Free Republic

A letter released by the Charlie Crist campaign: Dear Governor Scott: Four years ago, a district court of appeals ruled Florida’s ban on gay and lesbian adoption unconstitutional. When the ruling came down, I believed it was my job as Governor to exercise the authority vested in me by the people and our Constitution. The day the judge ruled, I declared Florida’s adoption ban over. Gay and lesbian parents began adopting the children they loved immediately. It is one of my proudest moments as an elected official. Last Thursday Federal District Judge Robert Hinkle gave you the same chance to...

How the same right allows for both same-sex marriage recognition and refusing to sell gay couples wedding cakes.How can a libertarian support gay marriage but also the right of businesses to decline to provide goods and services such as cakes, wedding dresses, and photographers for gay weddings? For many libertarians, it makes perfect logical, philosophical, and legal sense. But from the outside perspective, it often does not. As a result, critics looking for an opportunity to throw shade on the increased media and public interest in libertarian ideas can focus on just a piece of this mentality. We saw the...

Anytime I hear negative comments on the decision of Nigeria to ban homosexuality and gay marriage, my body develops goose pimples. I have made efforts at trying to rationalize why a man with his six senses, working at optimal level, will engage in animalistic actions and still make efforts at justifying such, hiding under the fallacious canopy of human right. Procreation, as designed by the creator, is meant to be carried out between a male and a female, and this had been the norm for generations. However, with some persons deciding to behave like animals; in fact, going below the...

Churchgoing Christians who support same-sex marriage are more likely to think pornography, cohabitation, hook-ups, adultery, polyamory, and abortion are acceptable. And it’s reasonable to expect continued change in more permissive directions. As mainline Protestant denominations increasingly accept the ordination of gay clergy and publicly affirm same-sex unions, the sociologist in me wishes to understand what this development means for people in those denominations. I’m not talking about subtle linguistic shifts. While the difference between speaking of marriage as a “civil contract between a woman and a man” and as “a unique commitment between two people” is obvious to those who...

A judge has suggested that now that same-sex marriages and homosexuality have become more accepted the next logical step could be to legitimize incestuous relationships. “A jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now ‘available’, not having [a] sexual partner,” Judge Garry Neilson from Australia said. Neilson compared incest to homosexuality, saying that such relationships were once illegal. “If this was the 1950s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you’d invariably have, they would...

Suddenly it's a possibility that experts are contemplating: marriage equality could be the law of the land all across the United States within one year. On Wednesday, Utah asked the Supreme Court to resolve its dispute with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals which two weeks ago became the first U.S. circuit court to declare that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Legal experts say the Supreme Court is likely to accept the case. With lawsuits piling up, and gay marriage on an undefeated legal streak since the Court axed the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, the...

On Wednesday, the state of Utah appealed a June 25 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling which invalidated that state’s ban on gay marriage to the United States Supreme Court. If the court accepts the case, some legal experts say, it could lead to the legalization of same-sex marriage across all 50 states.“Last month’s decision by the 10th Circuit was the first time a regional appeals court has made such a ruling in the year since the Supreme Court ordered the federal government to extend benefits to legally married same-sex couples,” a Reuters report read. “Legal experts say the Supreme...

On Friday, Vice President Joe Biden used an Independence Day celebration and speech in Philadelphia to compare gay marriage to the Civil Rights Movement and push for more gay marriage. According to The Hill, "[Biden] said he was reminded of two Philadelphias, one where the Declaration of Independence was signed 238 years ago and the other in Mississippi where civil rights workers were murdered in June 1964, two weeks before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act." After saying that the two Philadelphias helped give meaning to the words “all men are created equal," Biden reportedly said that gay...

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz is taking heat for his anti-gay views and vocal opposition to marriage equality by none other than a fellow Republican figure. Prominent Republican lawyer, Ted Olson, who is a strong supporter of LGBT rights, thought Cruz's comments on marriage equality were "very, very sad." Cruz had a lot to say to the crowds at the Texas GOP convention about the "threat" that is gay marriage. His speech appeared on an article of The New Yorker (emphasis mine): "Marriage is under assault," Ted Cruz said to the crowd. "It is under assault in a way that is...

The normalization of polygamy would undermine our commitment to human dignity—our sense that each human being is to be valued as an end in him- or herself, and not merely as a means to others’ ends. Conservatives have long warned that the redefinition of marriage sought by the proponents of same-sex unions will prepare the way for a further redefinition of marriage to include polygamy. Some liberals have already done their part to fulfill this prophecy by assuming that the argument over same-sex marriage is over and by beginning to argue for a normalization of plural marriages. As I have...

The Rev. Peter Gregory of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne said he’s not surprised by Wednesday’s court ruling that overturns Indiana’s ban on same-sex marriages. “It’s a disappointment, but not a surprise the judge ruled in this way,” Gregory said. “The disappointment is that he failed to recognize what marriage is – a union between one man and one woman – and the unique social good that marriage between a man and a woman is.” While the courts may be sending the nation in a headlong rush toward gay marriage, Gregory said they will not be the final...

In a 2-to-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Kitchen v. Hebert affirmed a lower court’s ruling holding that traditional marriage laws violate the Constitution. The case will likely soon go to the U.S. Supreme Court. Breitbart News examined this case last year when an Obama-appointed federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah invalidated that state’s law providing that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, comparing such laws to racism and saying they are literally irrational. Despite the fact that neither marriage nor homosexuality is mentioned...

As the battle for marriage equality rages on, a different, more obscure kind of sexual immorality is slowly rearing its ugly head: polygamy. Polygamy is defined as the "the custom of having more than one wife or husband at the same time," a practice which directly violates the Biblical commandment instructing marriage to be between a single man and wife (1 Timothy 3:2, 12 and Titus 1:6). However, the secular media is increasingly attempting to normalize, and even glamorize this kind of perverted lifestyle. Showtime is airing an original series called Polyamory: Married & Dating, which follows two polyamorous families...

The Obama administration will work to ensure that gay and lesbian Americans are eligible to take leave from their jobs to care for a same-sex spouse, regardless of whether they live in a state that recognizes gay marriage, the White House said Friday. President Obama is directing the Labor Department to start drafting rules making clear that the Family and Medical Leave Act applies to same-sex couples, allowing gay and lesbian employees to take unpaid leave to care for a sick spouse regardless of where they live. The move comes three years after the Obama administration stopped defending the Defense...

For years, Gov. Scott Walker has been a rock-solid proponent of traditional marriage between one man and one woman. As Milwaukee County executive, he opposed efforts to provide health care benefits to the gay partners of county employees. He also spoke out in favor of a 2006 constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. In 2010, he campaigned for governor as a supporter of traditional marriage. He also opposed a law that allowed gay couples to register with counties to get certain benefits, such as hospital visitation rights. "My position has been clear," Walker said Thursday. Indeed, it was. But that is...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Clinton: 'You are playing with my words' Hillary Clinton lost patience with an NPR radio interviewer who asked her several times to clarify the evolution of her views on gay marriage. “Would you say your view evolved since the 90s, or that the American public evolved, allowing you to state your real view?” asked radio host Terry Gross. Clinton at first avoided directly answering the question, replying, “I think I’m an American, I think that we have all evolved, and it’s been one of the fastest, most sweeping transformations that I’m aware of.” “I understand,” Gross said, “but a lot...

Is there anything more intolerant than the Tolerance Brigade? At the Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin agrees with Bloomberg’s Stephen Carter on the rise of a new McCarthyism, this time imposing penalties for dissent from progressive orthodoxy rather than tolerating debate on a broad range of issues. Both use attempts to silence argument in academia as the flash point that exposes this thought-police mentality. Carter recently wrote about the attempts to intimidate Douglas Laycock, an opponent of same-sex marriage, and explicitly invokes McCarthyism as the dynamic in play: A law student and a recent graduate, spurred on by the advocacy group...

Petition for a charter amendment to prohibit men (who perceive or express themselves as women) from using the women's restroom.

If conservatives don’t embrace the inevitable, they'll become irrelevant.Since last year, the progress toward marriage equality has been nothing less than stunning. Nearly a year ago, the Supreme Court granted full federal recognition of married same-sex couples in declaring the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional. In rapid succession since then, federal judges in 13 states have overturned their state’s respective bans on same sex unions. The latest was last week in Pennsylvania, when Judge John E. Jones III, a G. W. Bush appointee, overturned the ban, writing, “We are a better people than what these laws represent.” Because...

With a federal judge declaring a Pennsylvania ban on gay marriage unconstitutional on Tuesday afternoon, every state in the Northeastern corner of the country—Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and now Pennsylvania—has legalized same-sex marriage. Judge John Jones invoked the 14th Amendment to invalidate a 1996 Pennsylvania law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Like many of the other judicial decisions bringing down state marriage bans, this one framed the issue as a matter of civil rights. Jones wrote: In future generations the label same-sex marriage will be abandoned,...