Free Republic

...I stand by those words of Fr. Seraphim. This Hell is being driven by one’s hormones and knowing that to deny them is “unhealthy.” Hell is being driven by one’s desires and fantasies and knowing that to deny them is to deny the only joy there is, the joy that defines your whole being. Hell is a fine San Francisco morning standing trapped in your bedroom while an orgy takes place in the hallway outside. Hell is a foggy San Francisco afternoon standing in a room full of men involved in various actions with each other—and somewhere a voice tells...

ESPN sports journalist Rachel Nichols on Friday misrepresented a North Carolina law that prohibits people from using the public facilities of the opposite sex. Ms. Nichols said the law prevents any city in North Carolina from passing legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexuality or gender identity. “I know some people like to call this the ‘bathroom law,’ but it’s about so, so much more than bathrooms,” Ms. Nichols said on her ESPN show, “NBA: The Jump.” “The new law in North Carolina takes away any North Carolina city’s ability to protect anyone who is gay, lesbian, transgender in...

A federal government agency has blasted “recent state laws passed, and proposals being considered, under the guise of so-called ‘religious liberty’ which target members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (‘LGBT’) community for discrimination.” “Religious freedom is an important foundation of our nation,” said Martin Castro, chairman of the US Commission on Civil Rights. “However, in the past, ‘religious liberty’ has been used to block racial integration and anti-discrimination laws.” Castro added: The North Carolina and Mississippi laws, and similar legislation proposed in other states, perverts the meaning of religious liberty and perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, marginalizes the transgender and...

Since the publication of Time‘s recent cover story “The Transgender Tipping Point,” there has been a spate of conservative op-eds in retort, including ones featured in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Wall Street Journal, and online on conservative websites such as The Federalist. The attacks follow a predictable set of talking points that rely on the reader having no scientific knowledge of the issue. However, when examined from a perspective of peer-reviewed medical consensus and law, these talking points fail utterly.

- Catholic internet evangelist Michael Voris, the founder of Church Militant and known worldwide for his famous show The Vortex, “where lies and falsehoods are trapped and exposed,” has revealed for the first time that he was actively involved in homosexuality “over a prolonged period of time.” The internet sensation who has been zealous in exposing error and falsehood even where bishops are concerned, has long admitted he was a revert from a sinful sexual lifestyle, but never before revealed its specific nature. “I have said many times — in public — that I was in a state of mortal...

When I was a lad, I very much enjoyed the comedy of Cheech & Chong. Tonight, at the Novo by Microsoft theatre in downtown Los Angeles, I got to see them live. Their humor comes from a gentler, and now rather distant, time in our nation’s history, but only one of the many bits actually felt dated. Amid the drug-related and social-observation material came a genuine political surprise. An anti-Trump joke in the opening act fell a little flat, and a few minutes later, when the main act got under way, Cheech asked the audience, “Are there any Donald Trump...

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) declined to take a position on the North Carolina law that requires people to use the restroom that corresponds with their biological sex or the Mississippi law that protects religious organizations and individuals from being forced to act against their consciences on matters involving same-sex marriage, sex outside marriage or transgenderism. […] … “I’m not going to comment on what various different states are doing. Again, all of our committees that have jurisdiction in this area look at this issue. But it’s not my place to get involved in what each state is doing. To...

President Obama said Friday that laws affecting LGBT rights in North Carolina and Mississippi are “wrong” and should be reversed in court. The president, speaking at a news conference in London, also urged British people not to be afraid of visiting the two southern states, saying they would find “hospitable people” there. The British foreign office has issued a travel advisory warning its citizens about potential problems for gay or transgender people visiting those states. “The laws that have been passed there are wrong and should be overturned,” Mr. Obama said. “They’re in response to politics in part, in part...

What sort of man is lurking deep inside Donald Trump’s innards? [SNIP] Evolving? Projecting an image? Moderating? Back in the South those are code words for snookered, two-faced and phony-as-a-two-dollar-bill. Oh, Donald. What have you done? Say it isn’t so. “Donald Trump is telling the American people that he’s lying to us,” Sen. Ted Cruz said on the campaign trail Friday. “His campaign is now run by Washington lobbyists.” [SNIP] In just the past few days we’ve seen him begin to waffle on issues like abortion and religious liberty. Pro-life groups are extremely concerned by comments he made about rewriting...

Ted Cruz's campaign produced and released this attack ad overnight, after Donald Trump came out in favor of allowing transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice, rather than the bathroom corresponding to their birth. The Cruz campaign has seized on this issue as a clear indicator that Donald Trump is "not a conservative." "Leave it the way it is," Trump said. "There have been very few problems." "Should a grown man pretending to be a woman be allowed to use the women's restroom?" asks the Cruz campaign, calling the bathroom issue "PC Nonsense that is destroying America." "North...

A pro-family group has launched a boycott of Target after the retail store made it clear on Tuesday that its bathrooms and changing facilities can be used by anyone according to their gender identity. The American Family Association said that more than 162,000 citizens signed its #BoycottTarget pledge within 24 hours. “Corporate America must stop bullying people who disagree with the radical left agenda to remake society into their progressive image,” AFA President Tim Wildmon said in a statement. “#BoycottTarget has resonated with Americans.” …

Mississippi and North Carolina ought to rethink their laws affecting the rights of its LGBT citizens, President Barack Obama said Friday, while inviting all Britons to visit the states nonetheless. Before ending a news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, Obama fielded a question about the United Kingdom issuing travel advice to its citizens on Friday about the new laws in Mississippi and North Carolina that affect the rights of British LGBT travelers. Attempting to assuage concerns and not offend the citizens of those states, Obama told the British people that they should come visit North Carolina and Mississippi,...

Curt Schilling, the ex-Boston Red Sox ace pitcher, appeared on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM 125 The Patriot Channel with host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon on Friday morning to make absolutely clear he is not backing down to the left over his transgender bathroom comments.

The Family Policy Institute of Washington tried an experiment on gender ideology at a college campus, and came back with surprising results. In a video published last week, the Institute shows journalist Joseph Backholm visiting the University of Washington campus and asking a number of students questions about gender and self-identity. Their answers reveal how deeply ingrained gender ideology has become in the mindset of today's college students. Starting with the simple question, "If I told you that I was a woman, what would you say?" Backholm received the almost unanimous response that he'd be accepted as a woman. He...

“Well, I think it would be a bad idea to put little girls in a bathroom with grown men,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told CNN on Thursday. But the senator also made it clear that the issue is not one of major national importance, as far as he is concerned: “All I can say is that the only bathroom I can control is in my office, and you can use the bathroom in my office without bringing your birth certificate.” …

The 2017 NBA All-Star Game is slated to take place in Charlotte, N.C., but commissioner Adam Silver said that will change if the state's new anti-LGBT laws are not altered. In recent weeks, Silver had been rather vague in addressing the controversy, but on Thursday he indicated that the league is taking a firm stance on the matter during an interview with ESPN's "Mike & Mike".

If it concerns sex in any way, you can be sure that our culture will fixate on it and manage to defy common sense with hyperventilating indignation. Same-sex marriage roiled the waters for decades, but now that the Supreme Court has big-footed that question, culture warriors are prowling for new realms of transgression to embrace. So, coming to a bathroom near you — transgenderism. I’m just back from a weekend at Harvard University where unisex bathrooms are the norm. On behalf of womankind, I say: To the Bathroom Barricades! Bathroom injustice has been a feature of the world for a...

... His history with the gay community is a long one. He donated to charities focused on the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and early ’90s. In 2000, when he briefly considered running for president, he gave an interview to The Advocate, a gay magazine, in which he supported amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to “include a ban of discrimination based on sexual orientation.” “It would be simple. It would be straightforward,” Mr. Trump said in the interview, adding, “It’s only fair.” Sixteen years later, gay rights advocates are still trying to persuade Congress to pass a similar...

Social justice warriors America is going through a midlife crisis. How else can we explain the ridiculous nonsense we see going on in this country today? Many people in our nation are acceding to blatantly fantastical nonsense based on nothing but grossly ignorant wishful thinking, much like the 50-year old man with a pot belly who believes that his new sports car and gold chain are somehow going to make him attractive to young women half his age. Try as he may to imagine himself to be something he’s not, sooner or later reality will forcibly reassert itself. America’s flight...

An openly gay Missouri state representative told a Farm Bureau staff member that her support for a pro-marriage amendment to the state constitution could result in a loss of federal subsidies to her organization and to the state’s farmers. The pro-marriage amendment is intended to protect religious leaders and wedding vendors who support marriage — and who oppose single-sex marriage — from legal retaliation.