Free Republic

Trick-or-treating -- or turning tricks? Trashy Halloween kiddie costumes -- from a slutty thigh- and chest- baring "French maid" number to a skin- tight, mid- thigh "Major Trouble" skirt-and- shirt fatigues set -- have parents fuming. "If girls get used to dressing like this, they might want to become a whore after Halloween," howled Harlem mom Malinda Martinez, 33, who has a 6-year-old girl. "They're far too grown up for kids." The marketing message is even more blatantly sexual. "The Navy ships won't want to leave the dock unless this cute sailor girl is on board," reads one catalog entry...

This CBS News story is a snapshot of where the gay-marriage debate is taking us. At a rally in West Hollywood, Drew Barrymore revived the old narrative that family structure doesn't matter: "Children need families, people need to love and we need to move forward, not backward," Barrymore said. "What defines a family? We do!" A rabbi calls the idea that marriage means a husband and wife "religious bigotry," i.e., not religious liberty. The headline of the story is Ted Olson's decision to help bring a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Prop 8. I'm not sure the Human Rights...

A United States-based fertility doctor claimed to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women. In an interview published on Wednesday, Panayiotis Zavos told Britain’s Independent newspaper that although none of the women had had a viable pregnancy as a result, the first cloned baby could now be born within a couple of years. “There is absolutely no doubt about it... the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen,” he said, quoted by the paper. “If we intensify our efforts, we can have a cloned...

A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out o of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all. Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study...

After Kanye West's performance on "Saturday Night Live" over the weekend, the chattering classes are wringing their hands today over the gee-whiz revelation that, maybe underneath all that gratuitous Auto-Tune, West's voice might be a bit, as they say, "pitchy." We can go back and forth about the relative disaster-or-not qualities of his two-song set, but the hullabaloo over it begs for a few responses. First: hey, indie rockers, if you don't think that half your favorite beardo bands use things like Melodyne... But the second, and more crucial one, is this: What makes a "good" singer anyhow, and what...

AMERICAN actress Rose McGowan is to star in a new movie adaptation of comicbook warrior Red Sonja - the so-called 'She-Devil with a sword' - to be produced by her fiance Robert Rodriguez and released in 2010.

Britain has more living geniuses per head of population than anywhere else in the world, according to a new survey which reveals the country's influence on science, technology, business and the arts. The top 100 living geniuses Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web Almost a quarter of those featured in the list of 100 living geniuses are Britons, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the world wide web, in joint first place, and physicist Stephen Hawking at seven in the list. British artists and musicians feature heavily, including Brit Art leader Damien Hirst at number 15, poet Seamus...

VENICE (Reuters) - Taiwanese director Ang Lee's sexually explicit "Lust, Caution" was the surprise winner of the Golden Lion for best picture at the Venice film festival on Saturday, just two years after he won with "Brokeback Mountain." The movie is a World War Two thriller set in Shanghai featuring long and sometimes violent sex scenes which Lee has hinted were real. "It is overwhelming, because this movie has taken me to some very difficult places," Lee told the red carpet award ceremony on the Lido waterfront. "I have invited you to come along with me and in the end...

Sienna Miller's sex scene with Hayden Christensen in her new movie is so steamy it has prompted speculation it might be more than acting. Those who have seen Factory Girl say the sizzling clinch is even saucier - and more revealing - than the famous are-they-or-aren't-they love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in 1973's Don't Look Now. But Miller's publicist insisted the sex was not real. "She's just a really good actress," she told the New York Daily News. The 25-year-old plays Andy Warhol's beautiful but doomed protege Edie Sedgwick in the movie. Unconfirmed reports have claimed Miller...

SPEAKING AT the State Department in 1999, Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi sheik and leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, sounded an alarm about Muslim houses of worship in the United States. "The most dangerous thing that is going on now in these mosques . . . is the extremists' ideology," he said. "Because they are very active, they took over the mosques; . . . they took over more than 80 percent of the mosques that have been established in the US." He warned ominously that "a danger might suddenly come that you are not looking for...

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - As California recalls the catastrophic earthquake that struck San Francisco 100 years ago, seismologists warn that the golden state's love of cars could turn into a fatal attraction in the quake-prone state. Elevated freeways, highway overpasses, and garages built under homes are vulnerable to crashing down when the earth shudders, said seismologist Jack Boatwright of the US Geological Survey. "The automobile culture is really a knife in the heart of earthquake preparedness," Boatwright told AFP. "We are only as strong as our weakest overpass." Another key weakness is structural, including building code oversights exposed by the...

Below is a list of vandalized nativity scenes this Christmas season: ·        Vandals damaged a life-size nativity scene in Merced, California.  ·        Baby Jesus was stolen from a McKinney, Texas family’s yard. ·        Over a dozen statues were stolen from a nativity scene in Pasco County, Florida, and three of the inflatable snowmen were slashed.  ·        A nativity scene was stolen from the yard of a Pataskala, New Jersey family.  ·        A family from Whitehall, Michigan also had its entire nativity scene stolen.  ·        In Camillus, New York, a 75-pound nativity scene was stolen from a church.  ·        The nativity...