Free Republic

I can’t get this question out of my head: Who is Patricia Jannuzzi? These last few weeks, we’ve seen a lot of religious organizations publicly wrestling with gay rights. The Mormon Church authorized new protections for gay people, while attempting to protect religious believers, too. A rapidly dwindling denomination of Presbyterians decided to embrace gay marriage. San Francisco’s City Church, the largest evangelical megachurch, embraced gay marriage for its congregants. Cardinal Dolan was the grand marshal of the first St. Patrick’s Day parade that permitted people to march with LGBT banners. Some of these churches are discarding ancient Christian moral...

Atlanta is ranked number one among US cities when it comes to the rate of new diagnoses of HIV. Experts say that's because routine HIV testing is not offered in the places where most people get their health care. By the time patients are diagnosed in Atlanta, almost one third have advanced to clinical AIDS. Since starting a routine testing program in 2013, Grady Hospital has diagnosed an average of two or three patients with HIV every single day.

In Boston and New York, persons with same-sex inclinations representing gay activist groups are marching openly for the first time in Saint Patrick’s Day parades after years of lobbying and court battles. In Boston, two LGBT groups have been invited to participate in the parade “honoring” Saint Patrick – Out Vets and Boston Pride. In New York, Out@NBC-Universal will be allowed to march in the parade for the first time.These groups reject Catholic teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts and advocate for same-sex “marriage.” The Church is on the defensive, and Church leaders are concerned about appearing intolerant. Of course,...

A South Carolina woman’s new essay about being raised by her lesbian mom contains a surprising revelation: she opposes marriage equality. “Gay community, I am your daughter. My mom raised me with her same-sex partner back in the ’80s and ’90s,” writes Heather Barwick, a 31-year-old mother of four, in The Federalist. “I’m writing to you because I’m letting myself out of the closet: I don’t support gay marriage. But it might not be for the reasons that you think. It’s not because you’re gay. I love you, so much. It’s because of the nature of the same-sex relationship itself.”

The San Francisco metropolitan area has the highest percentage of the adult population who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) of any of the top 50 U.S. metropolitan areas, followed by Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas. Variation in the percentage who identify as LGBT across the largest metro areas is relatively narrow, with San Francisco's percentage just 2.6 percentage points higher than the national average of 3.6%, and the lowest-ranked metro area -- Birmingham, Alabama -- one point below the national average. The top 10 includes metro areas from every region of the country except the Midwest. Given...

93.8 percent of the adults polled in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metropolitan area do not “personally identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender,” according to a Gallup survey that interviewed 374,325 adults nationwide from June through December of last year. […] The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan area—commonly known as Silicon Valley—ranked fourth from the bottom among the 50 largest metropolitan areas for its percentage of LGBTs. 96.8 percent in that metro area do not personally identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, according to the Gallup survey, and 3.2 percent do. …

Glenn Beck says he is no longer a member of the Republican Party. “I’ve made my decision — I’m out," Beck said on his radio show Wednesday, according to Mediaite.com. "I’m out of the Republican Party. I am not a Republican; I will not give a dime to the Republican Party. I’m out.” The former Fox News host and founder of the Blaze supported the GOP during the last election cycle but has become disillusioned with the party in recent years over what he believes was its failure to stand up to the Obama administration — specifically, the Affordable Care...

Jakob Rumble was in severe pain when he came to the emergency room of Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina with his mother. What happened next provoked a federal lawsuit by the West St. Paul resident and a decision by U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson that is being hailed by national transgender and gay rights organizations. Nelson ruled this week that Rumble, who identifies himself as a transgender man, has built a “plausible” case that he was a victim of discrimination and mistreatment by an emergency room doctor on the basis of gender identity. She denied a motion by the...

A senior Hamas terrorist decided he wanted 72 virgins without killing himself. Instead he picked some of the terrorist group’s little human shields for the honor. According to Al Bawabh News, Hamas is trying to hush up a major sex scandal involving young boys in a Gaza mosque. A prominent Hamas member is accused of engaging in sex acts with young boys after enticing them with promises of teaching them Jihad and the Quran. According to the story, he pretended to be teaching the boys martial arts. He evaluated their “performance” and if he felt that they wouldn’t resist,...

The Presbyterian Church (USA) is the Radio Shack of church denominations. It’s been in free fall for so long that it’s sometimes difficult to believe the church is still around. It makes news only when it makes bad news. This is a church that has long embraced a culture of death by accepting abortion on demand. Indeed, church materials have declared that abortion can even be “an act of faithfulness before God,” and church policy states: “The considered decision of a woman to terminate a pregnancy can be a morally acceptable, though certainly not the only or required, decision.”...

The St. Paul school board unanimously approved a new policy Tuesday that aims to make school more welcoming for transgender and gender-nonconforming students. The policy sets the expectation that students' preferred name and pronoun be used at school and that teachers not separate students by gender without a compelling reason. It also will give transgender students access to the restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity. "I should be able to walk into a bathroom and not have people question if I'm supposed to be in there," Siren Lopez, a transgender teen girl, told the board. Emma Santibanez,...

Thank God for Hugh Hewitt. Despite an abiding respect for Dr. Ben Carson’s vision, intellect, and accomplishments, many conservatives began to wonder whether he was prepared to mount a presidential bid when his artless comments about the nature of homosexuality inspired a news cycle dedicated to the complexities of sexual relationships in prison. Needless to say, this was intellectual energy that could have been better spent. If conservatives had doubts about Carson’s readiness to run for the presidency, they were confirmed on Wednesday when the “Hewitt Primary” claimed its first scalp. In an extended interview in which Hewitt grilled Carson...

A top U.S. Forest Service executive told his employees to probe their own “unconscious bias” on everything from race and sexuality to the disabled and fat people, asking them to use an unproven assessment tool to explore their feelings. The online test, which Forest Management Director Bryan Rice urged other agency directors to use as well, specifically warns of problems when it is taken “outside of the safeguards of a research institution.” Users also are told to be careful about how far to go in interpreting the results. Mr. Rice, in a March 11 email to his employees, also instructed...

The US Supreme Court has set a precedent upholding the right of states to define marriage as the union of husband and wife. All federal and state judges—including those in Alabama—are bound by that precedent. Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore made news last month when he ordered probate judges in Alabama under his judicial supervision not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, even though a federal district judge had held the law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman to be unconstitutional. Howls of “lawlessness” went up in the corridors of the nation’s...

A suspect was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a 10-year-old boy in East Oakland, authorities said Thursday. Miguel Baraja, 48, was arrested Tuesday in Fremont and is being held without bail at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin in connection with the January attack. Alameda County prosecutors have charged him with intercourse or sodomy with a child.

The Office of the Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) has received numerous emails regarding the recent action of the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA) in redefining marriage. On March 17, 2015 the Presbyterian Church (USA) approved language that allows its ministers to officiate at same-sex marriages in its churches. The change comes after the General Assembly and a majority of that denomination’s 171 presbyteries approved an amendment to their Book of Order that describes marriage as “a unique relationship between two people, traditionally a man and a woman.” There are several Presbyterian denominations in the United States....

A human rights activist and writer is dismayed that there are no laws that allow the imprisonment of those who state certain offensive positions, such as Bill Maher and Phil Robertson. If the United States were a "civilized country" like those in Europe, Tanya Cohen wrote for Thought Catalog, then Robertson, a reality show star on A&E's "Duck Dynasty," "would have been taken before a government Human Rights Tribunal or Human Rights Commission and given a fine or prison sentence for the hateful and bigoted comments that he made about LGBT people." Among the types of speech that should be...

If Fiona M. Jardine had a husband, the expensive fertility treatments she's now undergoing would be covered by her health plan. But Jardine, 29, is married to a woman, so she and her wife have to pay out of pocket. A bill that would grant married lesbian couples the same fertility treatment benefits as husbands and wives is advancing in the Maryland General Assembly. - snip - Maryland has required state-regulated health insurance plans that offer pregnancy-related benefits to cover the costs of in vitro fertilization since 2000. It is one of a dozen states that require coverage of the...

Does the U.S. Constitution require same-sex marriage? No, the U.S. Constitution requires the Court to leave this issue to the states. If you believe otherwise, then amend the Constitution.The Supreme Court is about to decide if the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution requires the states to redefine marriage to include same-sex relationships. There are several reasons why the answer is no.The most decisive of these reasons is the fact that when the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, homosexual behavior was a felony in every state in the union. So if the 14th Amendment was intended to require...

An association of Southern Baptist churches in Alabama voted March 16 to dismiss a church over its pastor’s support of same-sex marriage. The executive board of Madison Baptist Association voted 74-5 to withdraw fellowship from Weatherly Heights Baptist Church in Huntsville, Ala., according to a statement to media.The voluntary association of 85 churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention investigated Weatherly Heights, which is primarily affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, after news reports that an unpaid staff member ordained by the church officiated at a same-sex wedding Feb. 9.Discussions revealed that the church’s pastor, David Freeman, also does not...