Free Republic

Aug. 21, 2008 | When I moved into my apartment, in May, the first thing I did was tear out the air conditioners. I don't need air conditioning: My front window is 50 yards from Lake Michigan, and, as any Chicago weatherperson will tell you, "It's cooler by the lake." I can't afford it, either: Three window units can add serious dollars to one's monthly electric bill. But those aren't the real reasons I got rid of the A/C. Air conditioning offends my sense of Northern pride. They have a saying in Maine: "If you can't stand the winters, you...

AFTER a lecture to the Marine Memorial Association last week, a reporter thrust a mike toward me and asked if I thought I should be tried for war crimes for my columns in The Post supporting our military. The reporter - who avoided revealing what outlet he was with - thought he was being wonderfully clever, but what fascinated me about the silly encounter (it was in San Francisco, after all) was how unintentionally revealing it was about the shameless hypocrisy of the left. Think about it: For expressing my views to readers like you on these pages, hardcore leftists...

Gay rights vs. faithful Christians' suits cite bias on job Pete Vere, THE WASHINGTON TIMES Thursday, July 31, 2008 The clash between gay rights laws and religious freedom has acquired two new fronts in recent weeks, both involving Christians who say they were punished on their jobs for actions that reflect religious disapproval of homosexuality.

A pamphlet set to be distributed by the California secretary of state warns voters that if they do not pass Proposition 8 in November to constitutionally define marriage between one man and one woman, thay will face an unexpected consequence: children as young as kindergarten will be subject to mandatory teaching on the virtues of homosexual marriage. Opponents of Proposition 8 are calling the education argument a smokescreen, a scare tactic and a fabrication. Supporters, however, are saying it addresses a reality Californians will face if voters don't stand up and insist on a constitutional, traditional definition of marriage. Randy...

In 2008, Sao Paulo, Brazil hosted the largest homosexual pride parade ever. A bill, already approved in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies and currently being debated in the Senate, demonstrates the type of dictatorship the homosexual movement would like to impose on the Christian world. If this bill were to become law it would punish with imprisonment, anyone who criticizes homosexual ideology or practice. This would empower the homosexual movement worldwide, thus reinforcing their plans here in America. Similarly, it uncovers the true goals of the homosexual movement, and, is thus of pivotal importance to freedom-loving people aroung the globe. Religious...

A total of 24 states allow voters to change laws on their own by collecting signatures and putting initiatives on the ballot. It's healthy that the entrenched political class should face some real legislative competition from initiative-toting citizens. Unfortunately, some special interests have declared war on the initiative process, using tactics ranging from restrictive laws to outright thuggery. - Snip - The initiative is a reform born out of the Progressive Era, when there was general agreement that powerful interests had too much influence over legislators. It was adopted by most states in the Midwest and West, including Ohio and...

The conventional wisdom is that Hollywood has never before been so gaga over any candidate as she is now for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama. In addition to raking in Oprah-level campaign cash, Mr. Obama is making Sen. John McCain, despite the Republican's comedic turns on "Saturday Night Live" and in "The Wedding Crashers," look like an out-of-it grandfather. While it is true that the ratio of Obama-to-McCain bumper stickers in West L.A. is about 250-to-1, there are untold closet Republicans in the entertainment industry who dare not advertise their beliefs in movie studio parking lots. (Unfortunately, car keying is a...

Christian publisher Zondervan is facing a $60 million federal lawsuit filed by a man who claims he and other homosexuals have suffered based on what the suit claims is a misinterpretation of the Bible.

Pelosi: I Want to Bring Back 'Fairness Doctrine' Photo of Ken Shepherd. By Ken Shepherd | June 25, 2008 - 10:38 ET Over at HumanEvents.com, John Gizzi has House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on the record saying that the Democratic caucus, far from being agnostic on the so-called Fairness Doctrine, is actually interested in resurrecting it. What's more, Pelosi herself wants to bring back the policy that could literally silence conservative talk radio. From his June 25 article: At a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor yesterday, I asked Pelosi if Pence failed to get the required signatures on...

Blogs bring out the base in us. The medium is primarily anonymous and the people who post or comment feel freer to tell others what they think. For a good example of what academics think about Christians, the Volokh Conspiracy has demonstrated that much of the academic world is inhabited by people who are the mirror image of Fred Phelps, right down to bigoted rants. It’s very revealing, yet the participants on that website keep on exposing the rotten underbelly of academia without any apparent self-consciousness. Theophobia Academics and Hostility to Religion Academia and Religion More on Academics and Hostility...

- Snip- Evidence from previous and pending cases indicates that the court tends to take an extremely narrow view of people's "free exercise and enjoyment of religion" when they clash with another group's need for equal protection. This would seem particularly true following the In re Marriage Cases ruling, in which the majority equated the ban on same-sex marriage to the now discredited (and unconstitutional) ban on interracial marriages. Religious liberty claims rarely, if ever, have prevailed in the face of complaints about racial discrimination. Conflicts about the rights of gays and those of religious believers demonstrate that these are...

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal. Things are different here. The magazine is on trial. Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things,...

Usually, when a journalist is censored in a Western nation, American news organizations respond with collective outrage. But as a major attack on press freedom unfolds in Canada, America’s mainstream media are silent. Neither the TV networks nor the major newspapers have reported on hearings last week at what amounts to a Stalinesque show trial in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mark Steyn, a Canadian journalist who now lives in New Hampshire and whose column appears in National Review magazine as well as several U.S. and Canadian newspapers, is facing charges before British Columbia’s Human Rights Tribunal. His crime? Spreading “hatred.” The...

Thanks to a little-noticed item in the Federal Register, the Federal Communications Commission may soon be handed the power to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air. There are liberals obsessed with “balancing” Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Mark Levin, and the rest of conservative talk radio, even though plenty of other outlets — the Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and National Public Radio — constantly flog the liberal agenda. The “Hush Rush” crowd’s dream has been to revive the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” which once required any radio station airing a conservative...

Quoting Scripture banned in library community room 'What next? Will board keep patrons from reading Bible?' Posted: June 10, 2008 9:33 pm Eastern © 2008 WorldNetDaily Quoting from the Bible has been banned in a community room at the public library in Clermont County, Ohio, and now a couple who sought to use the facility for a financial planning seminar have brought a court case.snip...However, when Cathy Vandergriff asked in person to use a meeting room for a financial planning meeting, the conversation with the library employee took an unwelcome turn. "When Mrs. Vandergriff indicated that the seminar would be...

AT its best, Western civilization has fostered freedom of speech and of thought. But Canada has a better idea. Last week, a Human Rights Tribunal in British Columbia considered a complaint brought against journalist Mark Steyn for a piece in the Canadian newsweekly Maclean's. The excerpt from Steyn's best-selling book "America Alone" argued that high Muslim birthrates mean Europeans will feel pressure to reach "an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots." The piece was obviously within respectable journalistic bounds. In fact, combining hilarity and profound social analysis, the article could be considered a sparkling model of the polemical art -...

The Canadian government has ordered a Christian pastor to renounce his faith and never again express moral opposition to homosexuality, according to a new report. In a decision handed down just days ago in the penalty phase of the quasi-judicial proceedings run by the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal, evangelical pastor Stephen Boisson was banned from expressing his biblical perspective of homosexuality and ordered to pay $5,000 for "damages for pain and suffering" as well as apologize to the activist who complained of being hurt. According to a report from Pete Vere at the Catholic Exchange, the penalty could foreshadow the...

Gonzalez tenure case: University admin’s credibility in shreds as truth emerges O'Leary UPDATED! Well, the jig is up now, re the Guillermo Gonzalez case. I’ve just seen the whack of documents Discovery Institute is releasing. 1. It appears that the decision had been made to turn Gonzalez down for tenure at Iowa State University before he had actually applied for it, and the reason was his advocacy of intelligent design. Read this story in the Des Moines Register last week by Lisa Rossi ISU President Gregory Geoffroy said in June that Gonzalez’s advocacy of the “intelligent design” concept was not...

In a world where a snob like Michael Moore and a smug manipulator like Al Gore can win Oscars for "documentaries" that play fast and loose with the truth, it's ironic that Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which makes a serious effort to tell the truth about a problem that's seriously damaging our civilization, not only won't get nominated for an Oscar but will certainly be attacked as anti-scientific. This is the opposite of the truth, or very nearly so. Ben Stein's film project was to expose the way rigid insistence on Darwinist dogma is expelling not only brilliant...

The University of Toledo (UT) has sent a message — loud and clear — to potential employees and students: African-American Christians need not apply. UT President Lloyd Jacobs has betrayed his own anti-Christian bigotry and intolerance in what amounts to a prima facie violation of the U.S. Constitution, Ohio's state constitution and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Recently, Jacobs, who portrays himself as a bastion of "tolerance" and "diversity," overtly and shamelessly discriminated against Crystal Dixon, a black, Christian employee, because of her constitutionally protected, factually based and popularly held viewpoint relative to — ironically — civil...

Help Wanted: Lefty College Seeks Right-Wing Prof CU-Boulder Bid to Endow A 'Conservative' Chair Leaves Both Sides Uneasy By STEPHANIE SIMON May 13, 2008; Page A1 BOULDER, Colo. -- How liberal is the University of Colorado at Boulder? The campus hot-dog stand sells tofu wieners. A recent pro-marijuana rally drew a crowd of 10,000, roughly a third the size of the student body. And according to one professor's analysis of voter registration, the 800-strong faculty includes just 32 Republicans. Chancellor G.P. "Bud" Peterson surveys this landscape with unease. A college that champions diversity, he believes, must think beyond courses in...

- Snip -But what if that curriculum is really a disguise for a very different agenda brought to Minneapolis by the Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based gay and transgender advocacy group? What if its lessons have little to do with bullying, and much to do with ensuring that kids as young as age 5 submit to HRC's orthodoxy on family structure, even if it differs from their own parents' view? - Snip - In March, Minneapolis Superintendent Bill Green praised "Welcoming Schools" as "a tool to combat bullying, by focusing on diversity, gender stereotyping and name-calling." But the curriculum's...

The academic left is fond of buzzwords that sound harmless but function in a highly ideological way. Many schools of education and social work require students to have a good "disposition." In practice this means that conservatives need not apply, as highly publicized attempts to penalize right-wing students at Brooklyn College and Washington State University revealed. "Social justice" is an even more useful codeword. Who can oppose it? But some schools made the mistake of spelling out that it means advocacy for causes of the left, including support for gay marriage and adoption, also opposition to "institutional racism," heterosexism, classism...

David Woodward is a political science professor at Clemson University—one who has first-hand experience on how dangerous it can be to speak out in favor of traditional values: He almost lost his job over it. In 1993, Woodward was asked to testify about the political power of homosexual groups in American life. He agreed to serve as an expert witness for the state of Colorado, which was fighting to defend the recently passed Amendment Two, which made it illegal to give protected status based on sexual orientation. In his new book, Why We Whisper: Restoring Our Right to Say It’s...

A case triggered by a school district's instructions to students to "shut up" if they held religious beliefs that did not support the practice of homosexuality is being appealed to the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. Officials with the Alliance Defense Fund have confirmed they are taking the case involving Timothy Morrison to the next level after a panel decided against a judicial ruling endorsing the student's First Amendment rights in the dispute with the Boyd County, Ky., Board of Education. "Christian students shouldn't be prohibited from expressing their beliefs," ADF Senior Legal Counsel Joel Oster...

A community college in New York has been presented with a demand letter from the American Center for Law and Justice to halt a professor's classroom practices that allegedly have damaged at least one student – so far. The letter from the ACLJ targets Suffolk County Community College and will be the prelude to a federal lawsuit if the issue isn't resolved, the organization said. At issue is a professor's demand that students "change their own personal viewpoints or state that they are unsure of whether their own personal beliefs are correct" on religious issues, according to the letter. That...

The equal opportunity laws that are supposedly in place in this country protect potential employees against discrimination based on race, sex, religion and even lifestyle choices. But, when it comes down to it, are these protections really in place? A few years ago, Nathaniel Abraham was fired from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Abraham, an expert in toxicology and developmental biology, also happens to be a “Bible-believing Christian.” His religious beliefs never came up in the interview, and rightfully so. No one gets grilled over other lifestyle choices since many of those are protected. Theoretically, then, a person’s...

The media and entertainment industry is spearheading the anti-Christian persecution in America. Christians have been belittled and have been looked upon as second-rate citizens. As a result, Christians have been misunderstood by many nonbelievers of the Christian faith. Therefore, Christians, according to the Media Research Center in Washington, D.C., are considered to be “cold, intolerant and oppressive.” (1) As a result, media bias has become a serious problem in the Christian community. Thomas Friedman in his article entitled “The Real War” practically declared war on Christianity. According to Joseph Farah in his counter article entitled “The Unreal War,” “Whether he...

Intelligent design theory, or ID, is opening new doors of scientific research, particularly in cancer and other disease research, according to its adherents, but a new movie, "Expelled" starring Ben Stein explores how an "elitist scientific establishment" is apparently muzzling and smearing scientists who publicly discuss ID. The First Amendment is under brutal attack in the scientific community, Ben Stein, a former presidential speechwriter-turned-actor and commentator, says in the film, which opens in theaters on Feb. 12. "I always assumed scientists were free to ask any question, pursue any line of inquiry without fear or reprisal," he says. "But recently,...

Over the last two weeks, leading American atheists have registered complaints about all the attention given to Christmas in the United States. These atheists have issued three challenges. First, they insist that being atheist does not mean being immoral. Second, they want other people to see that atheists are law-abiding, compassionate, and generous to others—that one does not have to be Christian or to feel “the Christmas spirit� to care for the poor and the needy. Third, they insist that monotheists have a harder time being tolerant of others than atheists do. Atheists, they think, are more humble, tolerant, and...

The survival of the most important cave paintings in the world is in doubt because of a severe fungal infection that spread after an air-circulation system was installed to protect them, archaeologists say. The 17,000-year-old paintings known as “the Sistine Chapel of pre-history” - the Lascaux cave in the Dordogne region of southwest France - are being damaged by black spots that are spreading at an alarming rate. Fragments of the cave walls have broken off and some colour tones are fading. Now Unesco is sending a delegation of specialists to the cave to determine whether it should be placed...

Religious right is deadBILL PRESS 26.DEC.07 No matter who becomes the next president of the United States, the American people have already won a great victory — with the total disintegration of the once all-powerful religious right. Starting in 1979 when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, Christian conservatives have been the most powerful voting bloc in the Republican Party. Ironically, they began by casting out of the White House a born-again Christian who continued, as president, his lifelong practice of teaching Sunday school, and replacing him with a divorced and remarried man who seldom stepped inside a church. But...

After catching Harold Meyerson's latest Washington Post hatemongering against religion in general, Christians in particular, and Republicans especially, all I could say was just WOW! This thing is nearly unhinged and if you took the word Christian out and replaced it with any of the favored, protected minorities that the MSM guards like mother hens, it would be indistinguishable from the kind of pure bigotry that would result in Meyerson's utter ostracizing should it have been written about those protected classes. Calling Republicans/Christians torturers, abusers of immigrants, members of the KKK, bigots and even mean, Meyerson skipped only the Nazi...

MISSION VIEJO – A high school honors student and his parents filed a First Amendment lawsuit Wednesday against a Capistrano Valley High School history teacher they say repeatedly made disparaging and religiously intolerant remarks about Christians and traditional Christian viewpoints during class. - Snip - Court papers cite statements tape-recorded by Farnan such as "Conservatives don't want women to avoid pregnancies – that's interfering with God's work" and "When you put on your Jesus glasses, you can't see the truth." -Snip - He railed against Christianity and traditional Christian viewpoints on topics such as birth control, teenage sex, homosexuality and...

A San Juan Capistrano high school student and his parents filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday alleging that his history teacher violated his constitutional rights by making "highly inappropriate" and offensive statements in class regarding Christianity. James Corbett, who teaches European history at Capistrano Valley High School, consistently "demonstrates a sense of hostility toward religion," causing Christian students to "feel ostracized and treated as second-class citizens," according to the lawsuit.. Corbett told students during class that "when you put on your Jesus glasses, you can't see the truth"; said that religion is not "connected with morality"; compared Christians to "Muslim fundamentalists"...

Darwinian Dictatorship by: Malcolm A. Kline, November 30, 2007 Want tenure? Learn to love Charles Darwin. Want to keep your tenure? Work his name into your license plates. Want to keep your job? Never, never cast aspersions upon academia’s favorite butterfly expert. “We need to caution young people and let them know there are consequences for expressing doubt about Darwin,” biologist Caroline Crocker said recently in remarks at the Family Research Council. “I’m going on 50, my career is over.” “I can start over but for young people it can be devastating.” Dr. Crocker was fired from George Mason University...

As the election season proceeds apace, we can expect to see increasing attention to the influence of religious figures on the Republican leadership. It made the headlines when the chancellor of Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian school, endorsed Mitt Romney. Similarly, televangelist Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani was big news. Religious leaders are portrayed by the press as kingmakers in conservative politics. In contrast, we rarely hear about the links between nonbelievers and political power. The assumption is that nonbelievers are disorganized and relatively politically weak. Indeed, this is the explicit lament of some high-profile atheists. In a...

PRIOR LAKE, Minnesota, November 27, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - After being fired for promoting abstinence among students at the school where he worked, ex school supervisor Chris Lind has been elected to the Prior Lake-Savage district school board in Minnesota. Lind, who was a hallway and parking lot supervisor at a local high school and a "conservative Christian" was told by District Human Resource Director Tony Massaros that he could not discuss abstinence from sexual activity with any students, during or after school hours, on or off campus, according to a friend who witnessed the meeting.  Lind was told that...

"TONY BLAIR has admitted that his Christianity played a “hugely important” role during his premiership but he was forced to play down his religious conviction for fear of being seen by the public as “a nutter”. In his most frank television interview about his religious beliefs, Blair confesses he would have found it difficult to do the job of prime minister had he not been able to draw on his faith." "In The Blair Years, the former prime minister, who is expected to convert to Roman Catholicism soon, compares the differing attitude to religion in British politics with that in...

Tony blair has sparked controversy by claiming that people who speak about their religious faith can be viewed by society as "nutters". The former prime minister's comments came as he admitted for the first time that his faith was "hugely important" in influencing his decisions during his decade in power at Number 10, including going to war with Iraq in 2003. Mr Blair complained that he had been unable to follow the example of US politicians, such as President George W. Bush, in being open about his faith because people in Britain regarded religion with suspicion. "It's difficult if you...

Maybe you missed this but the Desert News in Salt Lake City didn't. Harry Reid had some harsh words for Evangelicals calling millions of them "anti-Christian". Read portions of the article below: (the key qote is bolded)Some past prominent LDS Church leaders wrongly pressed conservatism on church members, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday during a press conference at Brigham Young University. The Nevada senator attacked President Bush and evangelical Christians while saying members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints need to worry less about abortion and gay marriage and more about health care, global...

Imagine you own a small business—let’s say a donut shop—and you have an employee who is late for work everyday and is rude to customers. When you fire him, he claims it is really because he is gay—and sues. Or imagine you run a daycare center in your church basement. One day a homosexual applies for a job. When you turn him down, he says you broke the law. Today, both of these stories are simply scenarios. But by the end of the week, they could be reality. Under intense goading from the gay-rights lobby, the House of Representatives is...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice “from local to global level.� This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn’t long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight “oppression,� and sees American society as pervaded by the “global interconnections of oppression.� Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

After an extensive audit, the Internal Revenue Service has exonerated Focus on the Family Chairman James Dobson of accusations from liberal watchdog groups that he violated his organization's non-profit status by endorsing GOP candidates -- including President Bush -- during the 2004 election. "No dings. No criticisms. Not a single allegation was found to have substance," Dobson said regarding charges made against him in 2005 by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and Citizens Project, a Colorado group that states its purpose is "creating a community valuing diversity, equality and religious freedom." [ snip ] CREW's original complaint,...

We are now living in what some scholars call the "post-Christian West."By this they mean that Christianity no longer influences culture in Europe or in North America in a way that it once did. Of course there are many inherited influences still evident in the law, but for the past 50 years Europe, then the United States, has jettisoned Christian influences in arts and entertainment, politic, and education.It is becoming, some scholars say, an "ABC moment" -- "Anything But Christian."While well over 90 percent of Americans still say they believe in God, and many still identify as "Christian," the values...

Newsweek's Anna Quindlen recently wrote that a presidential victory for Rudy Giuliani "wouldn't be a good thing for this country, but his candidacy may wind up being a good thing for his party," which Quindlen obviously believes has been hijacked by the Christian right. Giuliani's strong poll numbers, said Quindlen, perhaps "indicate that the end is nigh for the stranglehold the Leviticus Lobby has had on the GOP." It's no longer surprising that those screaming most loudly against Christianity and its influence on public policy in America often employ the same tactics and represent the same dangers they falsely attribute...

If public opinion isn't on your side, hit your opponent below the belt. This seemed to be the game plan for some Louisiana Democrats, who recently used religion to try and derail Republican rising star Congressman Bobby Jindal's run for the governorship. In a commercial that debuted in mid-August, sponsored by the state's official Democratic Party, the Catholic Jindal is accused of being "anti-Protestant." The unholy ads have run only in the Protestant-heavier north -- to play on Protestant fears without irritating the papists. According to the Almanac of American Politics 2006, "Catholic Cajun parishes (Louisiana has parishes rather than...

EVANSTON, Illinois, August 22, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Academics and transsexual activists turned on a psychology professor after he published a highly controversial explanation that transsexual desires are eroticism based on the "idea of being a woman". In his book "The Man Who Would be Queen," Professor J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University explained that a man's desire to be a woman is based on a sexual desire called "autogynephilia," which he describes as "sexual arousal at the idea of being a woman." He also explained that the term "women trapped in men's bodies" is a misleading way of explaining the...

David French has known for years that college campuses are bastions of anti-evangelical bias. He knew it when he served on the admissions committee at Cornell Law School and watched his colleagues ridicule evangelical applicants as "Bible thumpers" or members of the "God squad." He knew it during his tenure with an education watchdog organization that routinely challenged university speech codes bent on silencing evangelical viewpoints. He knew it when he shifted into his current role as director of the Alliance Defense Fund's Center for Academic Freedom, a position from which he's filed numerous lawsuits on behalf of victimized evangelical...

In Tennessee, Rep. Steve Cohen (D) is finding out the hard way that pastors aren't buying the liberal line on H.R. 1592, the federal "hate crimes" bill. A growing number of ministers are sensing that the wave of support for applying "hate crimes" to sexual orientation spells trouble for religious leaders and their ability to speak freely from the pulpit. Although Cohen is doing his best to reassure Tennessee's churches that they'll be unaffected, the state's faithful are challenging his vote in favor of the bill. Together with a powerful alliance of black and white pastors, congregations have ignited a...