Free Republic

Several hundred people packed the Georgia Capitol’s rotunda Tuesday afternoon in support of former Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran, a showing that supporters hoped would boost efforts to pass a “religious liberty” law. With lawmakers scattered throughout the crowd, representatives of groups including the Georgia Baptist Convention and the national Family Research Council urged proponents to rally against what they framed as a freedom of speech issue. Cochran, recently fired by Mayor Kasim Reed, lost his job over actions he took related to a self-published religious book that many construed as anti-gay. “I just wanted to come and take a...

Remember when Houston's lesbian mayor, Annise Parker, tried to subpoena five pastors' sermons in a case over the controversial transgender rights ordinance there? This same lesbian mayor is trying her level best to deny these pastors the right to a jury trial. She wants a "special master" to review the evidence. Here's the backstory, as Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) explains it: City officials got upset over a voter lawsuit filed after the City Council rejected valid petitions to repeal a law that allows members of the opposite sex into each other's restrooms. ADF attorneys jumped into the fray, contending the...

Houston's Lesbian Mayor Annise Parker is at it again after standing down on subpoenaing pastor's sermons. We had not heard from her for a few months after she got blasted by pastors and the public following the City Council's attempts to push through an unlawful "bathroom bill" and the city attorney's attempts to manipulate signatures in a petition against their illegal actions. However, that has changed. Now she is claiming that the pastors have no right to a jury trial and is calling for a "special master" to investigate. Though the city withdrew its subpoenas of the pastor's sermons,...

TLC is facing growing criticism over the decision to air “My Husband’s Not Gay,” a one-hour special slated to air on Jan. 11, which follows a group of Mormon men who, according to the network’s description, “are happily married and attracted to their wives, but they are also attracted to other men. They refer to it as Same Sex Attraction… not gay, SSA.”

Students who oppose gay marriage are homophobic, according to an audio recording of a Marquette University instructor who went on to say that gay right issues cannot be discussed in class because it might offend homosexuals. I reached out to the 20-year-old student at the center of this outrageous episode and the story he tells should serve as a warning to anyone who thinks religious schools are safe havens for open discourse. The story was first reported on a blog run by a Marquette University professor and was picked up by the good folks over at The College Fix. The...

A major Democratic donor was arrested this week by the Sex Crimes Unit in Portland, Ore., for raping a minor. Terrence Bean, a liberal activist who bundled more than $500,000 for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, is charged with having sex with a 15-year-old boy. Bean has made contributions to influential Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin and Rep. Barney Frank, who has had his own smarmy brushes with the law. Bean’s Instagram account shows him on Air Force One with President Obama and getting chummy with Vice President Joe...

<p>NEW YORK — Elton John has called Pope Francis "my hero" for his compassion and push to accept gays in the Catholic church, at his annual AIDS benefit.</p> <p>John hosted the event, "An Enduring Vision: A Benefit for the Elton John AIDS Foundation," Tuesday night in New York City. He says Francis is pushing boundaries in the church and told the crowd: "Make this man a saint now, OK?"</p>

The Supreme Court’s recent decision not to take up challenges to state amendments banning same-sex marriage has had two significant effects – it has expanded marriage to 30 states and reignited the political conversation around marriage equality in the 2014 midterms. Since 2011, I have worked with Project Right Side to help Republican leaders navigate a radically changing electorate on the freedom to marry. While public acceptance of marriage equality has steadily increased, this moment may ultimately be looked upon as the point where Republican opposition to marriage equality began to fall in earnest. According to a recent poll of...

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee threatened to leave the GOP and run for the White House in 2016 as an independent if Republicans “capitulate” and support same-sex marriage. “If the Republicans want to lose guys like me, and a whole bunch of still God-fearing, Bible-believing people, go ahead and just abdicate on this issue—and go ahead and say abortion doesn’t matter, either,” Huckabee told Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, on Wildmon’s “Today’s Issues” radio show. “Because at that point, you lose me; I’m gone.” “I’ll become an independent,” he vowed in an interview on Tuesday. “I’ll start...

So much for that moderate Islam. (via Religion of Peace) South Africa’s controversial first gay-friendly mosque, which also allows Christian worshippers and women to lead prayers, was damaged by a fire overnight, its founder and the police said Saturday. I’m not sure how this even qualifies as a mosque if there are Christians leading prayers. Clearly a lot of Muslims felt the same way. The mosque has faced fierce criticism and threats of violence from Muslims with 14 national and provincial organizations representing the Muslim community across South Africa issuing a joint statement condemning Hargey’s plans.According to an AFP report,...

I wish Pew had provided older numbers to use as a yardstick here. Can’t tell if this has been fairly constant for a few years now or if opinion is starting to move towards gays on public accommodations as well. The fact that more people support compulsion in the name of antidiscrimination than the right of the business owner to refuse for reasons of conscience is newsy, though. Say, wasn’t there another splashy poll by a famous pollster on this subject last year? Yep, sure was — Rasmussen asked a similar question in June 2013 and found, no typo, that...

Well it took a while. “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at Columbia University last night in response to a question about the recent execution of two gay men there.“In Iran we do not have this phenomenon,” he continued. “I do not know who has told you we have it.” Fareed Zakaria claimed that Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari was sentenced to prison in part for posting this photo on his Facebook page.And now they’ve been discovered in Iran. (via Religion of Peace) An 82-page document recently issued by Iran’s parliamentary research...

TOPEKA, Kan., Sept. 8 (UPI) -- Remember when "God" said he wanted to plaster a pro-tolerance message on a billboard in the back yard of the Westboro Baptist Church? Well, thanks to the donations of more than 3,700 funders, God -- or at least the mysterious person running God's Facebook page -- has raised more than $80,0000 in support of a "God Loves Gays" billboard in Topeka, Kan.

A gay group will be able to march under its own banner in the city's St. Patrick's Day Parade for the first time on March 17, organizers said Wednesday. The nation’s oldest and biggest St. Pat's parade will lift the ban on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups that want to participate while identifying themselves as gay. “Those of us who are Irish and LGBT would watch this city celebrate and know we weren’t welcome,” former City Council speaker Christine Quinn, who boycotted the event for decades, told the Daily News. “To have that end, not only puts all of...

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender remain significantly more likely than non-LGBT Americans to identify as Democrats. More than six in 10 LGBT Americans identify as Democrats or are Democratic-leaning independents, while 21% identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Non-LGBT Americans are more evenly divided in their politics, tilting just slightly more Democratic than Republican. The political orientation of LGBT individuals is virtually unchanged since Gallup's June-September 2012 report, when 21% identified as Republicans, and 65% as Democrats. These results are based on 88,802 Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted between Jan. 2...

The organizer of a yearly conference for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students pursuing MBAs is in a huff because entirely too many straight students are attending the event, which includes a recruitment fair. Matt Kidd, executive director of Reaching Out MBA, has also charged that a few attendees made comments that he says some gay people did not appreciate, reports Campus Reform. For example, in addition to having the temerity to show up while failing to be gay, one straight attendee allegedly said “Dude, I’m not gay.” Another allegedly said: “There needs to be less focus on gay stuff...

I have a sensitive, inconvenient, and undoubtedly politically incorrect question: Why aren’t there more gay people? I ask because there’s something confusing about our “culture war.” Given the prominence of the issue, you would expect homosexuality to be rampant in America. When asked to estimate how many gay people there are, most people guess that it’s on the order of 20% to 25% of the population. But yet another study has been released by the CDC giving a more scientific estimate, and it finds that almost 97 percent of Americans describe themselves as straight — the actual number who describes...

President Barack Obama held a signing ceremony for an executive order that will prohibit employment discrimination against those workers by the federal government and its contracting agencies

WASHINGTON — President Obama, declaring himself on “the right side of history,” called on Congress on Monday to ban job discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans as he signed an executive order doing so for workers of federal contractors. In a ceremony at the White House, Mr. Obama noted that in much of the country, companies can fire employees based on their sexual orientation. “That’s wrong,” he said to an audience of supporters. “We’re here to do what we can to make it right — to bend that arc of justice just a little bit in a better direction.” President...

Since humanity began, children have been raised by mothers and fathers.  Whether that is due to evolutionary pressures or God is irrelevant to the conclusion that children must benefit from having two parents of different genders.Recently the MSM has been trumpeting a study that supposedly says that children of gay couples are better off than children who have a father and a mother. To anyone who has been a parent, or a child in a family with two parents of different genders, that sounds like gays protesting too much.  Experience, and common sense, tells us that women and men bring...