Free Republic

In a killing described as "an American horror story," a man and his girlfriend were charged with murder for beating her 3-year-old son to death in their West Caln mobile home, Chester County District Attorney Thomas Hogan said Thursday. Hogan said his office would seek the death penalty against Gary Fellenbaum, 23, and Jillian Tait, 31, for torturing Tait's son Scott McMillan to death over three days with a homemade whip, a curtain rod, a piece of aluminum siding, and their fists, at one point while he was taped to a chair. The boy was discovered Tuesday after he died,...

Religions have surprisingly diverse approaches to the issue of possible extraterrestrial life, David Weintraub found. Below, a quick survey adapted from his book "Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It?" and interviews with the author.

Lena Dunham has blasted a right-wing website’s “upsetting and disgusting” claims that she molested her little sister when they were kids. Truth Revolt’s article, “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister,” points to a section of the “Girls” creator and star’s new book of essays, “Not That Kind Of Girl,” in which she describes examining her then-one-year-old sister Grace’s vagina when she was 7 to see if it looked the same as her own. The piece also mentions a National Review article that calls the essay “especially suspicious” and says “there is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode.” Dunham...

After a federal judge in Idaho recently ruled that the state’s ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional, ordained ministers Donald and Evelyn Knapp who own the Hitching Post wedding chapel in the city of Coeur d‘Alene, were asked by a gay couple to perform their wedding ceremony. According to Fox News , the ministers declined to perform the wedding due to their opposition to same-sex marriage. However, because the Hitching Post wedding chapel is registered as a for-profit business rather than a church or place of worship (although the wedding chapel is registered with the state as a “religious corporation”...

REVERE, Mass. (WHDH) - Some parents in Revere were angry when they learned students were being taught about Islam and the Muslim religion. "No religion should be taught at school. In their paper it says Allah is their only God. That's insulting to me as a Christian who believes in just Jesus only," said Anthony Giannino. A section of the textbook describing the beliefs of Muslims says, "I bear witness that there is no God but Allah." Giannino immediately pulled his son out of the classroom. "We don't believe in Allah. I don't believe in my son learning about this...

American attitudes to gay marriage have been turned on their head in the space of a single generation. After a US Supreme Court decision this month, 30 of America’s 50 states will have gay marriage laws, which is testament to the sudden shift in attitudes towards same-sex unions in the US. Two decades ago barely a quarter of Americans believed members of the LGBT community should enjoy equal marriage rights; now nearly two-thirds accept gay marriage. This quantum leap cannot be explained by what sociologists call generational shift – that is older, conservative folk dying off and younger, more liberal...

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...