Free Republic

From the time I was born until I was 17 years old, nearly everything in my life was propelling me to a life as one of America’s lost boys—the young men who fail to mature, do poorly in school, live on the economic margins, and become absentee fathers or fail to form stable families of their own. Today, one in six American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether: about 10 million men. This number has more than doubled since the 1970s. Meantime, over the past half-century, the number of men...

London — A book to be published this week says that Britain's Queen Victoria may have been illegitimate, possibly undermining the whole Royal Family's legitimacy, the Sunday Times reported. In his book The Victorians, acclaimed biographer A.N. Wilson alleges that Victoria's mother, Princess Victoire of Leiningen, had a lengthy affair with her Irish-born secretary Sir John Conroy and that he, rather than Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent, was Victoria's real father. Buckingham Palace said it would not comment on the allegation. Mr. Wilson based his argument partly on medical data, the newspaper said. Records show that the illness porphyria...

As so much despair has gripped our nation during this difficult time, I decided to go into our nation's most distressed communities with a message of hope and truth. I have been working on policy issues dealing with race and poverty through my organization, UrbanCURE, for 25 years. We purchased billboard space in hard-hit cities across the nation and posted a short, time-tested message that strikes at the heart of what drives poverty. The billboards show a picture of a young black man or young black woman and say: "Tired of Poverty? Finish school. Take any job. Get married. Save...

PORTLAND, Ore.—U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams announced today that a Texas man has been charged with assaulting a U.S. Marshals Service deputy with a construction hammer during weekend protests at the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in downtown Portland.Jacob Michael Gaines, 23, a Texas man currently residing in a recreational vehicle in Portland, has been charged by criminal complaint with one count of assaulting a federal officer.According to court documents, at approximately 1:00am on July 11, 2020, Gaines was observed using a hammer to damage a barricaded entrance at the Hatfield Federal Courthouse. At the time, federal law enforcement...

POWERFUL: A police officer and a protestor teach two young men that there is a better way than rioting. Black America needs fathers and good role models. Broken homes lead to broken communities.

Participants say government is overreaching, violating Constitution.. About 200 people gathered Friday evening in downtown Durango to protest public health orders ... The organizer, La Plata County rancher John Avery .. decried actions by the government as a violation to the constitution. “What have we become, to let ourselves be governed and treated like cowards?” Avery asked the crowd. “This is our time to be strong. Take a stand. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let fear rule your life.” The rally .. gathered without masks and not social distancing. Many people had “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and Trump 2020 swag....

For decades, the share of U.S. children living with a single parent has been rising, accompanied by a decline in marriage rates and a rise in births outside of marriage. A new Pew Research Center study of 130 countries and territories shows that the U.S. has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households. Almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults (23%), more than three times the share of children around the world who do so (7%). The study, which analyzed how people’s living arrangements differ...

In Changes in Family Structure and Welfare Participation Since the 1960s: The Role of Legal Services, (NBER Working Paper 26238) Andrew Goodman-Bacon and Jamein P. Cunningham investigate the contribution of low-income communities' access to legal services — enabled by the rollout of the War on Poverty's Legal Services Program (LSP) — as a driver of these changes. Their findings suggest that the program played a central role in changes in family structure and welfare participation of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. The LSP sharply increased the availability of free legal consultation for low-income households. LSP attorneys could assist with divorce...

The late Aretha Franklin’s family said Monday that it found an Atlanta pastor’s eulogy delivered at the Queen of Soul’s funeral last week to be offensive and distasteful. The eulogist, the Rev. Jasper Williams Jr., was criticized for a political address that described children being in a home without a father as “abortion after birth” and said black lives do not matter unless blacks stop killing each other. Franklin’s funeral was on Friday. “He spoke for 50 minutes and at no time did he properly eulogize her,” said Vaughn Franklin, the late singer’s nephew, who said he was delivering...

Some are puzzled by the dishonesty, lack of character and sheer stupidity of many people in the media. But seeing as most of them are college graduates, they don't bear the full blame. They are taught by dishonest and irresponsible academics. Let's look at it. "A Clash of Police Policies," a column written by Dr. Thomas Sowell, presents some readily available statistics: "Homicide rates among black males went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice (Earl) Warren and others triumphed, that this...

One in three babies in Germany are born to parents who haven’t tied the knot, according to a new report. The report by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research this week showed that 35 percent of babies born in Germany in 2014 came into the world with unmarried parents. And the study also revealed that there was great contrast between former East and West Germany, according to broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. The more religious and wealthy West saw 29 percent of new little bundles of joy born to unwed parents, compared to nearly 60 percent in the former states of socialist East...

On the 50th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the breakdown of the black family in urban ghettos, Baltimore has descended into the tragic violence and chaos he predicted. In a report titled, “The Negro Family: The Case for Action,” Assistant Secretary of Labor Moynihan, warned that the deterioration of the black family, would result in soaring crime rates if it continued unchecked. In the most famous passage of the 1965 report, Moynihan, who would later become a Democratic U.S. senator, wrote, “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los...

Hustlers and people with little understanding want us to believe that today’s black problems are the continuing result of a legacy of slavery, poverty and racial discrimination. The fact is that most of the social pathology seen in poor black neighborhoods is entirely new in black history. Let’s look at some of it. Today the overwhelming majority of black children are raised in single female-headed families. As early as the 1880s, three-quarters of black families were two-parent. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black families were two-parent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to...

An older generation complaining that an emerging one will be the death of civilization as we know it is a cliche and constant as the North Star. However, based on some rather troubling data regarding today’s millennials, it could turn out to be true this time. In his first inaugural address as governor of California 47 years ago, Ronald Reagan warned us that “freedom is a fragile thing, and is never more than one generation away from extinction.” He also reminded us that freedom “is not ours by inheritance but must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation,...

The Washington Post published a piece by a teacher which originally appeared in the Daily Kos. We have another issue to add to the never ending list of “privilege” that the left loves to whine about. Educational privilege is apparently a tragedy that has to be dealt with. The teacher complains about a couple of gifted kids, one who appears to take one government school science class and another who attends a private school on scholarship. These confident gifted kids are compared to the sad storied poor kids the teacher has to deal with every day. She complains about hunger,...

There’s a widening gap between the baby-having of married women, who tend to be more educated and more affluent, and their less-educated, less-financially-secure, unmarried peers. A growing body of research, including work by Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin, raises the possibility that because people like to feel financially secure before taking the marriage plunge, the rise of income inequality has divided Americans into those who marry and those who don’t. Now this could be playing out with childbearing, too. America’s recessionary “baby bust” has clearly leveled off now, but we’ve yet to see the birth recovery one would expect...

The Democratic Party has found what seems to be a winning formula in both state and national elections – a “War on Women” being waged by the Republicans. The “War on Women” is based on the premise that women are oppressed if they do not 1) have access to free birth control, 2) have unlimited access to abortion, 3) receive “equal pay for equal work” based on credentials rather than performance, and 4) have the support of the state if they have a child out of wedlock. On closer examination, however, this “War on Women” turns out to be something...

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So the Zimmerman/Martin case verdict is in and America, lead on by a commercially desperate media, retreats to its predictable corners. CNN and MSNBC have their tune and FOX has its tune. Go to your own comfort zone for the twain will never meet. Of all that has been written and spoken about the case–its origins, the investigation, the charging decisions, the politics, the media circus, the evidence, and the verdict–it cannot be stated often enough that the jury was the only entity that heard all the evidence. Not Limbaugh. Not Maddow. Not Matthews. Not O’Reilly. Not Morgan, or any...

Marriage Decline: The disintegration of the nuclear family — particularly in the African-American community — and the rise in fatherless homes have greater societal implications than gay marriage, yet few pay attention. The debate over gay marriage has taken center stage with two cases, one involving California's Proposition 8 which bans it, and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which bars federal agencies recognizing the validity of same-sex marriages in the states where they are legal, now before the U.S. Supreme Court. We have argued that the civil purpose of marriage is not and never has been to reaffirm the...