Free Republic

More than 340,000 have signed a pledge to stop shopping at Target, in response to the corporation’s announcement this week that transgender employees and customers will be allowed to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity. “This means a man can simply say he ‘feels like a woman today’ and enter the women's restroom... even if young girls or women are already in there,” stated the American Family Association, which started the petition. Target on Tuesday became the first giant retailer to weigh in on an issue at the center of a heated national debate. The announcement came...

The reaction has been swift. The singer Bryan Adams canceled his concert in Mississippi in protest against what he called an “anti-L.G.B.T.” law, and the actress Sharon Stone decided not to film a movie there. In North Carolina, Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Pearl Jam and Ani DiFranco have canceled shows in response to a law regulating transgender bathroom access. While the celebrity response is drawing considerable attention, the travel industry in each state is more concerned about lower-profile visitors: the everyday tourists who have already begun canceling trips or planning vacations elsewhere. Both states have been hit by hotel cancellations...

Former senator Harris Wofford has revealed he is to wed his male partner after finding love again after his fifty-year marriage to his wife. The 90-year-old wrote a moving essay about the tragic loss of his wife Clare Lindgren to leukemia in 1996, and beginning a new chapter of his life with Matthew Charlton - who is fifty years his junior.

The question of who is being made to feel comfortable and welcome at Target, and who isn’t, should be one of the top questions in your mind before you choose to spend your money in their stores. This week, a man took his six-yeard to Target to discuss how the bathroom policy works out practically, rather than just find out from blogs or biased cable news stations calling the whole thing a “gay rights” issue, which doesn’t even make sense. His story went viral on Facebook, and already has over 22,000 shares and 44,000 reactions.

In a rare entrance into a politically charged controversy, first lady Michelle Obama used a commencement speech Saturday at Jackson State University in Mississipppi to directly target the state’s recently-passed "religious freedom" bill. "We see it right here in Mississippi -- just two weeks ago -– how swiftly progress can hurtle backward," Obama said. "How easy it is to single out a small group and marginalize them because of who they are or who they love." Obama made the comment following an impassioned revival of the state and university's stained history with regard to civil rights. "So we've got to...

<p>CLAYTON (KCBS/AP) — An East Bay man has been arrested on suspicion of a hate crime after a rainbow flag was burned at a Clayton church.</p> <p>The flag was burned at the Clayton Valley Presbyterian Church. Church officials believe this was the latest act of recent vandalism surrounding the flag.</p>

Advocates of traditional family values are calling for a boycott of Target in response to the retail giant's announcement that they allow transgender people to use the restroom and dressing room that aligns with their preferred gender identity. The other way of saying this is that grown men have unrestricted and no-questions-asked access to bathrooms designated for women and girls. Via their website, Target announced, "[W]e welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity. …Everyone deserves to feel like they belong." Critics allege that this move is less...

It has been a week of weeks concerning the assaults on the American people coming from this administration and their communist allies within and without. They are becoming more emboldened, ruthless and obvious as to who is responsible for the crimes committed against the American people, especially those involving the sodomite community. Yet, you are told to believe that the homosexual manifesto is just satire. Let me make my point. Barack Hussein Obama the “First Gay President” and his controllers appoint 225 radical lesbians, homosexuals, and transgender to governmental positions only to be used as a political battering ram to...

But this one led to over a ton of coke and was 800 yards longFederal officials announced today (April 20) that they made arrests related to what is believed to be the longest cross-border drug transportation tunnel (800 yards in length), stretching from a house in Tijuana to a commercial lot in an Otay Mesa industrial park. Following an investigation that began on April 12, authorities seized 2242 pounds of cocaine and more than 14,000 pounds of marijuana. The cocaine stash is believed to be the largest ever seized from a tunnel. Six men (believed to be of Mexican descent,...

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver put his foot down on Thursday, asserting that for the 2017 All-Star Game be held in Charlotte, it is “necessary” that North Carolina change its law mandating people use only public restrooms corresponding to their biological sex in government buildings. This moves the discussion to a more definitive stance than the NBA adopted earlier in the month. In an apparent threat, Silver said that he did not know what impact the “discriminatory law” would have on the league’s ability to showcase the game in the Tar Heel state. Silver added that the law is “problematic for...

After a week of chaos leading up to the event, Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos’ lecture at American University was interrupted by nearly 150 protesters and screaming Black Lives Matters student activists. Oh Thursday night, Yiannopoulos took the stage at American University, for another stop of his “Dangerous Faggot Tour.” Although many of the visits on the tour have attracted minor controversies, students at American foreshadowed their large-scale protest of Yiannopoulos’ lecture by vandalizing and destroying posters in the week leading up to the event....

Welcome to life in totalitarian America, where even going to the bathroom and identifying the sex of an adult have now become intensely political acts. Totalitarianism is about the politicization of everything, and once people’s careers can be destroyed by the New Bathroom Order if they publicly object to the once-bizarre idea of men in the ladies’ room–we’re there. Ask the now-unemployed Curt Schilling. Totalitarianism is about using force to gain political goals. You can’t get more coercive than forcing the vast majority of people to endorse the utterly bizarre just to accommodate the allegedly hurt feelings of an almost...

All it does is force trans men and women to use bathrooms based on the sex that they were born in, considering that many trans men and women simply look like regular men and women, it does the opposite of the intended effect. It gives the pretext for straight perverted men to pretend to be transgender to enter women's bathrooms while dressing normally. They don't even need to wear a dress to enter the bathroom, they can just look like normal straight men and enter (because many trans men simply look like men) do you realize how ridiculous this law...

By Mike Collett-White LONDON (Reuters) - A 400-year-old painting previously believed to be that of a woman has been found to portray the male patron and friend of William Shakespeare, its owner said on Tuesday. The picture of the Earl of Southampton, featuring a figure with long, black curly hair, pursed red lips, an earring and a slender right hand, has prompted speculation in British media that Shakespeare was gay. "He is wearing perfectly fashionable male attire of the day, but the earring and the hair are effeminate and unusual for the 1590s," the painting's owner Alec Cobbe told Reuters....

LONDON (Reuters) - A 400-year-old painting previously believed to be that of a woman has been found to portray the male patron and friend of William Shakespeare, its owner said on Tuesday. The picture of the Earl of Southampton, featuring a figure with long, black curly hair, pursed red lips, an earring and a slender right hand, has prompted speculation in British media that Shakespeare was gay. "He is wearing perfectly fashionable male attire of the day, but the earring and the hair are effeminate and unusual for the 1590s," the painting's owner Alec Cobbe told Reuters. He said that...

Ananova Breaking Wire-What the Papers Say-The London Daily SunSHAKESQUEERMe thinks new evidence has emerged that doth suggest William Shakespeare might have been gay.I RULETony Blair delivered an astonishing slapdown to Gordon Brown yesterday by stressing that Britain had elected him to run the country not the chancellorStory Filed: 00:14 Monday, April 22, 2002 Greenwich Mean Time

Controversial plans to dig up William Shakespeare's grave, to find out whether he was murdered by his son-in-law, have been revealed by American scientists. The US experts, who are convinced the Bard's death was anything but natural, are hoping to be granted permission by his descendants to exhume his body. Shakespeare died on his birthday on April 23, 1616, and was buried two days later at Stratford-upon-Avon's Holy Trinity Church. His grave has remained untouched for more than 350 years, but now American pathologists want to disturb his resting place, in spite of warnings of a curse on Shakespeare's tomb...

A South African anthropologist has asked permission to open the graves of William Shakespeare and his family to determine, among other things, what killed the Bard and whether his poems and plays may have been composed under the influence of marijuana. But while Shakespeare's skeleton could reveal clues about his health and death, the question of the man's drug use depends on the presence of hair, fingernails or toenails in the grave, said Francis Thackeray, the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, who floated the proposal to the Church of England. Thackeray...

<p>To toke or not to toke? That is one question.</p> <p>Several 17th-century clay pipes found at the site of William Shakespeare's home were used to smoke marijuana, a South African anthropologist says. Although he has no proof that the Bard was the guy who smoked the pipes, he surmises that some of Shakespeare's sonnets and plays also lend credence to the possibility that the writer smoked marijuana for inspiration.</p>

On Friday's regular "Shields and Brooks" segment on the PBS NewsHour, pretend conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks slammed the North Carolina bathroom law -- which tries to protect women and girls from men intruding into women's restrooms in state buildings -- as he declared that the law is "so bad now I have to praise Donald Trump" for the GOP candidate's criticism of the law on NBC's Today show. He went on to complain that the Republican party "should have moved on" from "1980s socially conservative culture war politics," and concluded by lauding "moderate" Trump as "not stuck...