Free Republic

An Indian immigrant says his son was forced to violate Hindu dietary rules by eating a beef taco at a Cincinnati public school. Ashish Gandhi has filed a complaint with the U.S. Justice Department alleging religious discrimination, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported Sunday. Gandhi, who says a school employee force-fed the taco to his son, called it an "intentional act of religious bigotry" by the Academy of World Languages. Gary Winters, a lawyer for the Cincinnati Public Schools, says the 5-year-old boy selected the taco himself. "At most, there was an error made on a single occasion, for which CPS's personnel...

Reporting from Washington -- The Supreme Court narrowed, but did not overturn, the historic Voting Rights Act today, ruling that municipalities across the South that have had a clean record for the last decade can seek an exemption from the law. The decision came as a relief to civil rights advocates, who feared the high court was prepared to invalidate the law. Since 1965, the Voting Rights Act has required states and municipalities in the South to "pre-clear" any changes in their voting or election standards with the Justice Department in Washington. Three years ago, Congress extended this provision for...

PRESIDENT Obama is attacking a red herring when he defends his decision to send the worst terrorists at Guantanamo to United States prisons by saying the likelihood of escape from secure federal facilities is very low. Of course it is. No rope ladder or prison laundry truck is likely to do the trick. But when it comes to federal judges, we can't be so sure. The reason we sent the terrorists to Guantanamo in the first place, rather than bring them onto US soil, was never really connected to worries that they might escape. The Bush administration feared, quite correctly,...

Obama told human rights advocates at the White House on Wednesday that he was mulling the need for a “preventive detention” system that would establish a legal basis for the United States to incarcerate terrorism suspects who are deemed a threat to national security but cannot be tried...

Black clergy have long opposed the march toward legal same-sex marriages. Now, they’re also challenging the growing efforts of gay-marriage supporters to frame the issue as a civil rights cause. The Rev. William Gillison, pastor of Mount Olive Baptist Church, a large African-American congregation on East Delevan Avenue, said he is insulted by the comparison. “We know what we have gone through as an ethnic group. We feel the terminology, the definition itself, has really been hijacked,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s just another ploy to garner more support from people who may not understand what the civil rights struggle was...

Authorities sought to arrest the mother of a 13-year-old boy with cancer who refuses chemotherapy after she fled with her son and missed a court hearing Tuesday on his welfare. A judge issued an arrest warrant and ordered that Daniel Hauser be placed in a foster home and be sent for an immediate examination by a pediatric oncologist so he can get treated for Hodgkins lymphoma.

America's racial problems are persistent and vexing, and since the 1960s, the nation has used a powerful weapon to fix them: the ideas developed during the civil rights movement. Courts and government agencies enforce legal prohibitions against discrimination; private businesses and universities fashion their own diversity policies based on civil-rights principles. Even private individuals think about race relations in civil-rights terms: we aspire to the ideal of "colorblindness," and condemn the evils of discrimination and bias... --snip-- But in the face of today's most severe racial inequities, the civil rights approach is nearly powerless. For example, many civil rights activists...

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton will deliver the keynote address at the Major League Baseball Beacon Awards Luncheon during Civil Rights Game Weekend in Cincinnati, MLB announced Wednesday. Notables Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron and Bill Cosby will be honored with the MLB Beacon of Change, Life and Hope, respectively, at the Luncheon, which will be held at the Duke Energy Center on June 20.

May 5, 2009by: Natural Born Conservative "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Natural rights (also called moral rights or inalienable rights) are rights which are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of a particular society or polity. In contrast, legal rights (sometimes also called civil rights or statutory rights) are rights conveyed by a particular polity, codified into legal statutes by some form of legislature, and as such...

Where to begin..... I OC everywhere I can legally do so, and when my brother said he wanted to buy some bricks for a yard project I found no illegality about carrying to Menards as it did not fall under any of the carry restrictions in Wisconsin, AND it met all the criteria I had set forth for places I would be willing to go armed, private property with an entrance from their parking lot. I grabbed my firearm and unloaded and encased it in the truck, my brother drove to Menards. I loaded and holstered the firearm, then entered...

The ever-vigilant ACLU, notorious for defending indefensible fringe behaviors, has a new cause célèbre--public nudity. Last time I checked, my common sense said public nudity is not normal or practical. This latest ACLU lunacy stems from last year’s Halloween high jinks on the part of “Naked Pumpkin Runners,” 12 Boulder, Colo. pranksters running around nude with nothing but pumpkins on their heads. The pumpkin clad streakers were ticketed for indecent exposure. Due to the Colorado’s strict sex offender laws, these bare-bottom trotters could have landed on the state sex offender registry and been lumped together with bona-fide scumbags guilty of...

George Orwell's "Animal Farm" introduced the absurd proposition that "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Now comes a small utility district in Texas to challenge a situation in which Congress treats some American states as more equal than others. The utility district, which argued its case before the Supreme Court Wednesday, is right. In Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress required nine mostly Southern states, along with parts of seven others, to ask permission (or "preclearance") from the Justice Department whenever they make even the slightest change in any election...

The jailers of the 19th century — even in the pre-Civil War South — largely abandoned the practice of imprisoning people for falling into debt as counterproductive and ultimately barbaric. In the 1970s and ’80s, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that incarcerating people who can’t pay fines because of poverty violates the U.S. Constitution. Apparently, though, some states and county jails never got the memo. Welcome to the debtors’ prisons of the 21st century. “Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son,” the New York Times...

Wednesday April 22 saw a very interesting poll released by Rasmussen. This poll shows that 60% of Americans believe that the Government has too much power. 60% also say they believe that tax cuts help the economy. 51% have a favorable view on the Tax Day Tea Parties that were held last week. Clearly, more than half of Americans are at the very least concerned with what the government is doing, and how much power it has. This is now a civil rights issue, if only because more than half of Americans are not supportive of the governments’ plans. On...

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is asking the Supreme Court to overrule long-standing law that stops police from initiating questions unless a defendant's lawyer is present, another stark example of the White House seeking to limit rather than expand rights. The administration's action — and several others — have disappointed civil rights and civil liberties groups that expected President Barack Obama to reverse the policies of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, after the Democrat's call for change during the 2008 campaign. At the same time, the administration acknowledges that the decision "only occasionally prevents federal prosecutors from obtaining appropriate...

Abortion Permanently a Crime in the Dominican Republic, Pro-life Victory Comes with a Vote of 167 to 32 SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic, April 22 /Christian Newswire/ -- In response to recent efforts by international pro-abortion groups seeking to decriminalize abortion in the Dominican Republic, legislators permanently enshrined the right to life for pre-born humans by rewriting the Constitution of the Dominican Republic with the words "the right to life is inviolable from conception until death." The vote of 167 to 32 was held yesterday afternoon and served as a major victory to those working to protect all human life. A...

The nation's largest civil rights organizations said Monday that they were profoundly disappointed by the Obama administration's decision to boycott the U.N. conference on racism this week in Geneva. After weeks of discussion, the White House announced Saturday that it would not send a delegation to the Durban Review Conference because of objectionable language in the gathering's official document. There had been concern that the document and speakers at the conference would be critical of Israel, because at the last race summit in South Africa in 2001, some Middle Eastern states compared Zionism to racism. On Monday, several diplomats walked...

Congress shall make no law establishing articles of faith, or a mode of worship, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition to the government for the redress of grievances. ~ Proposed Bill of Rights, James Madison 14 Sep 1789 In the mid to late 20th century a great many technological advancements changed American society. None had greater impact than the advent of Radio and Television, and its widespread use. It created the opportunity for a far greater dissemination...

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind...

WASHINGTON—Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King of the Civil Rights Division announced today that Thomas Houston, former Chief of the Gary, Ind., Police Department, was sentenced to 41 months in prison followed by two years of supervised release for violating the civil rights of a Gary resident in June 2007. Houston was convicted in Sept. 2008 of assaulting the victim, identified in court documents as V.A., by striking and kicking him in the stomach while he was handcuffed, resulting in contusions to his face, head, chest and abdomen. Houston, a 42-year veteran of the department, had been chief for just...

Everyone has heard the term “Civil Rights”. The first thing that comes to mind for most of us is the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s that rightly ended segregation. But really, what are “Civil Rights”? Where are they guaranteed us? Most importantly what do they mean to us today? These are fundamental questions we as Americans need to be asking and teaching our children, and we are failing miserably. It should be shocking to find a poll done in 2006 by the McCormick Freedom Museum that found 22% of people knew the names of the 5 Simpsons from the...

Conservative principles are sufficiently established in today’s political debates that they appeal to people of all races and creeds when presented fairly. So it is disappointing to read Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, arguing conservatism has little to offer black Americans. In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, he writes, "In an era when even failed moral activism is redemptive -- and thus a source of moral authority and power -- conservatism stands flat-footed with only discipline to offer." Conservatism, "with its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society," Steele writes, offers no...

Faith organizations and individuals who view homosexuality as sinful and refuse to provide services to gay people are losing a growing number of legal battles that they say are costing them their religious freedom. The lawsuits have resulted from states and communities that have banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. Those laws have created a clash between the right to be free from discrimination and the right to freedom of religion, religious groups said, with faith losing. They point to what they say are ominous recent examples: * A Christian photographer was forced by the New Mexico Civil Rights Commission...

Frank Ricci -- a firefighter in New Haven, Conn. -- spent months listening to study tapes as he drove to work and in the evenings, preparing for a promotional test. It was a once-a-decade chance to move up to a command rank in the fire department. Ricci earned a top score but no promotion. The city had coded the test takers by race, and of the top 15 scorers, 14 were white and one was Latino. Since there were only 15 vacancies, it looked as though no blacks would be promoted. After a racially charged debate that stretched over four...

One day a man woke up and decided he'd had enough. Things would have to change. He was bone-weary of discrimination and shame and reproach. The way he could feel people looking at him, mocking him — sometimes subtly, sometimes not. The way people talked about him, about people like him. The sneering, caricatured representations in movies. Everywhere, the pressure, the rejection — singling him out as a second-class citizen, as substandard, as (at best) silly and ridiculous, or (at worst) weak and deficient. Not good enough. But it was all ignorance and lies. He was born this way. God...

Obama Drafting Bill to Take Control of the Internet!!! This is some freakin’ Orwellian stuff! If this bill goes through and gives power to Obama to control the Internet, you can rest assured that conservative bloggers and websites will be shut down left and right! Post a link to this article wherever you visit today and email it to everyone you know! This is war!!! A bill to shift cybersecurity to White House by Stephanie Condon - news.cnet.com Forthcoming legislation would wrest cybersecurity responsibilities from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and transfer them to the White House, a proposed...

March 16, 2009, 4:00 a.m. A Leadership of Cowards?Why is Eric Holder embarrassed about enforcing civil rights in Noxubee County? By Hans A. von Spakovsky Attorney General Eric Holder calls the U.S. “a nation of cowards� because we “do not talk enough about race.� I find this ironic, since the Justice Department seems embarrassed about a recent judgment in its favor by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. U.S. v. Ike Brown is a major Voting Rights Act case involving intentional race-based discrimination by local officials in Noxubee County, Miss. When the Fifth Circuit issued its...

Many surprised by event billed as diversity presentationAlveda King speaks about abortion Tuesday in Warriner Some students at Alveda King's speech Tuesday night did not expect a strictly literal interpretation of the advertised "life affirming choices" speech. The niece of Dr. Martin Luther King spoke out strongly against abortion at her "Can the Dream Survive?" presentation in Warriner Hall's Plachta Auditorium. Some students were surprised to learn that was the topic of her lecture. Several of the about 650-person audience walked out. "I felt a little misled personally," said Flint senior Detrone Turner, who said he thought the speech was...

President Obama's rise caps forty years of building new 'nations' from one America, as America's left adapted to the rise of civil rights, and built a power base from fanning discontent. Newsweek cheers, "We are all socialists now!" MSNBC's Jim Cramer calls Barack Obama's budget a "radical agenda" and points out "This is the greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a President." None of this should be a surprise to anybody who was paying attention to Obama's Hawaii links to the Communist Party, USA or his years of Chicago work with the Democratic Socialists of America. But many voters --...

Civil Rights: The open-borders crowd eagerly awaits the nomination of one of its own to a key Justice Department post, a man who has dedicated his life to promoting illegal immigrant "rights."President Obama is expected to appoint Thomas Saenz as the nation's top civil-rights enforcer. It's a key appointment because Obama has promised to "reinvigorate" the division Saenz will lead. And the Civil Rights Division carries a wide-ranging portfolio, covering everything from hate crimes and police misconduct to voting rights and redistricting laws. All this power will likely be turned over to Saenz, who was a top lawyer for a...

(CNN) -- Don Black said he despises Barack Obama. And he said he believes illegal aliens undermine the economic fabric of the United States. Black, a 55-year-old former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, isn't the only person who holds such firm beliefs, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which today released its annual hate group report. The center's report, "The Year in Hate," found the number of hate groups grew by 54 percent since 2000. The study identified 926 hate groups -- defined as groups with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people --...

It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. Why? It was the Democrats who Dr. King was fighting, and he would not have joined the Democratic Party, the party of segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. To understand why MLK was a Republican, let’s take a walk through history.

Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918, by Jeffrey B. Perry (Columbia University Press, 624 pp., $37.50) If you were a black Harlemite in the late nineteen-teens, your favorite black leader was likely a short, coal-black West Indian famous for blazingly eloquent orations on street corners and in meeting halls. Before radio and television, soapbox oratory amounted to much more than the small-change affair it usually is today; speaking didactically at great length in the open air was how one got his message out. And as a young Henry Miller recalled, “there was no one in those days who...

TAMPA - After President Barack Obama won the election, people flooded gun stores because of speculation that he may limit gun ownership or raise taxes on them. Even though neither has happened, the amount of people wanting to get their hands on a gun hasn't gone down. Scott Patrick is the General Manager of the Shoot Straight gun range in Tampa. He says the number of people coming into his store is still going up. "For whatever reason, whether it's the economy or crime, people don't feel safe," he said. Patrick is having serious trouble keeping all kinds of fire...

Warning: This article contains sexually explicit language. I’ve been a libertarian my entire adult life. Libertarianism, as I’ve been an apologist for it, is a philosophy promoting individual rights, civil liberties, and the freedom to have manifest destiny over one’s own life and property. I am opposed to the government telling people what they can do with their minds and bodies. I am consistent on this whether the issue is consensual intimate relations between adults, or the freedom to self-medicate and self-entertain oneself using the agricultural or pharmaceutical product of one’s choice, or the responsibility of parents to choose...

WHY WE DON'T CELEBRATE 'HISTORIANS DAY'February 18, 2009Being gracious winners, this week, liberals howled with delight at George Bush for coming in seventh-to-last in a historians' ranking of the presidents from best to worst. This was pretty shocking. Most liberals can't even name seven U.S. presidents. Being ranked one of the worst presidents by "historians" is like being called "anti-American" by the Nation magazine. And by "historian," I mean a former member of the Weather Underground, who is subsidized by the taxpayer to engage in left-wing political activism in a cushy university job. So congratulations, George Bush! Whenever history professors...

Few cases better illustrate how dysfunctional this country's immigration and “justice” systems are today than that of Roger Barnett - a Cochise, Ariz., man who is being sued in federal court by a group of illegal aliens who accuse him of violating their “civil rights” for holding them at gunpoint after catching them trespassing on his property. The illegals, who are suing Barnett with the assistance of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), seek $32 million for civil-rights violations, the infliction of emotional distress, and other things - $1 million in actual damages and $1 million in...

Muzzammil “Mo” HASSAN, the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV Muzzammil “Mo” HASSAN, the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, a Buffalo, NY based Islamic television Network he helped pioneer in 2004 amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light, reportedly admitted to police that he beheaded his wife at the television station yesterday afternoon.The victim was identified as Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37, who just last month, filed for and received an order of protection against her husband. According to police, HASSAN walked into the Orchard Park police station shortly after...

A House committee held an important hearing Thursday morning on the issue of "libel tourism." That's the practice of bringing libel suits against American authors in other nations, particularly the United Kingdom, where First Amendment protections do not apply and where the burden of proof is placed on the defendant rather than on the plaintiff. Saudi Arabian businessman Khalid bin Mahfouz has brought several such lawsuits, winning a default judgment against American researcher Rachel Ehrenfeld for her book Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It, and forcing a Cambridge University Press to destroy copies of the...

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the far left anti-gun group under investigation for voter fraud, could be eligible to receive millions, if not billions of dollars from the economic bailout bill that passed out of the House of Representatives. ACORN was an aggressive supporter of Barack Obama -- who had served as the group's legal counsel and even trained ACORN in "community organizing" -- in the presidential election. The Obama campaign even paid the group $800,000 for "voter turnout," the very activities that came under scrutiny by the FBI. In October 2008, ACORN's Las Vegas office...

Remember these two names: (1) The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and (2) U.S. District Judge John Roll. The former is representing a gang of 11 illegal immigrants who claim that their civil rights were violated after trespassing on the land of a U.S. citizen, during which they destroyed property, left garbage and human waste, and killed cattle. The latter is a crap-for-brains judge who rejected the property owner’s notion to have the charges dropped. Here’s the story from today’s Washington Times. This really makes me weep for my country: An Arizona man who has waged a...

From the Black Panther Party to the Nation of Islam, to Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa Movement,” to the angry black male in Compton, to the low self-esteemed black female in Brooklyn, to the warehouse workers in Chicago, to the plodding assembly line workers deep down in Mississippi, blacks everywhere, with sound validity in some cases, have been irate at the “white man” for intensifying the black man’s plight. Even after generations of manumission, blacks have been plagued by overt racism, hate, suffered violence and aspersions by public figures of authority, anathematized and emotionally mentally, even physically garroted by whites...

I missed Clintonite moldy oldie-turned-Obama economic adviser Robert Reich’s testimony a few weeks ago on how the government should spend federal stimulus money. The Berkeley professor engaged in academic fantasy land talk about getting all the cash out to workers as quickly as possible — a pipe dream debunked by the CBO report I mentioned in my column yesterday. Even more noteworthy, however, were the comments Reich made about which workers deserve the stimulus bucks most. Reich’s proposal exposes the lie that the Obama administration is actually interested in revitalizing basic infrastructure for the good of the economy. No, what...

Barack Hussein Obama’s wholesale support for the LGBT community is front and center on his agenda. Barely day 2 of his administration and the insanity begins. America’s social and moral fabric is being assaulted as never before. The consequences of these policies will have devastating effects on America’s future and all our freedoms. Madness, sheer madness!

In the article a point is made that, as Christians, we must pray for our leaders….with the focus being Mr. Obama. The posting of this article is to ask a hard question… Why, as Christians would we pray for Obama, "that God will grant you Solomon-like wisdom in all of the decisions you make" when Obama knows the truth and refuses make the correct biblical decisions? In other words, it would be like the Jews of Germany wishing Hitler well and praying that he would be granted wisdom in his actions to govern the country...we know the price the Jews...

It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: Slavery, Secession, Segregation and now Socialism. It was the Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery and passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats started the...

Today is Martin Luther King Day, a time to reflect on the struggles and triumphs of man’s quest for equality of opportunity. A little-known piece of this history is the politics of the civil rights struggle has much in common with Hawai`i’s path to statehood. In 1959 the 85th Congress of the United States voted the Territory of Hawai`i into the Union. Despite overwhelming support by 94% of Hawai`i voters in a 1959 statehood plebiscite, and very strong support in two earlier statehood plebiscites, the U.S. Senate debated the admission of Hawai`i and Alaska in a way that mirrored the...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2009/January/09-ag-052.html Arrests Made in Springfield, Mass., Church Arson WASHINGTON – Three individuals were arrested this morning in relation to a church arson on Nov. 5, 2008, in Springfield, Mass. Benjamin Haskell, 22, Michael Jacques, 24, and Thomas Gleason, 21, all of Springfield, Mass., were arrested early this morning on a civil rights violation, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General Grace Chung Becker; U.S. Attorney Michael J. Sullivan; Glenn N. Anderson, Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives - Boston Field Division; Warren T. Bamford, Special Agent in Charge...

<p>WASHINGTON -- Nine Muslim passengers removed from a flight from Washington to Florida after other passengers reported hearing a suspicious remark about airplane security.</p> <p>AirTran Airways spokesman Tad Hutcheson called the incident on the New Year's Day flight from Reagan National Airport to Orlando, Fla., a misunderstanding, but defended the company's response. He said the airline followed federal rules and did nothing wrong.</p>

At issue in the Ledbetter case was the deadline for filing charges under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Supreme Court did not deny that Ms. Ledbetter had suffered discrimination, but said she should have filed her claim within 180 days of "the alleged unlawful employment practice" -- the initial decision to pay her less than men performing similar work. The Supreme Court rejected the argument that each paycheck was a violation of the law. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the statute of limitations must be strictly interpreted to protect employers...