Free Republic

A few years ago, while visiting family in Maryland, I attended church with my brother. It was a very hip contemporary church. The pastor, who looked in his early forties, wore a shirt and jeans. I saw a parishioner with a Mohawk haircut and others with tattoos. This is not a judgment, merely an observation that the congregation was very racially diverse, as well as in their attire. The topic of the pastor's sermon was homosexuality. He disclosed that his sister is a homosexual. Folks, filled with national statistics and documented facts, the pastor delivered the most loving and compassionate...

What do white evangelicals, Muslims, Mormons, blacks, conservative Republicans, and immigrants from Africa, South America, and Central America all have in common? They're less likely to support gay marriage than the average Californian. Over the years, I've patronized restaurants owned by members of all those groups. Today, if I went out into Greater Los Angeles and chatted up owners of mom-and-pop restaurants, I'd sooner or later find one who would decline to cater a gay wedding. The owners might be members of Rick Warren's church in Orange County. Or a family of immigrants in Little Ethiopia or on Olvera Street....

Editor’s note: Amid the discussion about the religious liberty laws in Indiana and Arkansas this week, there’s been a lot of misinformation—and a lot of thoughtful concerns about what religious freedom laws actually allow and what they ban. We talked to Heritage Foundation’s William E. Simon Fellow Dr. Ryan T. Anderson to get the facts—and to find out whether, as your liberal relatives will likely argue as the political discussions happen this holiday, the original Indiana religious freedom law would have allowed discrimination.What’s religious liberty all about?Religious liberty is about protecting people’s fundamental natural rights. People have rights—including the...

Let us assume, for the moment, that individuals and organizations opposed to Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act are well intentioned and pursuing their protests in good conscience. That may be more credit than most of them would give to people on the other side of the debate. But I’ve got a point to make. The view of the opposition is that this law denies the civil rights of gays. They are convinced that those who support it are motivated by animosity toward homosexuals and revulsion at the idea that people of the same sex can marry. Opponents reject any argument...

A bill, ready for a House vote, would allow private adoption agencies to use religious and/or moral reasons to deny gay couples wanting to adopt children. ... Republican Rep. Jason Brodeur said if gay couples want to adopt, they can go to the Department of Children and Families or a private agency that don’t have a problem with it.

Indiana lawmakers announced Thursday morning that they had reached a deal to update the state's controversial religious freedom law so that it states the law cannot be used to discriminate against anyone, including gay and lesbian customers...... language in the legislation states that the law does not, "Authorize a provider to refuse to offer or provide services, facilities, use of public accommodations, goods, employment, or housing [based on] sexual orientation, gender identity, or United States military service." The references to "sexual orientation" or "gender identity" are the first to appear in an Indiana law.

Urging Presbyterian Church USA to "repent and be restored to fellowship," the National Black Church Initiative, which represents 34,000 churches from 15 denominations, has declared it has severed ties with PCUSA after it amended its constitution changing their definition of marriage to include same-sex couples."NBCI and its membership base are simply standing on the Word of God within the mind of Christ. We urge our brother and sisters of the PCUSA to repent and be restored to fellowship," NBCI President Rev. Anthony Evans said, according to Charisma News."PCUSA's manipulation represents a universal sin against the entire church and its members....

WALKERTON, Ind. - A small-town pizza shop is saying they agree with Governor Pence and the signing of the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The O'Connor family, who owns Memories Pizza, says they have a right to believe in their religion and protect those ideals. “If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no,” says Crystal O'Connor of Memories Pizza. She and her family are standing firm in their beliefs. The O'Connor's have owned Memories Pizza in Walkerton for 9 years. It's a small-town business, with small-town ideals....

Few recent battles have seized the nation’s moral compass quite as emotionally as the one going on in Indiana right now, pitting defenders of religious liberty against opponents of discrimination based on sexual orientation. But Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook brings the moral confusion surrounding the battle to a head this morning with his op-ed in the Washington Post. Lumping together both legitimate and illegitimate “religious freedom restoration acts,” he writes, “they go against the very principles our nation was founded on.”Really? Let’s see if that claim stands up. We find those principles in the nation’s founding document, the Declaration...

A Christian florist and grandmother who declined to provide flowers for a same-sex wedding because of her Christian belief in traditional marriage has been fined $1,001 by a Washington court and will be held liable to pay the legal fees incurred by the gay couple, which could "devastate" her financially. As previously reported by The Christian Post, 70-year-old Barronelle Stutzman, the owner of Arlene's Flowers in Richland, Washington, was found guilty of violating the state's non-discrimination law in February, after referring Rob Ingersoll and Curt Feed to another florist when they asked her to provide the floral arrangements for their...

Indiana is experiencing its two minutes of hate. It is doubtful that since its admittance into the union in 1816, the heretofore inoffensive Midwestern state has ever been showered with so much elite obloquy. Indiana’s sin is that its legislature passed and Governor Mike Pence signed into law a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, setting out a legal standard for cases involving a clash between a person’s exercise of religion and the state’s laws. To listen to the critics, you’d think the law was drafted by a joint committee of attorneys from the Ku Klux Klan and Westboro Baptist Church. The...

Acceptance of gay marriage has long been a matter of when, rather than if -- in large part thanks to younger generations being overwhelmingly in favor.But just how quickly are views of homosexuality changing from generation to generation? A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute has some insights.The poll tested how millennials (ages 18 to 34) view various sexual behaviors, including homosexuality. And about equal numbers say homosexuality is morally wrong (38 percent) and morally acceptable (42 percent). Another 13 percent say it depends on the situation, while 7 percent declined to answer.What's most interesting, though, is when...

This weekend Kirsten Powers and Jonathan Merritt stirred up controversy by writing in the Daily Beast that Christians have no biblical basis for claiming that religious belief should allow them to refuse to serve a same-sex wedding:Before considering legal rights, Christians wrestling with this issue must first resolve the primary issue of whether the Bible calls Christians to deny services to people who are engaging in behavior they believe violates the teachings of Christianity regarding marriage. The answer is, it does not. Nor does the Bible teach that providing such a service should be construed as participation or affirmation. Yet...

Indiana's Republican legislative leaders said Monday they're working on adding language to a new state law to make it clear that it doesn't allow discrimination against gays and lesbians.... Supporters of the law insist the law will keep the government from compelling people to provide services they find objectionable on religious grounds. Arkansas is poised to follow in Indiana's footsteps, as Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson has said he'll sign a measure moving through the state's Legislature.

.....San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee on Thursday placed a travel ban on city-funded trips to Indiana, saying, “San Francisco taxpayers will not subsidize legally-sanctioned discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people by the State of Indiana.”

Imagine an America where atheists, Buddhists, Catholics, Protestants, agnostics, Hindus, and Muslims are all subject to the whims of local, state, and federal legislators. Gone is our most fundamental Civil Right, Freedom of Religion. Each person’s conscience is subject to the loudest and most organized objector. Every man servant to caprice, perversion, and proclivity. Imagine an America where one ideology is ensconced as supreme, where debate is criminal. This statist dystopia is precisely what the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered (LGBT) community militates for—a caliphate of sexual psychosis. The LGBT movement isn’t a debate about Civil Rights but about special...

Atheists and homosexual-rights activists in Ireland are threatening protest marches. A local government in the overwhelmingly Catholic country has fined a homosexual baker in the village of Inch (County Clare) for refusing to produce a wedding cake featuring, on its icing, the inscription, “A man shall . . . hold fast to his wife — Gen. 2:24.” The baker, Robert O’Riordan, says that he considers the inscription to be an implicit rebuke of his own domestic living arrangement and an imposition on his right as an atheist to refuse assent to “any material endorsement of religious ceremonies.” Mr. O’Riordan regularly...

Indiana has adopted a state-level version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), thereby imposing a “strict scrutiny” legal standard when the state government or local powers pass laws that interfere with the free exercise of religion. For this, Governor Mike Pence and Indiana’s legislators have been denounced as gay-hating monsters, a claim that was never made about President Bill Clinton, who signed the federal RFRA, or about the people and powers of such liberal states as Connecticut, which is one of the 20 states with a RFRA. Another dozen or so states have constitutional provisions similar to those...

A religious freedom bill signed into law by Indiana Republican Gov. Mike Pence Thursday is being characterized by major media outlets as a codification of anti-gay discrimination. They are wrong. Here is why. Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act is a state-level version of the federal RFRA. To understand what RFRA does, it helps to first understand how the law came about. History of RFRA In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling, Employment Division v. Smith, that was a radical departure from previous interpretations of the religious freedom clauses of the First Amendment. A member of the Native American...

SISTERON, France — The German co-pilot accused of crashing a passenger plane in the French Alps frequented a gliding club near the crash site as a child with his parents, according to a member of the club. Francis Kefer, a member of the club in the town of Sisteron, said on i-Tele television that Andreas Lubitz' family and other members of the gliding club in his home town of Montabaur, Germany, came to the region regularly between 1996 and 2003. ... The crash site is about 50 kilometers (30 miles) away from the Aero-club de Sisteron glider airfield.