Free Republic

The University of Kentucky has stopped a campus-wide survey asking students if they think homosexuality is a “sin,” apparently deciding that knowing this information is not worth the negative publicity it is receiving. The survey, originally reported on by Campus Reform, asked students if they agree or disagree with statements such as “Male homosexuality is a perversion” and “If it were possible, I would be straight.” It was not made clear in the survey who would be reading students’ responses or if the survey was confidential, sparking concern and confusion among some. …

From time to time, a situation arises that gives truth to the old adage, "politics makes for strange bedfellows." The current case in point can be found at Cardiff University. The Students' Union there recently decided to ban all pro-life demonstrations on campus. In a sweet use of irony, the Students' Union was outraged over pro-life rallies and wanted to "prevent affiliated societies and groups from taking part in anti-choice protests or rallies." Nothing says tolerance like saying no to those you consider anti-choice by taking away their choices and banning them. Sadly, I'm sure that such destruction of logic...

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) -- Hauling a truckload of logs to a Southern Oregon mill last fall, Chris Hill noticed a sheriff's deputy behind him and flashed his lights to warn a UPS driver coming the other way. The deputy pulled over Hill on U.S. Highway 140 in White City and handed him a $260 ticket for improperly using his headlights, saying another deputy had seen the flashing lights from behind the UPS truck and alerted him to stop the log truck because of the signaling. Outraged, Hill decided to fight the ticket, and on Wednesday, a Jackson County Justice...

While Americans fume about the sidelining of Mozilla’s Brendan Eich, another conservative is getting some long-awaited payback. It took eight years, but Dr. Mike Adams, associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, finally won the promotion he deserved — thanks to a federal court’s intervention. Almost a month earlier, a jury had sided with Dr. Adams, agreeing that the university was retaliating against the criminology professor for his conservative views. This week, a U.S. District judge followed up on that verdict, ordering UNCW to promote Adams and provide $50,000 in back pay in what many are calling a “landmark...

"....Hounding out people with different views is seen by the Left as a necessary means to achieve its supposedly noble goals — just like the Spanish Inquisitioners who claimed God was on their side as they went after religiously “incorrect” Jews, Muslims, and heretics. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been part of the problem, not part of the solution. Its appointees used the once-impartial IRS against conservatives. They monitored Associated Press reporters. They denied that the NSA was eavesdropping on average citizens. They arbitrarily chose not to enforce laws they didn’t like. The president bragged of using “a pen and...

In her recent post at the Nation, Michelle Goldberg attempts to place the dust-up over #CancelColbert into a broader frame of what she calls “radical anti-liberalism.” She writes: “One of the most striking characteristics of ‘60s radicalism was its aversion to liberalism,” wrote Alice Echols in Daring to Be Bad, her history of radical feminism. “Radicals’ repudiation of liberalism was not immediate; rather, it developed in response to liberalism’s defaults—specifically, its timidity regarding black civil rights and its escalation of the Vietnam War.” Something similar, albeit on a much smaller scale, happened after Bill Clinton ended welfare as we know...

Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) denounced this week’s Supreme Court ruling allowing individuals to donate to as many political causes and candidates as they please. “The worst thing about this decision is that it will hamper the Government’s ability to regulate speech,” Schumer complained. “Critics may end up almost as well financed as spokespersons for the government. That is a formula for dissent and disunity.” “The limits struck down by the Court cut the legal ground out from the Administration’s program of using the IRS to scrutinize and restrain groups that contribute to dissension and disunity,” the Senator added. “Fortunately, the...

Snip What You Can Do It is important that people give Mozilla pushback--and a lot of it--because the less people suffer the consequences of this kind of behavior, the more it will be invited in the future. You want Christians to experience a new and even worse persecution than what they're facing now? Do nothing. You want to fight back? Here's what you can do . . .   1) Mozilla has a web page where you can leave feedback on its Firefox browser. THAT WEB PAGE IS HERE. At the time of this writing, the feedback in the last...

“We must do away with all newspapers. A revolution cannot be accomplished with freedom of the press.” - Ernesto "Che" GuevaraWhen I first started writing about campus free speech issues for Town Hall in 2003, I complained that most college administrators were ignorant of the constitution. One of my readers, Jim Collins from Colorado Springs, was quick to correct me. Jim pointed out that college administrators aren't just ignorant of the First Amendment. Instead, he insisted that they are hostile towards it. Time has shown just how right he was. In fact, administrative hostility towards the First Amendment has gotten...

The resignation of Mozilla’s CEO amid outrage that he supported an anti-gay marriage campaign is prompting concerns about how Silicon Valley’s strongly liberal culture might quash the very openness that is at the region’s foundation. […] “There was no interest in creating an Internet lynch mob,” OkCupid co-founder Sam Yagun, whose dating service site was among those engaged in online protest, said Friday. “I am opposed to that with every bone in my body.” But Eich’s abrupt departure has stirred the debate over the fairness of forcing out a highly-qualified technology executive over his personal views and a single campaign...

On Thursday, CEO Brendan Eich of Mozilla was forced out of his job thanks to his $1,000 donation to the Proposition 8 pro-traditional marriage effort in California in 2008. At that point, he held the exact same position as Barack Obama on traditional marriage. Now, that position has soured in the nostrils of the militant left, which seeks to ruin the lives of those with whom it disagrees. ~~snip~~ Google Adsense Shuts Down WorldNetDaily. On February 6, Google Adsense notified WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah that it would be cancelling WND’s account thanks to a “policy violation email this morning regarding negative/hate...

PRESS RELEASE April 2, 2014 Contact: James Bopp, Jr. Cell Phone 812/243-0825; Phone 812/232-2434; Fax 812/235-3685; jboppjr@aol.com Supreme Court Strikes Limit on Number of Political Contributions Today, the U.S. Supreme struck down federal “aggregate limits” on how much an individual may spend on otherwise legal contributions in a two-year election cycle to federal candidates, political parties, and political action committees (“PACs”). The case is McCutcheon v. FEC. For example, though an individual may legally give $5,200 to each candidate in a two year election cycle, the aggregate limit restricts his total contributions to candidates to $48,600. Thus, an individual may...

A New York appeals court has affirmed a lower court’s 2012 ruling that a lesbian chef is owed $1.6 million for being forced to attend weekly prayer meetings where her boss would regularly warn that "gay people" were "going to go to hell." Mirella Salemi sued Gloria's Tribeca Inc., Gloria's Tribecamex and principal owner Edward Globokar for violations of the New York City Human Rights Law after a string of incidents that occurred between 2004 and 2007. Gloria's Tribeca is a Mexican restaurant. Salemi was awarded $400,000 in compensatory damages and $1.2 million in punitive damages in what her lawyer,...

The mother of the 16-year-old pro-life demonstrator who suffered a rough confrontation with a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has shown a rare civility -- the spirit liberals are forever bemoaning the lack of but rarely demonstrating themselves. The event: A small group of pro-life activists visited UCSB to demonstrate against abortion. They bore posters and leaflets and set up their display on the campus's "free speech zone." Professor Mireille Miller-Young was offended, no "triggered," by the photo of an aborted baby on Thrin Short's poster. Together with two or three students, the professor grabbed a...

17-year-old Gregory Vied was suspended for flying a confederate flag atop his pickup truck, "which was parked in the student lot at Steinert High School in Hamilton Township." According to News 12 New Jersey, Vied said he was suspended on March 25th after being repeatedly told he could not fly the flag.

A first grader in California has been told she’s not permitted to talk about the Bible at school. A teacher at Temecula Valley School told her first grade class to bring an object to school that represented a family Christmas tradition and then give a one-minute presentation. Brynn Williams brought the star that tops her family’s Christmas tree and shared how her family remembers Jesus’ birth at Christmas. “The star is named the Star of Bethlehem,” Brynn said. “The three kings followed the star to find the baby Jesus, the Savior of the world.” Brynn had planned to end her...

Ever since I ended my joint representation with National Review and fired my lawyers on Boxing Day, the endlessly reprised refrain has been that "Mark Steyn has a fool for a client". As I wrote here: That's an old English joke, of course. Circa 18th century, I believe, when English life was very lightly lawyered. Whether it applies a quarter-millennium on in a sclerotic dungheap of a system that, as my old boss Conrad Black likes to point out, employs as many lawyers as the rest of the planet combined, who between them invoice ten per cent of GDP is...

An Oklahoma pawn broker took his small town’s police department to federal court, claiming cops clamped down on him when he put a sign on the curb warning of a speed trap ahead. James Goad, of Meeker, says the harassment that followed his action amounted to a violation of his First Amendment right to freedom of speech. In the suit against the Meeker Police Department and Police Chief Sam Byrd, Goad claims police arrested him and violated his civil rights to get back at him for his sign stunt. ***SNIP*** But the sign apparently bothered former Meeker reserve Officer Sean...

Leaked Homeland Security documents obtained by Infowars reveal details of a joint DHS/FEMA national exercise set to take place this week, one of the components of which revolves around an effort to counter online dissent by a group called “Free Americans Against Socialist Tyranny,” which is disgruntled at the imposition of martial law after an earthquake in Alaska. The document again underscores the federal government’s obsession with characterizing libertarians and conservatives as some kind of extremist radical threat. The document (PDF) was leaked by an individual affiliated with Stewart Rhodes’ Oathkeepers organization and passed on to Infowars. It is entitled...

First Amendment enthusiasts are thrilled that Mike Adams, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, won his lawsuit against administrators who denied him a promotion because of his conservative, Christian views. Adams joined the university in 1993. He was an atheist at the time. By the year 2000, he had converted to Christianity and become an outspoken political conservative. He eventually wrote columns for Townhall.com. In 2006, he was denied a promotion. Administrators were retaliating against him for his conservative views, he claimed. The jury agreed. Adams’s lawyers said the victory is an important one for free speech...