Free Republic

After weeks of sacking villages and destroying church buildings around Nigeria’s northeastern town of Gwoza, Islamic extremist group Boko Haram on Wednesday (Aug. 6) killed an estimated 100 people in the predominantly Christian town, sources said. The shooting, fire-bombing and slashing of men, women and children in Gwoza, Borno state, as initially the military reportedly fled before an insurgent force backed by international terrorist groups, began at about 4 a.m., producing eyewitness assertions that Boko Haram, which seeks to impose sharia (Islamic law) throughout Nigeria, had taken control of the town of more than 276,000 people. “You have been fleeing...

You know, being a fan of the Minnesota Vikings is difficult enough just based on what happens on the field. We’re 0-4 in Super Bowls. We’ve got to deal with the stomach-curdling memories of the 1999 NFC Championship Game, not to mention 41-doughnut in the same game two years later, and the bounty-hunting Saints putting out a contract on Brett Favre in 2010. But on a cultural level . . . hey, what the heck did we do? We were just sitting here minding our own business. First we got stuck with a petulant, attention-mongering punter who couldn’t and can’t...

The nation’s first-ever memorial to gay military veterans will be placed in the “gay corner” of the historic Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill, home to the gravesites of senators, congressmen, Supreme Court justices and vice presidents. In announcing the new memorial, cemetery President Paul K. Williams said the stone structure will be put close to “the ‘gay corner,’ thought to be the only LGBT cemetery section in the world.” The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Veterans Memorial Project and the cemetery announced the design this week. It consists of three black granite panels standing 11 feet high, 5 feet wide...

Did you know that it is perfectly normal for a man to appear in public wearing pink pony ears and tail? No, really.  There is nothing at all unusual about that. And if you don't believe me then I will write an overlong article trying to convince you of its complete normalcy. Such is the attitude of Jennifer Goforth Gregory of The Atlantic who tries a bit too hard to convince the readers that men wearing flashy pony costumes is absolutely normal. The funniest thing about Gregory plugging such men aka "Bronies" is how much obvious effort she puts into...

“Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.”  These words are taken from Robert Lifton’s book, The Nazi Doctors.  They summarize the total enmification (the making into an enemy) of Jews by the Nazi government in the belief that Jewishness personifies physical disease in the body of humanity.  The concept of homophobia, as used by progressives to psychodiagnose Christians, is a variation...

...Charlie Crist, the former Republican governor turned independent turned Democrat, was endorsed by SAVE, the gay rights group based in Miami-Dade County. The gay and lesbian community has become an important element of the Democratic Party’s coalition.

Listed as a third-stringer on the depth chart and expected by many to not make the 53-man team, Michael Sam’s quest to become the first openly-gay player on a regular-season roster moved on Friday night to an actual game.

Julie Atwood was standing at her son's casket when the phone rang. The church where her son's funeral was scheduled to be held the next day decided to abruptly cancel the service, after the pastor learned the deceased was gay and his obituary listed a surviving "husband." Atwood said she was told it would be "blasphemous" to hold the services at the church because her son, Julion Evans, 42, was gay. "It was devastating," she said. "I did feel like he was being denied the dignity of death." Evans' husband, Kendall Capers, says the pair were partners for 17 years...

Nova Scotia’s first gay-friendly mosque is set to open in the next few weeks. The Halifax Unity Mosque is an expansion of the Toronto Unity Mosque, also called el-Tawhid Juma Circle. The mosque is a “gender-equal, LGBTI/queer-affirming” place for Muslims to worship, according to its Facebook page. Syed Adnan Hussein has been building support for the Halifax Unity Mosque for a while. He found a space this week and hopes to start worship by next month. He hopes it will welcome people with a range of sexual identities. Many Muslims live in countries where being gay is a crime. Often,...

The Target Corporation has traditional marriage and family in the crosshairs of its bulls-eye. Target has now declared its support for homosexual “marriage.” However, the Minnesota-based retailer has gone past the point of articulating support for gay “marriage” and has jumped into the fray to wield its influence with the courts on this issue. Working to overturn the vote of the people regarding the true definition of marriage, Target has filed an amicus brief with the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals pushing for so-called marriage “equality” regarding the ban on same-sex marriage in Wisconsin and Indiana. (The case is before...

"Anti-LGBT attitudes are terrible for people in all sorts of communities. They linger and oppress, and we need to stamp them out, ruthlessly," tweeted Josh Barro, a writer for the New York Times. In subsequent tweets he made clear that those who believe in traditional marriage are not worthy of respect or civility and, most alarmingly, that the government has the power to redefine words such as marriage. In Houston, Texas, ironies upon ironies abound in an anonymous group publishing the names and addresses of citizens opposed to a gay rights measure. This also happened during the Proposition 8...

Michelle Obama said it: ‘The blood of Africa runs through my veins’ Then Obama said it: ‘The blood of Africa runs through our family’ Gee, that's great. Exactly why one might be proud of it is a good question. For all his blather about human rights, Barack Obama celebrated the monsters of Africa at the White House. Obama’s monsters ball: How the White House opened its doors to some of Africa’s most evil dictators and homophobes and turned blind eye to their human rights record. Leaders were invited to the White House for the first ever US Africa summit. Included...

Barack Obama’s first term provoked the Republican Party’s most libertarian moment since the Goldwater campaign, or perhaps even the advent of the New Deal. Several things thrust the GOP in this direction. Needing to distance themselves from the failures of the now-departed Republican administration, most lurched toward the conclusion that George W. Bush had failed because he had embraced big government and forsaken the true free-market path. As it had under Bill Clinton, the Republican base grew more suspicious of the use of military power with a Democrat in office. And the scope of Obama’s economic agenda tended to overshadow...

"The party can’t become the opposite of what it is," the libertarian-leaning senator said. "If you tell people from Alabama, Mississippi or Georgia, 'You know what, guys, we’ve been wrong, and we’re gonna be the pro-gay-marriage party,' they’re either gonna stay home or -- I mean, many of these people joined the Republican Party because of these social issues." "So I don’t think we can completely flip. But can we become, to use the overused term, a bigger tent?" he added. "I think we can and can agree to disagree on a lot of these issues. I think the party...

There is this notion, one we hear more and more, that the Republican Party has to shed the social issues to seize the future. “Social issues are not the business of government!” says thoroughly modern millennial. It’s a seductive cry, one repeated this past Tuesday in an article about how some young libertarians dubbed the “Liberty Kids” are taking over the moribund Los Angeles GOP. Oh, wouldn’t the political landscape be simple if we could just boil things down to fiscal responsibility? But life is seldom simple.If you would claim to be purely fiscal, or assert that “social issues” should...

A Denver bar has been cited by the state's Division of Civil Rights for discrimination because it refused to let a gay man dressed in drag enter. The bar is the Denver Wrangler, and despite what its name might suggest, it is not some Country Western joint. It is, in fact, a gay bar. So the state has determined that a gay bar has discriminated against a gay person. What happened last summer is that a gay man named Vito Marzano, dressed in drag from a fundraiser elsewhere, wanted to enter the Wrangler. He was denied entry. The bar claims...

Amid the reports emerging out of Liberia, it’s difficult to discern what is true and what isn’t. But the fear they carry is undeniable: Fear of the disease, fear of dead bodies, fear that God himself has sent down a terrible plague to blight the people of Liberia for their transgressions.There are local reports that “armed men” are allegedly trying to poison wells “to kill in the name of Ebola.” There are reports that the government is dumping bodies by the truckload at a mass grave on the west bank of a river and nearby residents fret over water contamination. And there...

When the fight for gay marriage began to gain traction back in the early years of the last decade, social conservative critics usually went beyond denying that marriage could be redefined to include same-sex couples. Many of them argued that homosexuals were much less inclined than heterosexuals to valorize the ideal of monogamy. Allowing gays and lesbians to marry would therefore introduce a polyamorous option into the institution, and adultery would come to be viewed as an acceptable option for all marriages.A spate of recent articles explicitly making the case for polyamory would seem to vindicate those conservative predictions and...

The president, vice president and a former State Department official with the Obama administration took advantage of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit this week in Washington, D.C., as an opportunity to advance the homosexual rights agenda. “Despite the focus and emphasis on these issues, the United States has remained committed to its principles of strengthening and promoting democratic institutions, encouraging good governance and accountability and also promoting good human rights, including respect for the LBG [lesbian, bisexual, gay] communities across Africa,” Johnnie Carson, former assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under Hillary Clinton and senior adviser at the U.S. Institute...

The federal government has awarded the University of California Los Angeles $193,989 in taxpayer funds to study skill-building as HIV prevention for male sex workers in Peru. The grant was issued by the National Institute of Mental Health, a part of the National Institutes of Health, and proposes “a pilot study for a group that has been neglected in the Peruvian HIV epidemic, namely male sex workers (fletes).” Men having sex with men in Peru have a “high burden of HIV” at 10 to 15 percent, compared to male sex workers, who have a 23 percent prevalence, researchers found. …