Free Republic

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender remain significantly more likely than non-LGBT Americans to identify as Democrats. More than six in 10 LGBT Americans identify as Democrats or are Democratic-leaning independents, while 21% identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Non-LGBT Americans are more evenly divided in their politics, tilting just slightly more Democratic than Republican. The political orientation of LGBT individuals is virtually unchanged since Gallup's June-September 2012 report, when 21% identified as Republicans, and 65% as Democrats. These results are based on 88,802 Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted between Jan. 2...

Leave it to Laverne Cox to make sure Oprah's best friend gets her trans terminology right. The Emmy-nominated “Orange is the New Black” actress — the first openly transgender woman to receive that honor — appeared on “CBS This Morning” Tuesday to promote the show and her other projects. When co-host Gayle King started her section of the interview by saying “So, you were born a boy…”, Cox quickly corrected her by saying that she was “assigned” a gender at birth, but she always felt like she was a girl.

The movement demanding legal recognition for same-sex marriage has made a radical and profoundly uncharitable assumption. It is this: Adult homosexuals need and have a greater right to same-sex marriage than babies have to their mothers. You cannot simultaneously claim babies have a right to their mothers and two men have a right to marry each other. Nor, of course, can you simultaneously claim babies have right to their fathers and two women have a right to marry each other. Notably, advocates of same-sex marriage do not argue that babies have a either a right or a need for a...

Making controversial statements is nothing new for me. Neither is the reaction that usually follows. But perhaps no other issue causes as much discussion, debate, and condemnation from others than when I present my position on the issue of homosexuality. As a known Christian, I have been told that I MUST think a certain way and that I MUST believe a certain way regarding not only people who are gay, but regarding their entire lifestyle as well.

President Barack Obama's LGBT workplace discrimination order has revealed a rift among Democrats over whether religious freedom trumps gay rights. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives could exploit that rift by bringing the Senate-passed Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which has a religious exemption, to the floor for a vote. ENDA, which would ban workplace discrimination based upon sexual orientation and gender identity, was passed by the Senate in November with the support of 54 Democrats and 10 Republicans. The bill likely would not have passed if it had not contained a religious exemption. The exemption was a major point of contention during...

As it has for decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week released its annual National Health Interview Survey on the health of Americans. But this year, there was a difference: For the first time, the respondents were asked about their sexual orientation. Of 34,557 adults ages 18 and older, the survey reported, 1.6 percent said they were gay or lesbian. Some critics say the numbers are low, but they fall in the range of other surveys. In the new survey, however, only 0.7 percent of respondents described themselves as bisexual; other studies have reported higher numbers.

Dear Mr. President, I write to you today as a concerned citizen of our great nation, standing as a witness against your historic actions on the morning of July 21, 2014, actions which I hope you will one day repudiate with deep remorse and regret. I am referring, of course, to your signing an executive order Monday banning “discrimination” by federal contractors against LGBT people, allowing for no religious exemptions of any kind. This was an outrageous act of discrimination against religion in the name of anti-discrimination, an act of bullying people of faith in the name of the prevention...

President Barack Obama issued an executive order Monday prohibiting workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity for federal contractors. What does this mean for Christian organizations that remain faithful to the biblical teaching on homosexual behavior? Here are two main points that those groups need to be aware of: First, the order only applies to government contractors and sub-contractors, it does not apply to groups that receive government grants. Most religious non-profits that provide services for the government do so through a government grant. They would not be affected. A grant recipient is awarded money for general purpose,...

President Barack Obama's executive order of July 21 has installed workplace rules forbidding the firing of gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people by the federal government and federal contractors -- a key provision in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act languishing in Congress. The U.S. bishops have opposed the bill, known as ENDA, which was passed by the Senate last November but was never scheduled for a vote in the House. The bill has been introduced in almost every Congress since 1994. "Today's executive order is unprecedented and extreme and should be opposed," said Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, chairman of...

There is good news in Tuesday’s release from the CDC’s National Health Information Survey. No, it’s not the revelation that the gay and lesbian population may be slightly smaller — 1.6 percent — than many scholars have believed; population-based surveys tend to fluctuate. The results of the report make sense to me, and since others have already described them, I will refrain from repeating them at length here. The good news is that the survey’s questions were administered to over 34,000 Americans, randomly sampled, enabling scholars to get quality information about even small communities. And since the NHIS didn’t...

Blogging for the Ruth Institute, Jennifer Johnson recounted her experience of growing up with five parents. The piece responds to claims by Masha Gessen, a prominent LGBT activist who was recently honored by the state department, who has famously celebrated her own unorthodox family as the shape of things to come: I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally… I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality, and I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage....

AURORA, Ill. – A Hobby Lobby store in Illinois is facing a discrimination complaint after a ‘transgender’ employee was told that he may not use the women’s restroom until he has reconstructive surgery to switch from male to female reproductive organs. The employee, who goes by the name Meggan Sommerville, also professes to be a Christian. He has worked for Hobby Lobby since 1998, at which time he identified as male.However, in 2009, Sommerville began transitioning to look like a woman and changed his name. According to Sommerville, Hobby Lobby accommodated him by changing his gender in the company records...

HIV infections are rising among gay men in many parts of the world, the World Health Organization warned Friday, urging all men who have sex with men to take antiretroviral drugs to prevent infection. "We are seeing exploding epidemics," warned Gottfried Hirnschall, who heads WHO's HIV department. Infection rates are rising again among men who have sex with men -- the group at the epicentre of AIDS pandemic when it first emerged 33 years ago, he told reporters in Geneva. While images of skeletal men dying of AIDS in the 1980s pushed the world to act, a younger generation that...

Can I pose a serious question? At what point does replacing the American flag with the rainbow flag, a symbol of gay/LGBTQ(RSTUVWXYZ) pride from embassies abroad become an impeachable offense in itself? Last time I checked, the official flag of the country was the Stars and Stripes, not the same rainbow that is found on the doors of gay bars downtown. A friend sent me this picture of the U.S. Embassy in London...

A JP Morgan Chase bank employee says he’s not only puzzled by an internal company survey that asked workers if they considered themselves friend of the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender community — he’s fearful of losing his job. The unnamed employee reported to Professor Robert George of Princeton, who runs a law blog, that this year’s company survey — which is distributed to employees annually as a means of gauging work satisfaction — asked respondents to note if they were disabled, had children or spouses and domestic spouses with disabilities and were members of the LGBT community, Breitbart reported. But the last question...

The Hobby Lobby case has produced some ridiculous hysteria and pronouncements, especially from lawmakers and Obama administration officials, and that may have just produced some significant backfire on their own side of the aisle. The White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill put a lot of effort into pushing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) on behalf of the LGBT community, a bill that would prohibit employment discrimination for a wide range of sexual-orientation categories. It passed the Senate with Republican votes that came after adding a clause that protected religious expression similar to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA),...

In the George W. Bush years, liberals were routinely shocked and awed that the Bush administration would obliterate their sacred wall of separation between church and state. They frowned on federal faith-based initiatives and worried about the bureaucracy being invaded by frightening people with college degrees from Christian schools like Liberty University, Regent University or Catholic University. Government was no place to be spreading a dangerous Christian majoritarianism with a swaggering certitude that wouldn't tolerate opposing views and respect minority opinions. The media presented the Bushies as -- to quote a slur from NBC anchor Brian Williams -- "anti-gay, pro-Jesus...

(Must see video...Ugh) The limitless imagination of the American marketing mind came to the fore again this week, as a San Francisco Burger King franchise unveiled its “Proud Whopper” in honor of LGBT Week. It’s exactly the same as a regular flame-grilled Whopper, but inside its rainbow-colored wrapper read the words, “We are all the same inside.” Senior Vice President Fernando Machado told Fox News, “It showcases who we are as a brand. It shows how we, as a brand, believe in self-expression.” The fast food chain even produced a video to highlight the campaign, ending with a little girl...

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Monday at the White House while hosting a reception to observe LGBT Pride Month, President Barack Obama call his White House Pastry Chef Bill Yosses "the crust master"