Free Republic

Q. My Sister’s Parenting: My sister has this idea that she shouldn’t confine her son to traditional gender stereotypes. Recently she started dressing him in feminine clothing. He is 4 years old and gets teased at his day care and has expressed many times how much he hates his dresses and pink tutus. She keeps telling him the other children are wrong to tease him and he should be proud of dressing that way. What can I say to her without insulting her parenting skills? A: Your sister’s behavior will not have your son embrace her ideals of gender fluidity,...

Toys Я Us is pulling its four collectible dolls based on characters from AMC’s hit series “Breaking Bad” after taking heat from a Florida mom who launched a petition campaign last week. The dolls are based on the series about Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who turns into a crystal meth dealer, and his sidekick Jesse Pinkman. The figures have a detachable bag of cash and a bag of methamphetamines.Toys Я Us, which is based in Wayne, New Jersey, told The Associated Press late Tuesday that the dolls are being removed immediately from its website and shelves. …

Boy is it getting ugly. As democrat candidates lose ground, they become more desperate and vicious. Wendy Davis has already derided Greg Abbott for being in a wheelchair and now she slides right into the gutter: Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis earlier this month was pilloried in the press for her attack ad that prominently highlighted the fact that her Republican opponent Attorney General Greg Abbott uses a wheelchair. Davis took her attacks to a new level on Monday by strongly implying Abbott would support an interracial marriage ban, despite the fact that Abbott is married to a Latina....

Dressing up like Wolverine or Cersei Lannister is probably more fun than scouring the classifieds for menial jobs. Imagine you're a college graduate stuck in a perpetually lousy economy. That's a problem Japanese twenty-somethings have faced for more than 20 years. Two decades of stagnation after the collapse of the 1980s real-estate and stock bubbles — combined with labor laws making it tough to fire older workers — have relegated vast numbers of Japanese young adults to low-paying, temporary contract jobs. Many find themselves living with their parents well into their twenties and beyond, unmarried and childless. Then again, they...

A few days ago President Obama, in an interview he gave France's Canal+ TV Channel, said that the American people need to be better educated about Islam, since US could and should be regarded as a Muslim country. He said that the number of Muslims residing in the US makes it "one of the biggest Muslim nations". In reality the US has one of the smallest percentages of Muslims of any Western country. The number of Muslims in the US is approximately 4.5 million, 1.5% of the population, one of the smallest minorities in the US. Since there are approximately...

Apple and Facebook say they'll shell out out as much as $20,000 for women to put their parenthood plans on ice. The firms also hope the incentive will help women balance child-rearing and work life. However, even as success rates continue to rise, there are no guarantees the method will lead to conception down the road.

Over the past few years, General Mills has positioned itself as something like the anti-Chick-fil-A, celebrating LGBT pride and vehemently opposing Minnesota’s proposed gay marriage ban. All of that is very nice—but come on, this is 2014. If you’re a food company and you haven’t made an adorable ad featuring a gay couple with their children, you’re just another face in the pro-gay corporate crowd. Luckily, General Mills has now decided to get with the program, releasing a commercial with a gay couple, their adopted daughter, and a bowl of Cheerios. And the ad is just as impossibly cute as...

There’s no good time to tell a guy you’re a virgin. First date? Too much, too soon. Wait until the third date and you risk being considered a tease. Second date? Perhaps, but at this point you’re both still fretting over whether or not to eat another piece of bread; delving into sexual histories (or lack thereof) seems a bit extreme. So: There’s no good time to tell a guy you’re a virgin. Even worse? Telling him you’re waiting until marriage.

Exclusive: Matt Barber warns, 'The courts are tossing around spiritual nitroglycerin' It’s called Pandora’s Box. And the Supreme Court just opened it. Did you actually think the debate over “gay marriage” was about marriage? Have you really come to believe that this cultural kerfuffle has anything to do with “civil rights” or “equality”? Have you bought into the popular premise that this is a legitimate discussion on federalism – that it’s a reasonable disagreement over whether the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause requires that newfangled “gay marriage,” something rooted in same-sex sodomy, a deviant and disease-prone behavior our Constitution’s framers...

In what sounded more like a gay activist screed in a high-school publication than a serious editorial in a major newspaper, the Charlotte Observer has officially declared war on people of faith and conservative moral values, mocking those who believe there is the slightest rational reason to resist the radical redefinition of marriage.Making no attempt to hide its disdain for the conservative, historic position, and gleefully mocking the views of the majority of North Carolinians, the editorial begins with three sentences ending in exclamation points – when is the last time you have seen that in a major editorial? –...

Pornography is everywhere. It’s an evil with far-reaching affects that damage many layers of society. But no one is hurt more by the overwhelming presence of pornography in our society than children.According to a study by the London School of Economics, nine out of ten children who go online (by the way, many of them just doing their homework) will view pornography. Even when kids are acting responsibly and innocently, adults in the pornography business are so fixated on creating new porn addicts that they have made it virtually impossible for children to escape their grasp. Think about it—90 percent...

A Nebraska school district has instructed its teachers to stop referring to students by “gendered expressions” such as “boys and girls,” and use “gender inclusive” ones such as “purple penguins” instead. “Don’t use phrases such as ‘boys and girls,’ ‘you guys,’ ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ and similarly gendered expressions to get kids’ attention,” instructs a training document given to middle-school teachers at Lincoln Public Schools. “Create classroom names and then ask all of the ‘purple penguins’ to meet on the rug,” it advises.

To donate vital organs, a donor must be dead. Tough this is known as the “dead donor rule,” I have been warning that utilitarian bioethicists and transplant medical professionals want to shatter the DDR to permit killing living living profoundly cognitively disabled patients for their organs.Now, we see what appears to me to be a push poll type question in a study measuring popular support for such a change in the law.A push poll seeks to obtain a desired answer by the way the question is framed. Here is the question from “Abandoning the Dead Donor Rule?” in the Journal...

(Reuters) - Sex could keep the Ebola epidemic alive even after the World Health Organization (WHO) declares an area free of the disease, one of the discoverers of the deadly virus said on Tuesday. The WHO is hoping to announce later this week that Nigeria and Senegal are free of Ebola after 42 days with no infections -- the standard period for declaring an outbreak over, twice the maximum 21-day incubation period of the virus. However, it appears the disease can last much longer in semen. "In a convalescent male, the virus can persist in semen for at least 70...

After remaining mostly silent since nude photos of her were taken from her phone and leaked online, actress Jennifer Lawrence has spoken out at length to Vanity Fair about the hack. "It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime," Lawrence told Vanity Fair. "It is a sexual violation. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. That’s why these websites are responsible." "Just the fact that somebody can be sexually exploited and violated, and the first thought that crosses somebody’s mind is to make a profit from it. It’s so beyond me. I...

Late last month, the journal Pediatrics, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, released a policy statement entitled Contraception for Adolescents. The statement is an update to the Academy’s 2007 statement on the same topic. The update “provides the pediatrician with a description and rationale for best practices in counseling and prescribing contraception for adolescents,” according to the journal article. The abstract says: The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that pediatricians develop a working knowledge of contraception to help adolescents reduce risks of and negative health consequences related to unintended pregnancy. The American Academy of Pediatrics seems to have taken...

Saturday morning American broadcast TV was once animation's home field. Filling a cereal bowl with artificially colored sugar pebbles and staring at the tube was every kid's weekend plan. Not any more: For the first time in 50-plus years, you won't find any animation on broadcast this morning. It's the end of an era. Yes, The CW, the final holdout in Saturday morning animation, ran its last batch of Vortexx cartoons last weekend. This week,where you once saw shows like Cubix, Sonic X, Dragon Ball Z and Kai, Digimon Fusion, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, you'll instead find "One Magnificent Morning," a block of live-action educational programming. It's the end of...

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has updated their policy guidelines (PDF) concerning contraceptives for children under 18, recommending that the first line of defense against pregnancy for adolescent girls should be implantable contraception such as an IUD or a sub-dermal hormonal implant. The AAP says that because young girls cannot be trusted to remain abstinent, reliably take a daily birth control pill, or use condoms, the best way to ensure they do not become pregnant is to fit them with a “long-acting reversible contraceptive” – a device that, once installed, will either provide a continuous dose of hormones designed...

A student at Duke University started doing porn to pay for her tuition. She became a media sensation and liberals everywhere loved telling her story. She would do interviews and say things like porn is “empowering” and “freeing”. She is in a documentary coming up and now that she has been in the industry for a little bit her view of porn has dramatically shifted. “The sex industry has a way of making you very cynical and very bitter,” a tired-looking Weeks tells an off-camera interviewer, “In a way I’ve started to become kind of a bit bitter and a...

Last May, one of the most influential conservative and religious intellectual leader in America gave a somber speech in Washington, declaring it to be “Good Friday in America for Christians.” In this exclusive two part video interview, Princeton’s Robert P. George admitted, “that was a hard speech to give.” “Christians, and those rejecting the me-generation liberal dogma of ‘if it feels good do it,’ are no longer tolerable by the intellectual and cultural elite,” says George, 59, director of the James Madison program at Princeton University. Citing the political witch hunt....