Free Republic

Illegal immigrant women being detained at a California jail say they are being "humiliated" by strip-searches, particularly in cases involving transgender detainees, and have filed a complaint demanding federal officials put a stop to it. The complaint, sent Monday to the Santa Ana City Jail and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which contracts with the jail to hold illegal immigrants, is the latest step in an escalating push by immigrant rights advocates to try to end the detention of women and children in the country illegally and, in the meantime, to alleviate conditions at the facilities. In this case, advocates...

In an interview with the Tunisian Al-Wataniya TV channel, Professor Amel Grami said that in the days of early Islam, "society was more aware of its diversity and more pluralistic, while today we are more rigid and unaccepting of the other." According to Grami, a professor of Arabic studies at the University of Manouba, Tunisia, and an authority on gender studies, "many judges talked openly about their passion for boys, and said that they have their own boy, whom they meet intimately, and so on. Many jurisprudents had such relations." The interview aired on December 20, 2015. Video at link

Dr. Robert Spitzer, a Jewish American psychiatrist who played a leading role in establishing agreed-upon standards to describe mental disorders and eliminating homosexuality's designation as a pathology, died Friday in Seattle. He was 83. Gay-rights activists credit Spitzer with removing homosexuality from the list of mental disorders in the D.S.M. in 1973. He decided to push for the change after he met with gay activists and determined that homosexuality could not be a disorder if gay people were comfortable with their sexuality. At the time of the psychiatric profession's debate over homosexuality, Spitzer told the Washington Post: "A medical disorder...

In 1975, I took a college course in psychology. The professor invited a gay man to speak to the class. He explained to us, "I'm just like you, only I prefer to have sex with men instead of women." No one objected or protested. What did we know? The thesis seemed plausible then, and today most people regard it as axiomatic. The gay agenda is to convince the heterosexual majority that there are no appreciable differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals. We are to believe that sexual preference is merely a personal choice with no broader ramifications for society. The choice...

There's a misleading debate over accepting Obama's first batch of Syrian migrants, the vast majority of whom are Sunni Muslim economic migrants, not refugees, and unlike the genuinely persecuted Christians and Yazidis whom we are not taking in, face no actual persecution. The media bellows ceaselessly that the Sunni Muslims are just like the Jews during the Holocausts. They're more like the Nazi war criminals fleeing Berlin after losing the war. Like the Nazis, they also hate America and want to kill Jews. Polls show at least 1,300 of Obama's first refugee batch support ISIS. The vast majority of Americans...

  Jim Alcorn/Special to The Record   When "Something Rotten!" actor Aaron Kaburick and stage manager Patrick Wetzel aren't at Broadway's St. James Theatre or their Manhattan residence, chances are they're enjoying their log cabin on West Milford's Pinecliff Lake. From the neon lights of Broadway and their work on the new musical "Something Rotten!" to the serenity of West Milford's Pinecliff Lake, where the only illumination comes from the stars, two Manhattan renters couldn't come up with a more different setting for their first home.  But that is what Aaron Kaburick and Patrick Wetzel wanted in a getaway home. ...

History hasn't looked kindly on the Catholic Church during WW II. The conventional narrative is not the whole storyAt six in the morning on Sunday, 12 March, a procession snaked toward the bronze doors of St. Peter’s. Swiss Guards led the line, followed by barefoot friars with belts of rope. Pius took his place at the end, borne on a portable throne. Ostrich plumes stirred silently to either side, like quotation marks. Pius entered the basilica to a blare of silver trumpets and a burst of applause. Through pillars of incense he blessed the faces. At the High Altar, attendants...

Imagine this scene if you will.A respected doctor and medical professor serving at a large hospital becomes concerned as he documents increasing health risks related to obesity. But as he is compiling data to document this, he is astonished to see that his hospital actively supports fast-food restaurants and even encourages participation in pro-obesity events.When he protests the hospital’s actions and shares his concerns, he is fired for his lack of sensitivity to fat people. He is even accused of holding to prejudicial views and, to prevent this from happening again in the future, the hospital institutes obesity sensitivity training...

President Obama signed legislation repealing the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in 2011, but servicemen are still keeping silent on a related issue: Male-on-male rape. A new study released by the American Psychological Association says male rape is underreported in the U.S. military. A true approximation of the problem may even be “15 times higher than has been previously reported.” The APA’s conclusions, released Tuesday, were drawn from data spanning the 1980s until present. Its authors found cases of male Military Sexual Trauma, or MST, ranged over the years from .02 percent to 12 percent, with an average...

Far more military men are being raped by other men than is reported by the Pentagon because of the stigma attached to such sexual assaults, says a new study by the American Psychological Association. “Rates of military sexual trauma among men who served in the military may be as much as 15 times higher than has been previously reported, largely because of barriers associated with stigma, beliefs in myths about male rape, and feelings of helplessness,” the APA said in releasing its findings Tuesday.

A group of more than 60 legal scholars released a statement last week calling on all federal and state officeholders not to accept the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision--declaring a national right to same-same sex marriage--as binding precedent. One of the signers and authors of the statement was Robert. P. George, the founder of the American Principles Project and McCormack Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton. "We stand with James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in recognizing that the Constitution is not whatever a majority of Supreme Court justices say it is," said George. "We remind all officeholders in the United...

So the gay community supports "Black Lives Matter" and disdain the police despite having more to lose to crime A St. Louis coffee shop is imbibing some bitter brew over cups it gave to customers with FTP written on them. For those who can’t figure it out, FTP means F@## the Police. Gateway Pundit is percolating the news over this incident: “A radical St. Louis coffee shop is getting negative publicity over the initials ‘FTP’ being written on coffee cups. FTP stands for F*** the Police. Mokabe’s Coffeehouse made a snarky announcement on Twitter claiming it has placed an employee...

LOS ANGLES (CBSLA.com) — A new billboard has lots of folks in Los Angeles buzzing about sex, safe sex, online hookups and apps. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) is taking the popular online dating apps Tinder and Grindr to task — suggesting their users are more susceptible to STD’s like chlamydia and gonorrhea. One of the billboard’s is strategically placed — KCAL9’s Jennifer Kastner said the billboard is a few blocks from Tinder’s Beverly Boulevard headquarters. Tinder could hardly miss the sign. The billboards are also accusing the sites of promoting a hook up culture. “I saw it and I...

Pope Francis said on Monday government officials have a “human right” to refuse to discharge a duty, such as issuing marriage licenses to homosexuals, if they feel it violates their conscience.

If there is one overarching observation that I could make from the discussions I've seen on the internet about Kim Davis' recent imprisonment, it is that there are a powerful lot of uninformed, inarticulate, cognitively-challenged folks out there on the information superhighway. It seems like any place you go where there is an article about Kim Davis and her refusal to issue illegal marriage licenses to homosexual couples, you will quickly find yourself surrounded by mouth-breathers raucously asserting that she "deserved to go to jail" for "breaking the law" and "violating their constitutional rights." Even "conservative" establishmentarian pundits like George...

In Kim Davis’ case, there are plenty of other clerks and plenty of other counties (and as Blankenship and Cruz have shown, plenty of other states) who would issue a marriage license to a couple of guys pretending to get married If there is one overarching observation that I could make from the discussions I’ve seen on the internet about Kim Davis’ recent imprisonment, it is that there are a powerful lot of uninformed, inarticulate, cognitively-challenged folks out there on the information superhighway. It seems like any place you go where there is an article about Kim Davis and her...

Now, we're getting somewhere. The judge that ordered Kim Davis to be jailed for not breaking the law, but opposing his unlawful orders, is the same judge behind re-educating (indoctrinating) Kentucky student who opposed sodomy. That judge, a Bush appointee no less, was none other than US District Judge David Bunning. In 2003, the communist American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the Boyd County Board of Education. The suit was to bully the Boyd County High School into allowing a "gay-straight" alliance club to meet. Parents overwhelmingly spoke out against the club, but to no avail. (Hint: Parents who love...

As of Friday morning, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis sits in jail for her refusal to hand out state licenses for same-sex marriages. She cited her First Amendment religious liberty in her defense. She was arrested after being held in contempt by a federal judge, District Judge David L. Bunning.

As is now well-known, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis stopped issuing marriage licenses after the Supreme Court ruled in June that states are required to recognize same-sex nuptials. But the fury aimed at Davis has been disproportionate to the actual facts of the situation, and shows galling – and revealing – inconsistency on the part of her critics. In particular, where was the outcry when Attorney General and later Governor of California, Jerry Brown, refused to mount a defense of gay-marriage ban Proposition 8? Representing the state in court was at the center of his job. Yet he put his personal...

PRINCETON, N.J. -- The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans' 25% estimate in 2011, and only slightly higher than separate 2002 estimates of the gay and lesbian population. These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Gallup Daily tracking in the first four months of this year.