Free Republic

Pro-life activists and religious leaders are slamming the enactment of a New Jersey bill that will legalize abortion up until the moment of birth.Gov. Phil Murphy, D-N.J., signed the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act alongside Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver, the leadership of the state’s Senate and Assembly and Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson Thursday. The legislation will “explicitly guarantee, to every individual, the fundamental right to reproductive autonomy, which includes the right to contraception, the right to terminate a pregnancy, and the right to carry a pregnancy to term.”Additionally, the measure will “enable all qualified health care professionals to...

Sydney McLaughlin, New Jersey's 16 year-old sensation, will attempt to become one of the youngest U.S. track and field Olympians when she competes in the finals of the women's 400-meter hurdles at Sunday's U.S. Olympic Trials at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. McLaughlin, who turns 17 on Aug. 7, needs to finish in the top three in her race to make the Olympic team, which will compete in the Olympic Games next month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The 400 hurdles race is scheduled for Sunday at approximately 7:03 p.m. EST. and will shown on NBC. McLaughlin, who will be...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio will not be marching in the nation’s largest St. Patrick’s Day parade, deciding to skip one of his city’s signature celebrations because the event organizers refuse to let participants carry pro-gay signs.De Blasio will become the first mayor in decades to sit out the traditional march along Fifth Avenue. “I will be participating in a number of other events to honor the Irish heritage of this city,” said de Blasio on Tuesday during an unrelated press conference at City Hall. “But I simply disagree with the organizers of that parade.” …

Joseph Kennedy had befriended McCarthy because he found him to be a likable fellow Irish-Catholic who had all the right ideas on the domestic communist menace. These warm feelings were quickly transferred to the entire Kennedy family. JFK liked the fact that McCarthy went after the "elites" in the State Department whom JFK regarded with contempt. (13) Even before McCarthy made accusations against the State Department of subversion, JFK had already aligned himself with the militant anti-communists who blamed the Truman State Department for the "loss" of China. So JFK declared on the House floor in January 1949. "The responsibility...

Director Martin Scorcese’s violent tale of gang warfare in nineteenth-century New York ignores the dramatic transformation of the city’s Irish underclass into mainstream citizens. | 14 January 2003 In 1842, accompanied by two policemen to ensure his safety, Charles Dickens visited Gotham’s Five Points slum, at the corner of what today are Worth, Baxter, and Park Streets behind Manhattan’s Supreme Court building, and found it “loathsome, drooping, and decayed” (see “A Traveller’s New York, 1842,” Autumn 1994). The area boasted some 17 brothels and countless saloons; for dark-side amusement and thrills, Five Points was the place. Davy Crockett remarked after...

Thomas Nast, whose antislavery political cartoons propelled him to notoriety in the 19th century, has ignited another uproar: whether his anti-Irish and -Catholic drawings should disqualify him from the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Irish and Catholic groups are waging a campaign against including the father of the American political cartoon in that group of notable New Jerseyans, arguing that he routinely depicted them in an unfavorable light.

During sectarian riots, two Catholic churches were burned to the ground, another was saved only by military intervention. Virtually every Catholic church in Philadelphia County was threatened. Scores of houses were destroyed and dozens of people were killed. It happened in Philadelphia 169 years ago, but it still has lessons for today. The violence began in May and ended in August of 1844. It started in Kensington, where St. Michael’s Church was ultimately destroyed, spread to the older part of the city where St. Augustine’s was destroyed and flared up again in August when St. Philip Neri in the Southwark...

WASHINGTON— When Michelle Obama worked in Mayor Daley’s City Hall in the early 1990s, she was “distressed” by how a small group of “white Irish Catholic” families — the Daleys, the Hynes and the Madigans — “locked up” power in Illinois. And as she prepared to become first lady, Mrs. Obama naively wanted to delay a move into the White House for six months, so her daughters could finish the school year. Her initial thought was to “commute” to the White House from her South Side home. And Marty Nesbitt, one of President Obama’s best friends, had been recruited to...

The first thing a traveler from Israel notices about Ireland is the green; wide, ambling expanses of rolling hills and serene meadows of forest green as far as the eye can see. In driving from Dublin’s international airport to our hotel in Ballinasloe – some two hours away – we saw many more sheep, cows and horses than we did human beings. Life on the Emerald Isle is spread out, farmland in every direction, resulting in a serene and pastoral atmosphere that complements the easy-going Irish way of life. Ireland’s natural beauty is stunning – from the majestic Cliffs of...

An agency of the Irish Bishops Conference has warned that it will not hesitate in raising complaints if the Catholic Church is subjected to inaccurate comments in the media. The move comes after the editor of the Irish Daily Star, the second biggest selling newspaper in Ireland, made what were described as 'exaggerated' comments about the Church on RTE's Prime Time programme. Martin Long, director of the Catholic Communications Office, said his office would be proactive in monitoring statements made about the Church in future. During a discussion about privacy and the media, Irish Daily Star editor Gerard Colleran –...

Abstract Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming "Help Wanted--No Irish Need Apply!" No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, but Irish women nevertheless dominated the market for domestics because they provided a reliable supply of an essential service. Newspaper ads for men with NINA were exceedingly rare. The slogan was commonplace in upper class London by 1820; in 1862 in...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version March 17, 2004, 8:34 a.m. Kerry’s Irish BlarneyHow green is Massachusetts's junior senator? On this Saint Patrick's Day, I plan to raise a pint of Beamish to my favorite Irish American: Soledad O'Brien. CNN's O'Brien has previously been named to Irish American magazine's "Top 100 Irish Americans" list. Interestingly, she also received the "Hispanic Achievement Award in Communications" and she's a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, too. One can only imagine what St. Patrick's Day is like around her house. Given examples...

HIBERNIANS SPLIT OVER MCGREEVEYJuly 5, 2004 To become a member of the Catholic, Irish-American fraternal organization, members must take an oath to uphold certain core values. The governor's political views, some say, are opposed to those values. A number of members of an Irish-Catholic organization want Gov. James E. McGreevey removed due to his support of several social and political issues - views that contradict those he once vowed to uphold as a member. The Hibernians are a long-standing Irish-Catholic national organization whose mission, besides advocating a free Ireland, is to act as an advocate for the Roman Catholic Church...

<p>So Mayor Gavin Newsom -- having sounded the trumpet in the battle over same-sex marriage -- walks into a room filled with the Bay Area's Irish Catholic old guard and a bunch of priests.</p> <p>Sounds like the setup to a corny joke, right? Well, no joke. It happened at the American Ireland Fund's annual dinner at the St. Francis Hotel, when Newsom, as well as his father, the Hon. William Newsom, a retired California appellate court justice, were honored with the charitable organization's Distinguished Leadership Award.</p>

Please come and join Middlesex County Right to Life in Protest and solidarity on Sunday, March 14th, 2004, at 12:30 pm, at the corner of Rt. 35 and Main St., Woodbridge, NJ,  (in front of the Woodbridge K of C building), to watch the Irish Club's St. Patrick's Day parade.   The Middlesex County Right to Life was banned from marching in this parade, being told by the Irish Club parade organizers that they are not religious or political where they implied that the MC RTL was; the NJ RTL/NJ RTL PAC and its county affiliates are non-partisan and non-religious and  have backed members...