Free Republic

One of the profound changes wrought by LBJ's landmark program was a huge increase in government-sponsored family planning at home and abroad. President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Medicare Bill at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. [Wikipedia.com] President Lyndon Baines Johnson had spoken the words “Great Society” before, but on January 4, 1965 he brought the pieces together as a legislative package for Congress. His State of the Union message stirred a remarkable flurry of congressional activity that in short order produced major new programs in civil rights, health care, and anti-poverty. In the half-century since then,...

Within Islam, the world is divided into a zone of war and a zone of peace. Those who are in the zone of war or sympathize with it are enemies who deserve death. Firefighters carry a victim on a stretcher at the scene of a shooting at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper, Jan. 7. (CNS photo/Jacky Naegelen, Reuters) “An aspect of the attack (in Syria) that was not often reported in the media was the way the Islamist invaders tried to remove not only the Christians but the Christianity from the town, a phenomenon that is...

Grace presbytery has stripped Joseph B. Rightmyer of his ordination as a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA). The presbytery’s Permanent Judicial Commission (PJC) ruling found Rightmyer guilty on eight counts related to the process that resulted in the departure of Highland Park Presbyterian Church from the denomination. ... Rightmyer was ordained by the Atlanta presbytery in 1972. He served faithfully for more than 40 years

Brothers and Sisters: Peace be with you. I've learned the following news from the Aleteia Catholic news portal: Yesterday a rally took place outside the Canadian Embassy in Warsaw, Poland to protest the Christmas Eve incarceration of Canadian Mary Wagner. She is being held in the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton, Ontario, a medium/maximum security correctional facility. Wagner was arrested for the crime of entering the waiting room of an abortion clinic on December 23—this time, the Bloor West Village Women’s Clinic in Toronto—and quietly offering individual women a rose with a card stating where they could learn about...

How about a true act of solidarity for your fellow journalists. How about all USA "journalists" concerned with free speech send out an email to every publisher and weekly in the country and they all agree to publish one page of the slain french cartoonists work all on the same day. Every ordinary citizen can also email or post one to. Arrange for it to happen on January 15, 2015. They cant intimidate everyone. This would be a true act of courage and faith. Get enough people and we can shame the rest into acting or better yet see the...

Bespectacled, balding, and thin, the Australian scholar Peter Singer has the looks of a stereotypical college professor. You would never be able to tell simply by his unassuming persona that his mind holds some of the most controversial ideas in American academia.  Singer has spent a lifetime justifying the unjustifiable. He is the founding father of the animal liberation movement and advocates ending “the present speciesist bias against taking seriously the interests of nonhuman animals.” He is also a defender of killing the aged (if they have dementia), newborns (for almost any reason until they are two years old),...

Bill Donohue comments on reactions to his news release from yesterday [click here] on the murder of 12 people in Paris: Being misrepresented is commonplace for public figures. Sometimes it reflects an honest misreading; other times it is a willful distortion. I don’t have the time now to address all of these instances, but I am hardly going to run from my position. My position is this: the murderers are fully responsible for what they did and should be treated with the full force of the law. Nothing justifies the killing of these people. But this is not the whole...

Increasingly, the Catholic League's Bill Donohue is less a defender of Catholicism and more a defender of the sycophantic whims of his patrons. First was his shameful defense of the St. Patrick's Gay Parade. Now his absurd moral equivalence with regard to yesterday's Islamo-nazi shooting massacre at Charlie Hebdo. Here is the key part of his statement. Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned. That is why what happened in Paris cannot be tolerated. But neither should we tolerate the kind of intolerance that provoked this violent reaction. While he perfunctorily condemns the killing,...

Cardinal Raymond Burke at the extraordinary Synod on the Family in Rome in October 2014 (CNS photo) Kaya Oakes, a revert to Catholicism after spending time as a self-described pro-choice liberal, has penned a little screed—a veritable bundle of befuddlement!—aimed at the recent New Emangelization interview with Cardinal Raymond Burke (which I posted about on Monday). I've not read Oakes' book about her spiritual, uh, arc, which is titled, Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Catholic Church, but my impression is that she has some—nay, numerous—issues with orthodoxy, or what she apparently calls "Catholic conservatism", which is in...

The mayor of Atlanta Kasim Reed announced today the firing of the city's fire chief for the crime of being a Christian, according to news reports. It seems the fire chief, Kelvin Cochran, wrote a book for his Bible study group in which he espoused actual Christian beliefs. How dare he? But his firing doesn't infringe on religious freedom at all, so says the mayor. "This is not about religious freedom, this is not about free speech" the mayor reportedly said. "Judgement is the basis of the problem." So there you have it. If you're fired for being a Christian...

A group of the Catholic Church’s most notorious far-left dissenters has issued an open letter and petition attacking any questioning of the statements and actions of Pope Francis. The controversy was touched off by an article appearing over the holidays in Italy’s daily Corriere della Sera by the country’s most senior Vatican specialist, Vittorio Messori, who spoke of Pope Francis’s “perplexing” habit of apparent contradictions between his actions and statements, with which he is “disturbing the tranquility of the average Catholic.” The petition calls for a “Stop on attacks on Pope Francis.” It says, “At first, the chatter on the...

An ex-gay organization is planning legal action against the District of Columbia for its recent banning of conversion therapy, also called Sexual Orientation Change Efforts therapy, for minors. Voice of the Voiceless, an organization focused on ex-gay rights and recognition, is in the early stages of planning to bring legal action against the government of the nation's Capital over the recently passed bill. Christopher Doyle, president and co-founder of VoV, told The Christian Post that at present they are seeking a plaintiff to bring a case against the new law. "We are still seeking a plaintiff (minor and their family)...

Archbishop Thomas Wenski, archbishop of Miami, has warned archdiocesan employees that any action in support of Florida’s now-legal same-sex marriage could cost them their jobs. “Because of the Church’s particular function in society,” the archbishop wrote, “certain conduct, inconsistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church, could lead to disciplinary action, including termination, even if it occurs outside the normal working day and outside the strict confines of work performed by the employee for the Archdiocese.” The policy extends to include posts (photos or comments) on social media sites. The preemptive letter by Archbishop Wenski should help to thwart potential...

A group of Catholic students in Belgium remains in opposition to Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp. Spero reported on January 4 that the Flemish Catholic Students Association of Antwerp issued an open letter to Bishop Johan Bonny denouncing his statements on homosexual marriage. “Monsignor Bonny, as a successor of the apostles, wishes to alter the form in which the faith has revealed it (marriage). As a Catholic association headquartered in Antwerp, the Association of Flemish Catholic Students of Antwerp KVHV (Vlaams Katholiek Hoogstudentenverbod) raises its voice to say clearly: ‘No, Monsignor. What you are proposing is not Catholic.”In an email...

Petition demands ‘public retraction’ of prof’s view that people have ‘right to choose’ abortion Following pressure on his Christian college from a pro-life group, a professor has apparently recanted the muddled views on abortion he articulated in a campus forum. That’s not good enough for Created Equal, which started a petition campaign against Indiana Wesleyan University demanding that the school “not tolerate pro-abortion professors.” As The College Fix previously reported, IWU professor Greg Fiebig called himself “equally pro-choice and pro-life” in the “Life vs. Choice” forum in November, which provoked Created Equal’s social-media campaign against him. Fiebig said he had...

A longtime Catholic school priest at a renowned New York City school has admitted to sexually abusing minors in the 1970s and 1980s, and local prosecutors are now investigating, authorities say. Father Robert Harrison, a priest who taught for 26 years and coached basketball for more than 20 years at the all-boys Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, has been removed from the school and is barred from any sort of ministry as church and law enforcement officials investigate.

For believing Christians, the identity of Jesus was announced at the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451): Jesus was always divine and human simultaneously. How did this work? Very simply, “it’s a mystery.” But a fuller explanation of how a peasant became God is the subject of Bart Ehrman’s latest book, “How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee,” and the subject of contentious debate among scholars. Several colleagues published a response titled “How God Became Jesus.” Mr. Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is a popular speaker on the evolution of Christian theology...

Amid a robust Italian debate over the leadership of Pope Francis, a cross-section of liberal Catholic groups in the country has launched an online petition to show backing for the Argentinian pontiff. Pointedly called “Stop the Attacks on Pope Francis,” the petition was launched on Christmas Day by groups including “We are Church,” “Blessed are the Peacemakers,” the Edith Stein Study Center, an Italian association of theologians, and a variety of base communities. All are generally associated with the liberal wing of the Italian Church. The petition is also signed by the Rev. Luigi Ciotti of Turin, one of Italy’s...

The Church of England is embroiled in a row over proposals to sweep away laws that forbid a full Christian funeral to people who have taken their own lives. Most clergy now regard suicide with far more sympathy than when ‘self murder’ was still a crime, and the move will be seen as reflecting a growing acceptance as more Britons choose to end their lives in clinics such as Dignitas in Switzerland. But some critics within the Church say the reforms will ‘legalise’ suicide, which should still be regarded a serious sin.

ALBANY – When Mario Cuomo was sworn in to his first term as governor on January 1, 1983, a young Bishop Howard Hubbard delivered the invocation. Thirty-two years later, the now retired bishop remembers that moment with crystal clarity. But it’s what Cuomo said to him over breakfast on that inauguration day that stands out even more. "He said to me, on that occasion, 'You know, I ran for office not for any personal reward, but I ran to serve the people of New York, and if you see there are some better ways in which I can serve the...