Free Republic

During his weekly interview with the national radio station, the Zimbabwean president joked that he planned to travel to Washington DC ‘get down on one knee and ask his hand’. Mugabe, who is known for his brutal crusades against homosexuality, was responding in bizarre fashion to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees gays and lesbians the same right to marry as heterosexuals. Speaking on on Saturday, Mugabe said: ‘I’ve just concluded – since President Obama endorses the same-sex marriage, advocates homosexual people and enjoys an attractive countenance – thus if it becomes...

A report issued Thursday by the Department of State repeatedly refers to sex reassignment surgery in Iran as “gender-confirmation surgery.” Iran has a well-documented record of coercing gay and lesbian people into having the gender reassignment surgery, that is, disrupting rather than “confirming” the gender identity of hundreds per year. Since homosexuality can be punishable by death in Iran, known homosexual men tend to accept the government-subsidized surgery to become women, and vice versa. By referring to the surgeries as “gender confirmation,” rather than the much more widespread and morally neutral “sex reassignment surgery,” the State Department seems to be...

It is likely that the P5+1 nuke “deal” with Iran will be approved soon. Military and other nuke sites which Iran has not “disclosed” will not be inspected. Nor will Iran’s nuke ties with North Korea — which P5+1 member China seems to be helping, Iran’s massive support for terrorism and abysmal human rights record be considered because they are also deemed unnecessary for “deal” approval. Sanctions against Iran are moribund and will not be revived regardless of whether there is a “deal.” However, a bronze bust of Obama may soon be displayed prominently in Supreme Leader Khamenei’s office and one of Khamenei may soon be displayed proudly in Dear Leader Obama’s...

Do the name callers who label people “Islamaphobic” support Qur’an-instructed violence against women and girls?To be “anti-Islam” (and “anti-Shari’a”) is to reject submission to Allah and the Qur’an. To be anti-Islam is to be for protecting women’s rights and human rights. To be anti-Islam is to advocate for children who are powerless and voiceless, to liberate everyone enslaved by Islamic totalitarian ideology.There is nothing bigoted, racist, or fearful about opposing a political ideology that rejects universally accepted human rights laws.If the European Court on Human Rights has repeatedly ruled that Shari’a law is “incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy,” then...

A top UN official has provoked outrage after likening David Cameron’s threat to scrap human rights laws to Nazi Germany. The Prime Minister has warned the Government could withdraw the UK from the convention in order to deport foreign criminals. It is the most radical option as part of plans to scrap the Human Rights Act, which enshrines the convention in UK law, with a “British Bill of Rights” enforced by the UK’s Supreme Court rather than by judges in Strasbourg. But Professor François Crépeau, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, said: “We have to remember...

Statement from Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron ahead of Jason Rezaian’s trial in Iran: The shameful acts of injustice continue without end in the treatment of Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian. Now we learn his trial will be closed to the world. And so it will be closed to the scrutiny it fully deserves. It’s worth recalling what kind of system we’re dealing with. Jason was arrested without charges. He was imprisoned in Iran’s worst prison. He was placed in isolation for many months and denied medical care he needed. His case was assigned to a judge internationally notorious...

The terror group strips girls naked, conduct virginity tests, and send them to slave auctions after they have attacked their villages, often killing their husbands, fathers and brothers ISIS terrorists are picking out the “prettiest virgins” from the women they capture and sending them to their Syrian stronghold to be sex slaves, according to a UN expert. And there are horrific reports about the fate of the brave women who resist the murderous terrorists - including one victim who was burned alive for refusing to perform “extreme sexual acts”. Fierce haggling usually breaks out at slave auctions, where the girls...

Even while the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba could be heard singing, “Avanza, Lincoln, avanza! Tu eres nuestra esperanza!” (Onward, Lincoln, Onward! You are our hope!) – as if they knew, even before the soldiers fighting the war far to the North and long before most politicians understood, that the war in America would change their lives, and the world. The secession crisis of 1860-1861 threatened to be a major setback to the world antislavery movement, and it imperiled the whole experiment in democracy. If slavery was allowed to exist, and if the world’s leading democracy could fall apart...

The Obama administration has, once again, complained to the United Nations about alleged American human rights violations–and boasted about liberal policies like Obamacare as the solution. The State Department report, released Monday as part of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the UN Human Rights Council, reads less like an accounting of human rights issues and more like the platform of the Democratic Party–and invites the world to judge America harshly. The so-called “human rights” problems cited in the report include: •Police brutality, including the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri •Discrimination against Muslims who want to build or expand...

Even though the Communist Party of China is officially atheist, and the central government was once wary of religion, subtle signs and increasing activities show there is a changing attitude towards religion in order to unite China and its neighbors. In March last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping stood in the offices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, and extolled the profound impact Buddhism has had on China. "Buddhism originated in ancient India," said Xi, the leader of the officially atheist Communist Party of China. "After it was introduced into China, the religion went...

A Canadian documentary has alleged that the Chinese state is aware and approves of the removal of organs from live political prisoners, often without anesthetic. Some 10,000 political prisoners are reportedly killed each year, and at least one former worker is willing to testify to atrocities. The documentary, produced by Australia’s SBS Dateline, purports to show the gruesome details of the multi-billion dollar “organs-on-demand” transplant program, and how these Chinese hospitals remove organs from live patients, in some cases putting the people in incinerators before they had even died. The filmmaker, Leon Lee, in an interview with Australia’s News.com, described...

Vice President Joe Biden once told Chinese President Xi Jinping that U.S. leaders only support human rights as a matter of political optics, and that this makes the United States no better than China, according to a new New Yorker profile of Jinping. The New Yorker relates encounters between Biden and Jinping in 2011 and 2012, when both were vice presidents of their respective nations: Biden told me that Xi asked him why the U.S. put “so much emphasis on human rights.” Biden replied to Xi, “No President of the United States could represent the United States were he not...

In her memoir Hard Choices, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised her own work and that of the State Department in securing the departure of threatened dissident Chen Guangcheng from China. Chen, now in Washington, D.C., disputes this version in his own memoir, in which he laments pressure by Clinton’s State Department to trust the Chinese Communist Party– so much pressure that “I no longer felt that they were on my side.”

(LiveActionNews) — A common narrative in our society is that, by opposing abortion and infanticide, Christians are conducting a “war on women.” However, in a fascinating study entitled “The Rise of Christianity,” published by Princeton University Press, sociologist Rodney Stark argues that the phenomenal growth of “the obscure, marginal Jesus movement” was due in large part to women. Stark argues that early Christianity was “especially attractive to women” because “within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.”Furthermore, Stark argues that the Christian opposition to abortion and infanticide was one of...

Let's just get it over with and go for a guaranteed income for all. If you work and earn less than the guaranteed income, the government will pay you the difference. If you don't work, the government will pay you the guaranteed amount anyway. After all, a living wage is a human right. As is healthcare. The government should provide it. As is housing. Food. Clothing. Cell phones. Internet. Transportation. Vacations. But we must all pay our fair share. Those earning less than the guaranteed income will receive a check from the IRS. Those earning more than the guarantee up...

Live Science reported in January on research being done by scientists at Ganogen, Inc., a biotech company in California, that transplants organs from aborted babies into lab rats with the goal of growing them for use in patients who need organ transplants. “Researchers say they have developed a new technique that will get more kidneys to people who need transplants, but the method is sure to be controversial: The research shows that it is feasible to remove a kidney from an aborted human fetus, and implant the organ into a rat, where the kidney can grow to a larger size,”...

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday called on nations around the world to expand human rights, religious tolerance and peaceful dialogue as they struggle to combat a spate of terrorism that has recently struck places as far afield as Australia, Canada and Europe. In an address to world leaders on the final day of his summit on violent extremism, Mr. Obama said that poverty and political grievances fuel alienation that can lead to bursts of killing like those seen in Paris, Copenhagen, Sydney and Ottawa. In addition to building up security forces, he said nations must “put an end to...

Suspected dissidents disappear after midnight visits to their homes; chilling screams can again be heard from Idi Amin's infamous torture chambers, reopened after a quarter of a century of disuse. From the few that escape come tales of punishment beatings and even mass executions. Welcome to President Yoweri Museveni's Uganda. One of Britain's favourite African states in recent years has, almost unnoticed in the West, become a sinister land where a corrupt regime uses its secret police to rule through fear. The reasons for this transition are not hard to fathom. Mr Museveni has ruled Uganda since 1986, when his...

The 21 men beheaded on a Mediterranean beach in a video released by Islamist savages Sunday were killed because of their Coptic Christian faith, by men who proclaimed the reason for the murders before the whole world. And the White House won’t say the word. Christian beheading victims are marched to the beach in Libya to be murdered by Islamist militants on Sunday. (Daily Mail photo) “The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of 21 Egyptian citizens in Libya by ISIL-affiliated terrorists,” a statement issued by the White House said.“ISIL’s barbarity knows no bounds.  It is unconstrained by...