Free Republic

A new bill proposed by Senator Capri Cafaro (D-Ohio) would require parents who have decided to homeschool their child to undergo an investigation by social services, who would then decide whether or not it would be permitted. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) website is reporting that on December 3, 2014, Senate Bill 248 was introduced in Ohio. This bill is the latest attack against families from state legislatures who want to severely restrict choice to homeschool children. The HSLDA summarizes this bill: It requires all parents who homeschool to undergo a social services investigation which would ultimately determine...

The media are currently filled with reports of students in the U.S. scoring poorly on international tests. The Program for International Student Assessment, which compares 15-year-olds in most industrialized countries, reports that American students dropped from 25th to 31st in math, 11th to 21st in reading and 20th to 24th in science. The solution consistently offered for these low rankings is to spend more money on schooling. But numerous studies examining the billions of dollars we've spent on education in the last decade show that money has not improved the performance of U.S. students, and higher-scoring foreign countries spend far...

The pundits may have thought that Barack Obama’s efforts to exploit the Sandy Hook School tragedy on December 14, 2012, where a mentally ill young man killed 20 elementary school students and 6 teachers, had been tabled for lack of support. Now we learn that Obama’s Organizing for Action super pac is exploiting the one-year anniversary with fake memorials in order to resume the push for gun control. Along with the efforts to reach adults are those to reach children in schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of Obama’s education initiative called Common Core (recently admitted...

It’s past time for Conservatives and Conservative Talk Show hosts to start calling the Obama Regime and the Democrat Party “Communists”. Sean Hannity avoids the word and the closest Mark Levin can do is Statist. The Obama Administration is full of communists. The EPA and many Government Agencies and Bureaus are pushing Government control of every aspect of our lives. DHS and other Government Agencies are buying up all the ammunition while the EPA is in the process of closing the last lead smelting plant in the U.S. (ALERT! BACK DOOR GUN CONTROL MOVES FORWARD!--"Obama … beforeitsnews.com › Events Oct...

Not caring about what happens to gay men is like not caring about prison rape. Prisoners are our brothers, too, and so are gay men. We must care deeply about the abuse of our brothers in prison and we must care deeply about the lives led by our gay brothers. Prison rape seems a world away from us, a subject we try not to think about, yet it is rampant, dehumanizing and deadly dangerous. In the same way, we avert our gaze from the lives led by gay men. Certainly ignoring the lives of gay men is what the paladins...

Elian Gonzalez, the object of a 1999-2000 custody squabble involving Washington, Havana and family members on both sides of the Florida Strait, holds a piece of U.S. legislation directly responsible for what he endured then, Cuban official media said Monday. "They were very sad times for me, which marked me for my whole life. I was never given the chance to have a moment to think about my mother, who as a result of that (U.S.) Cuban Adjustment Act died at sea," the now-19-year-old Gonzalez said last weekend during a Union of Young Communists event. ~snip~ The 1966 Cuban Adjustment...

(Update: Adding more on opposition to Core, where Duncan spoke) U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of state schools superintendents Friday that he found it “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.” Yes, he really said that. But he has said similar things before. What, exactly, is he talking about? In his cheerleading for the controversial Common Core...

Schools: Opposition is rising to new national education standards pushed on public schools. They have turned schools into re-education camps for liberalism, with political statements masquerading as English lessons. If one had to include one speech by President Ronald Reagan as recommended reading in a national standardized curriculum it might be the one in which he stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" One might pick Reagan's first inaugural address when he said, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Or even his 1964 "A...

After certain press criticism and a productive online backlash in the blogosphere, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is performing a gratifying volte-face in its use of the term sexual "orientation" for paedophilia. In its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the APA has distinguished between paedophilic disorder and paedophilic orientation. Paedophilia-advocacy groups, like B4U-ACT, a grassroots lobby group, have long seen the declassification of paedophilia to the status of an "orientation" for “minor-attracted persons" (MAPs) to be a necessary means to their ends. The North American Man-Boy Love Association (and numerous international affiliates advocating...

Global superstar,philanthropistand bestselling author Ricky Martin announced today the launch of PiccoloUniverse.com, a multi-lingual community website giving parents and caregivers from all around the world a placeto celebrate and sharethe joys and struggles of raising children.

The ninth of November marked the twenty-fourth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, probably the most important historical event since World War II and the most important lesson about human freedom experienced within the living memory of most of us. Presumably, next year there will be more of a commemoration, but the salient question now is how this lesson is being taught in the nation’s classrooms. For while those of us in our forties and older remember the fall of communism and its causes, today’s teenagers are wholly in the dark. What, then, are the high-school students of...

Pointing a finger and saying “bang!” isn’t the only thing that will get you in trouble in school today. Now it seems that just complaining about your child’s homework assignment can get a finger pointed at you — for being a neo-Nazi. This is precisely what happened to Josh Barry of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. And the kicker? Barry is Jewish and married to a woman who is half-black and half-white. The problems started when Barry reviewed a homework assignment in which his eighth-grade daughter’s East Pennsboro Middle School (EPMS) asked students to evaluate a New York Times article on the...

Germany has granted a young doctor asylum due to his sexual orientation, after he faced persecution and social exclusion in Russia. Thanks to a recent EU ruling, other gays and lesbians will likely to follow. Pavel is gay. He is open about his sexuality, a fact which used to continuously cause outrage in Russia. "It is very unpleasant to be living in a society that thinks you are sick and backward, and where you can be fired from work just for being gay," he said. "At any moment, someone can chop your head off," that's how he described the fear...

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, November 7, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The New Zealand Family Planning Association is trying to save face after public backlash over the Association’s plan to release a sexuality resource for children aged 5 to 8 later this month. The resource has drawn attention to the fact that “sexuality” is already included right through each year level of the health curriculum. Even in Catholic schools “sexuality” education is compulsory, although parents do have the right to be informed and are given the option of removing their children from these classes. The Ministry of Education’s 2002 document “Sexuality Education –...

Josh Barry, of Camp Hill, Penn., wants to know why the president of the local teacher’s union thinks he’s a neo-Nazi after he complained about a classroom assignment that he believed to be biased. “I’m Jewish and my wife is half-black, half-white,” Barry told me in a telephone interview. “I am the furthest thing from a neo-Nazi.” Last week, his daughter’s eighth grade American History class at East Pennsboro Middle School was asked to analyze a New York Times story about the recent government shutdown. Barry, who said he is a registered independent, read the story and then read a...

You will not indoctrinate my child,” he wrote. “If you are going to present articles with a slant to one side you are morally and ethically required to present the opposing views, to give an opportunity for the student, your captive audience, to come to their own conclusions.” Barry also reached out to the principal, who defended the teacher’s assignment and allegedly told him The New York Times story was not slanted. On Friday the story took a bizarre turn. A friend of Barry’s received a telephone call that he says came from Cydnee Cohen, the president of the East...

It's exactly what critics of the Common Core school curriculum warned about: Partisan political statements masquerading as English lessons finding their way into elementary school classrooms. Teaching materials aligned with the controversial national educational standards ask fifth-graders to edit such sentences as “(The president) makes sure the laws of the country are fair,” “The wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation” and “the commands of government officials must be obeyed by all.” The sentences, which appear in worksheets published by New Jersey-based Pearson Education, are presented not only for their substance, but also to...

There is a phenomenon that is rarely commented on but which is as common as it is significant. For at least two generations, countless conservative parents have seen their adult children reject their core values. I have met these parents throughout America. I have spoken with them in person and on my radio show. Many have confided to me -- usually with a resigned sadness -- that one or more of their children has adopted left-wing social, moral and political beliefs. A particularly dramatic recent example was a pastor who told me that he has three sons, all of whom...

A new Common Core-aligned lesson is teaching third-graders across the United States that “the commands of government officials must be obeyed by all,” and that “the wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation.” Those un-American and unconstitutional concepts are being peddled to elementary students by the Pearson Education company, one of the nation’s leading producers of school curricula, reports MinutemenNews.com.The historically inaccurate lesson appears to be part of a Pearson Education unit that teaches kids about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War – “Hold the Flag High” – while doubling as an English assignment....

ESSEX, March 5, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Jill Recknell is mourning the loss of her grandson, despite the fact that he is alive and well. It’s just that, according to five-year-old Zach Avery and his parents, he’s not her grandson anymore. He’s her granddaughter. Zach’s family, who live in England, says that he was a normal boy up until last year, when he became obsessed with the cartoon character Dora the Explorer and started dressing in girl’s clothing. Zach before becoming a "girl." “He just turned round to me one day and said, ‘Mummy, I’m a girl,’” Theresa Avery, Zach’s mother,...