington that a vote on the divisive legislation would be “good news for our entire country.” Though the bill passed the House earlier this year after a row over rape-reporting requirements in the legislation, the Senate’s version from Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is a long-shot to pass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. Several moderate Republicans like Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois and Susan Collins of Maine are likely to oppose the legislation, and only a...

If a woman is seeking to have an abortion in the state of Missouri, it is required that she be given medical information on abortion, how the fetus can feel pain by 22 weeks and wait 72 hours before having the abortion. For Satanists, these restrictions are unconstitutional and violate their “religious” beliefs. Uh, ok. So the Satanists filed a federal lawsuit this week against the governor of Missouri and the state’s attorney general asking for a religious exemption to the law. They don’t believe that a human prenatal child is a separate, living being, as science has proven, and...