Free Republic

Three-quarters of California’s state assembly supported a bill that has striking implications for American citizens’ first freedoms, in that state and nationally. It is ostensibly a ban on gay and transgender “conversion therapy,” but the bill’s vague and sweeping text could affect essentially every institution of every religion that affirms sexual complementarity.We’re talking churches, schools, religious charities, summer camps — every forum that involves a financial transaction could be banned from allowing any discussion of basic doctrines of sexuality that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, among others, have held for thousands of years. We’re talking core doctrines of religions adhered...

California is about to implement compulsory new classes encouraging children as young as six to “question their sexual orientation and gender identity”, while teaching them how to use a range of vegetables for purposes other than for which they were created, and promoting deviance as “normal”. Acts too obscene to be presented on a Jewish news site are performed before and taught to California school children. YourNewsWire.com’s Baxter Dmitry reports on the California Healthy Youth Act in 2015, the controversial provisions of which are starting to take effect in classrooms. “Under the auspices of health,” Baxter writes, “the law says...

Ohio Gov. John Kasich hinted again Sunday at a possible 2020 presidential run by ripping the Republican Party and declaring “I can bring that party back.” The Republican governor accused the GOP of being “anti-immigrant, anti-trade, in favor of debt,” and implored party members to “come home.” “We should care about people from top to bottom, not just at those at the top but everybody,” Mr. Kasich told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I can bring that party back, that’s what I’m going to do, in one way or another.”

Parents in Orange County, California may not opt their children out of lessons related to gender identity or sexual orientation, according to a memorandum written by the school district’s general counsel. “Parents who disagree with the instructional materials related to gender, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation may not excuse their children from this instruction,” read the memorandum from Ronald Wenkart to the Orange County Board of Education. A school district spokesman confirmed the authenticity of the memorandum sent to us by a parent.

Imagine if a young person was struggling with a drug addiction, or a gambling addiction, or a sexual addiction, but the government passed laws saying these people could NOT get help, therapy or treatment in dealing with these unwanted addictions or attractions. Most people would be utterly shocked at such heartless and fascist interference by the state. They would correctly argue that people should have the right and the freedom to make such choices for themselves, and should not be denied help when they desperately want it. Yet this is happening throughout the West when it comes to people who...

No longer content with widespread acceptance, activists are fighting to eliminate any program aimed at helping those struggling with same-sex attraction or gender identityOKLAHOMA CITY, April 3, 2018 /Christian Newswire/ -- "The level of hatred and bullying is not like anything we've seen," says Stephen Black, who lived as a gay man for 8 years, over 35 years ago, and now Executive Director of First Stone Ministries is in the crosshairs of gay activists. Black is the author of a ground-breaking book that reveals that 70-percent of people who want freedom from a destructive same-sex lifestyle find it. In Freedom...

Just four days after Easter, George Washington University will host a training session for students and faculty that teaches that Christians — especially white ones — “receive unmerited perks from institutions and systems all across our country.”

A student Resident Advisor (RA) at Providence College has reportedly been threatened with rape after posting a flyer that expressed a traditional view on marriage. According to LifeSiteNews, RA Michael Smalanskas has faced severe student backlash since displaying the poster on a bulletin board in early March, with upset classmates gathering outside of his dorm room and endangering his safety.

A transgender woman is suing Tinder on behalf of other transgender people living in the Portland area, claiming it rejects all transgender people from the dating service. Ariel Hawkins claims in a new lawsuit, obtained by TMZ, a few days ago she edited her profile to disclose that she was a pre-op trans woman. She says Tinder immediately deleted her account. She says the company sent her email saying she violated its terms of service ... but didn't point her to any term and refused to explain the basis for the rejection.

A reader took this photo of a flyer in the halls of Grady High School in Atlanta. What symbolism! A public school in Atlanta is now propagandizing students to believe that people who dissent from the multiculti Narrative are haters who deserve to be symbolically stomped by a jackboot.

It has been four years since Disney’s Frozen took over the universe, and yet to this day, many fans are still pleading for Disney to add some much-needed LGBTQ representation to their films with Frozen 2. Speculation has been swirling around the Internet since the film’s initial release that Elsa, the film’s protagonist, is a queer character. This theory left many fans calling for Disney to give Elsa a female love interest in the film’s sequel, which is expected to hit theaters in November 2019. Idina Menzel previously said that she was “excited” by the online discussion, but offered no...

In the early 2000s, when I was a middle schooler in Florida, I was subjected to a trauma that was meant to erase my existence as a newly out bisexual. My parents were Southern Baptist missionaries who believed the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion therapy could “cure” my sexuality. I sat on a couch over two years and endured emotionally painful sessions with a counselor. I was told that my faith community rejected my sexuality; that I was the abomination we had heard about in Sunday school; that I was the only gay person in the world; that it...

Irish feminists have hit out at a group of British trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) who have organized a meeting in Ireland as part of their campaign to oppose Britain’s proposed Gender Recognition Act (GRA). The proposed GRA would end the requirement that trans people obtain a doctor’s diagnosis before they can officially change their gender. In 2015, Ireland passed a similar act that allows self-identification — namely, gives an individual the right to change their gender and apply for a new birth certificate without medical treatment. At the time, Ireland was hailed by Human Rights Watch as a “global transgender...

A recent trend in many states is to outlaw "conversion therapy," where people who are unhappy with homosexual inclinations go through therapy to dispense with those inclinations.  Even though the process is voluntary, liberal states cannot tolerate the idea of someone with same-sex attractions wanting help to get rid of them. In the U.S., state governments are beginning to outlaw conversion therapy in growing numbers.  California became the first to do so in 2012.  Eight other states have banned it in some form since.  In 2017 alone, Nevada, New Mexico, and Connecticut have signed their own bans into law. Now New Hampshire, by...

A former Union High School teacher who in 2011 called homosexuality a "perverted spirit" that "breeds like cancer" has agreed to a three-year suspension of her teaching certificates. The posts on Jenye "Viki" Knox's personal Facebook page eventually caused the special education teacher and faculty adviser to the school's Bible study group to resign. She later filed a federal lawsuit claiming school officials had violated her free speech and religious rights.

<p>Wisconsin’s supreme court can soon right a flagrant wrong stemming from events set in motion in 2014 at Milwaukee’s Marquette University by Cheryl Abbate. Although just a graduate student, she already had a precocious aptitude for academic nastiness.</p> <p>On October 8, in an undergraduate course she was teaching on ethics, when the subject of same-sex marriage arose there was no debate because, a student said, Abbate insisted that there could be no defensible opposition to this. (Marquette is a Jesuit school.) After class, the student told her that he opposed same-sex marriage and her discouraging of debate about it. She replied (he recorded their interaction) that “there are some opinions that are not appropriate that are harmful . . . do you know whether anyone in the class is homosexual? . . . In this class homophobic comments . . . will not be tolerated.” The student’s appeals to Abbate’s superiors were unavailing (the chairman of her philosophy department referred to the student as an “insulin [sic] little twerp”), so he gave John C. McAdams his recording of Abbate rebuffing him.</p>

Vice President Pence arrived in Aspen, Colo., this week for a holiday vacation — but not without encountering a silent protest from his neighbors in the liberal ski resort town. “Make America Gay Again,” reads a rainbow banner posted on the stone pillar at the end of the driveway of the home where Pence and his wife, Karen, are staying. A dispatcher with the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office referred The Washington Post to the White House press office Saturday, but Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Buglione told the Aspen Times that Pence’s next-door neighbors posted the banner shortly after the vice president...

Starting in January, Illinois will bar a rare criminal defense allowing the use of a victim’s sexual orientation as justification for violent crime, a ban gay rights advocates say they will attempt to replicate in about half a dozen states next year. Defense attorneys will no longer be able to mount the so-called “gay panic defense” in Illinois, the second state after California to prohibit the tactic. It isn’t common, but one study shows it has surfaced in about half of all U.S. states and has been used with some success. Advocates say bans are necessary because crimes against gay...

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. - A California judge has ruled in favor of a Christian baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The judge denied a motion for a temporary restraining order filed on Wednesday against Cathy Miller, the owner of Tastries Bakery in Bakersfield, California. According to a press release sent by The Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund, the order would have compelled "Miller to create wedding cakes for LGBT persons, even though doing so would violate her sincerely held religious beliefs."

It’s astounding how many defenses of the state’s position in Masterpiece Cakeshop depend on misrepresentation and misconceptions. Last week I wrote about the most common misrepresentation — that Jack Phillips discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation when he refused to design a custom cake for a same-sex-wedding celebration. After all, he served all customers — regardless of race, sex, or sexual orientation. He just consistently refused to design cakes that advanced messages he disagreed with. No person of any identity has the legal authority to compel an artist to use his talents to advance a cause the artist...