Free Republic

Helen Andrews' address delivered at NatCon 5 in Washington, DC on Sept. 2, 2025.

This time it’s Jane’s jungle Earlier this month, NYC’s largest Gothic cathedral celebrated the annual feast day of St. Francis of Assisi and his ancient Blessing of the Animals. For 11 years, until the pandemic, I hosted a similar animal’s holiday at St. John the Divine. We loved all — the young, babies, healthy, strays, police dogs, the sick, frail, old, rescues, a frog, fish in containers, turtles, horses outside, sheep, pigs, cows, camels, donkeys, chickens, goats. Even a choir and a rabbi for the Jewish animals. Police rerouted traffic. I remember His Eminence Cardinal Dolan flat on the floor...

Sylvester Stallone’s wife, Jennifer Flavin, isn’t afraid to say what a lot of people are thinking about many of the parents in Hollywood. In a viral clip from The Katie Miller Podcast, the businesswoman and former model was asked why she thinks "so many kids in Hollywood now are transgender." Her answer was blunt: it comes down to bad parenting and a culture obsessed with self-expression over stability. "I just think Hollywood is, you know, it’s all about expression," Flavin said. "So, you know, however you want to express yourself. If you feel like a cat today, you’re a cat....

When two transgender Utah girls and their parents sued to stop a law passed three years ago that would ban them from participating in sports with other girls, they were going into eighth and ninth grades, fighting as they entered high school to share in the same pastimes as their peers. But as they enter their final years of high school, after three years in court and amid President Donald Trump’s second term in office, their case to run and swim with classmates who are their same gender has fallen apart.

LEXINGTON, MA — A Pride-parade picture book showing bondage gear and drag nuns is set to appear in Lexington’s 2025–2026 kindergarten social studies curriculum, sparking fury among parents who say the district has crossed the line between inclusion and age-appropriate teaching. The revelation was first reported by Massachusetts Informed Parents, a watchdog group that obtained lesson materials from Lexington Public Schools (LPS). According to their review, the Pride-themed book This Day in June is listed as part of a new “Social Studies” unit for five-year-olds — a class typically reserved for topics like community, geography, and basic civics. But the...

OMG.. you cannot make this up.. These are some of the things the Democrats are demanding we fund: - $3 million for circumcisions and vasectomies in Zambia - $833k for transgender people in Nepal - $4.2 million for lgbtq people in the Western Balkans and Uganda - $3.6 million for pastry cooking classes and dance focus groups for male prostitutes in Haiti - $500k for electric buses in Rwanda - $6 million for media organizations for the Palestinians - $300k for a pride parade in Lesotho - $882k for social media and mentorship in Serbia

The Dylan Mulvaney effect claims another victim. After Anheuser-Busch decided to partner with self-proclaimed transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney — a man pretending to be a woman — for an ad campaign featuring him drinking Bud Light in 2023, Fox Business reported sales were down 29.9 percent for the week ending in January 2024 when compared to the previous year. That was 2023. Companies have had time to learn that customers did not want to see delusional men play dress up in a marketing effort, but here we are. Kathmandu Holdings, known as KMD Brands, has reported an $82.9 million loss...

The artistic director of the infamous Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony has admitted that the LGBT-themed performance was “political” and described Saint Joan of Arc as one of the “greatest transvestites” in French history. Speaking to the Le Monde newspaper this week, Thomas Jolly acknowledged political bias his Opening Ceremony for the supposedly politically-neutral Olympics in Paris, which sparked international criticism over a performance seemingly intended to mock Christianity with a drag queen-themed apparent reimagining the Last Supper of Jesus Christ.

ThePersistence @ScottPresler BREAKING The New Jersey gubernatorial election is TIED! 🟥 Jack Ciattarelli: 43% 🟦 Mikie Sherrill: 43% I’m asking everyone across the country to focus your time, talent, & energy on New Jersey.

The blame game over suspect Tyler Robinson's motives for shooting Charlie Kirk continued to play out this weekend with some on the left continuing to claim that Robinson was a Groyper or someone critical of Charlie Kirk but on the far right.There have been a lot of twists and turns in this story already. There was a report in the Guardian Friday that Tyler's high school classmate said he was pretty far left on everything but by Saturday those comments had been deleted from the story. However, CNN published its own story Saturday which included some similar comments from a...

President Donald Trump ripped Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) on Monday for stating last week that the concept that rights are given by a creator – a foundational American belief – is “extremely troubling.” During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last Wednesday, Kaine called comments from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, suggesting rights are God-given, “very troubling.” “The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the creator–that’s what the Iranian government believes,” Kaine said. “The statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling,”...

Charlie Sheen is done censoring his truth. The former “Two and a Half Men” star, 60, revealed he’s had sex with men, which began when he started smoking crack. “I flipped the menu over,” Sheen reveals in his upcoming Netflix documentary, “aka Charlie Sheen,” out on Sept. 10, about his same-sex bedroom experience. The actor revealed he’s done hiding his sexual encounters with men. Sheen revealed that his first encounter happened while he was using heavy narcotics, like crack, and he struggled to come to terms with his actions. These days, he’s owning it.

Graham Linehan is the creator of Father Ted, a truly beloved sitcom from the UK's Channel Four. But, because he is opposed to the notion that women have penises, he was forced out of TV comedy (as ruthlessly homogeneous a world as can be found) and then out of Britain itself. He returned from exile this morning only for the purposes of attending his trial, starting at Westminster Magistrates' Court this Thursday, following his previous arrest by Big Tranny's ideological enforcers at Scotland Yard. So naturally, on landing at Heathrow this morning, he was immediately arrested all over again by...

California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom is the new front runner in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. Behind a social media campaign that mocks the style and demeanor of President Donald Trump, Newsom’s charges have worked wonders for his national profile and elevated what appears to be an all-but-certain presidential campaign in 2028. New polling from Emerson suggests the 57-year-old former mayor of San Francisco is heads and shoulders above his Democratic peers who each possess a fatal flaw that will likely prevent them from warding off the coming era of Newsom. Emerson queried 387 active registered Democrats and...

Over 100 people showed up for Miami Beach’s rainbow crosswalks that are currently in the political crosshairs across the state of Florida. “Our rights are on shaky ground everywhere, but especially here in Florida,” said activist Paul Thomas. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Florida Department of Transportation has ordered communities across the state to remove colorful crosswalks

Most Democrats agree that they need to fight Trump more vigorously, while also focusing on economic issues. A sharper debate has opened over social and cultural issues: Should Democrats break with identity politics? WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party’s standing in public opinion polls has sunk to its lowest point in more than 30 years. Many of the party’s own voters think their leaders aren’t fighting hard enough against President Trump. In one survey, the words they used most often were “weak” and “tepid.”“The party is in shambles,” said James Carville, the political strategist who helped Bill Clinton win the White...

But the organization's days could be numbered.There was a time when most people would’ve viewed transgender medical procedures on minors as outright child abuse. Now, not only are countless people fighting tooth and nail to keep “gender affirming care” legal, but one organization is actually incentivizing hospitals to chemically and surgically mutilate children. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an LGBTQ rights group, persuades children’s hospitals to give transgender surgeries to minors, according to a report by Do No Harm. HRC uses a scoring index to measure a hospital’s “compliance with various tenets of gender ideology” and ranks each facility, giving...

Chris Cuomo declares the Democrat Party is DEAD 💀 Cuomo tells me elitism, open borders, socialism and defund the police killed the modern Democrat Party. Cuomo says the Democratic Party that his father was apart of “no longer exists” and he “doesn’t know why” his brother still registers as a Democrat. “My brother’s a Democrat. I don’t know why, but he is. My father was a Democrat. But his party doesn’t exist anymore.” “Now it's the left arguing for a cultural elite. This is how you will talk about people, Benny. This is how you will raise your kids. This...

The leader of a Girls Scout troop in New Jersey says she was removed from her position due to her social media posts that questioned the organization’s perceived shift towards LGBTQIA+ activism and its introduction of gender sexuality alliance clubs to scouts. Alexandra Bougher, who is also the Bergen County chapter chair of Moms for Liberty, said she was fired in a phone call Wednesday with two members of the council of the Girl Scouts of Northern New Jersey. Moms for Liberty is a right-wing parents rights group that advocates against school curricula mentioning LGBTQ rights, race, and ethnicity. Bougher...

A Lithuanian same-sex couple has been declared a legal family by a court in Lithuania, a historic victory for LGBTQ+ people in the Baltic nation. The two women in the couple, whose identities have not been made public, were living together and wanted to have their cohabitation recognized by the government as a form of partnership. The Vilnius City District Court agreed and ruled that the state should create a way for them to register their relationship. The Lithuanian constitution bans same-sex marriage, and the country’s Civil Code also bans the recognition of same-sex relationships as civil partnerships. Nevertheless, the...