Free Republic

A year after an airman at Maxwell Air Force Base was allowed to take an oath without saying "so help me God," the Air Force has quietly reversed course and once again made the phrase mandatory."Reciting 'So help me God' in the reenlistment and commissioning oaths is a statutory requirement under Title 10 U.S.C. §502," Air Force spokesperson Rose Richeson told Military.com, adding that Air Force Instruction on the oath is consistent with the language mandated in the law."Airmen are no longer authorized to omit the words 'So help me God'," she said.The issue first came up last year when...

For too long we have been lied to about the sexual revolution. But now the mask is coming off, and the younger generations are recognizing that they have been sold a pack of lies. It’s sobering and frustrating to consider that each and every time social conservatives raised the cultural alarm throughout the last five decades, pointing out that each new manifestation of the Sexual Revolution would lead to devastating consequences, they were written off with derisive laughter. They were accused of “provoking a moral panic,” or being “stuck in the past” or “too prudish.” The “slippery-slope” arguments of...

The Obama administration has renewed its attempt to force a Catholic religious order, the Little Sisters of the Poor, to comply with the HHS abortion mandate. The mandate compels religious groups to pay for birth control and drugs that may cause abortions.The Obama administration announced today it will continue its legal battle against the Little Sisters of the Poor, a religious order of nuns dedicated to serving the neediest elderly in society. This comes despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby and another company in their bid to stop the HHS mandate.The government is...

How often have we heard our elderly brothers and sisters say they don’t want to be “a burden.” Who made them think such a thing? We did!A great column in the Daily Mail by Stephen Glover indicts the UK culture for its blatant ageism–a condemnation that applies equally to the USA. From, “Why Today’s Elderly are Old Age Pariahs:” It can scarcely be disputed that people in their 70s, 80s and 90s are increasingly made to feel they are part of a burdensome minority which is more or less surplus to requirement. What is particularly disturbing is that the kind...

In early April 2014, German author Gabriele Kuby visited the Czech Republic to give a number of public presentations promoting her new book, The Global Sexual Revolution: The Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom, recently translated to Czech. During her visit to Brno, I had a chance to interview Kuby about her book and ask how her Catholic perspective helps her understand one of the most important issues of our time: the continuing sexual revolution that is leading not only to private lifestyle changes but a new legal understanding of sexuality and the family. Kuby warns that the...

The documentary After Tiller portrayed late-term abortionists in a flattering light, highlighting the tragic stories of women who were carrying dying or disabled unborn babies. Dr. George Tiller, who the documentary is named after, was assassinated by a man who claimed to be “pro-life.” All established pro-life organizations condemned the murder, including Live Action.But was Dr. Tiller a kind, compassionate hero who relieved women of the burden of carrying dying babies? The reality is far different.The pro-life group Life Dynamics has a recording of a speech Dr. Tiller made to the National Abortion Federation in which he said: We have...

f you count a generation as spanning 20 years, then approximately 36 percent of the American generation born from 1993 through 2012 — which has begun turning 21 this year and will continue turning 21 through 2033—were born to unmarried mothers. 80,838,742 babies were born in the United States from 1993 through 2012, according to the birth reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 29,007,173 of those babies were born to unmarried mothers. That does not count the 40.6 percent of babies (1,605,643 out of 3,957,577) born in 2013 who were also born to unmarried mothers. In...

Gentle lighting casts a glow across the perfect, healthy, Caucasian newborn who sleeps in a cocoon of white blanket. The photographer has captured the baby-ethos that tugs on the heartstrings of any member of the human race with half a heart, and it is hard to look at the picture without an inward, “Aww.” The text that is superimposed over the photo says, “Not a mistake. Not a problem. Not a burden. Not an inconvenience. Not a nuisance. Not an accident. Not a punishment.” Then, in larger font, “A miracle.” It is all very lovely. And yet when I...

Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, who rose to prominence after her filibuster of Texas’ anti-abortion legislation, reveals in a new campaign memoir that she terminated two pregnancies for medical reasons in the 1990s, including one in which the fetus had developed a severe brain abnormality. In the book, “Forgetting to Be Afraid,” Davis writes that she had an abortion in 1996 after an exam revealed that the brain of the fetus had developed in complete separation on the right and left sides. She also describes ending an earlier ectopic pregnancy, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus. It...

Back in March, I wrote a piece for CatholicVote about FDA evaluation of a process that would create multi-parent embryos: Things like this always begin for such seemingly noble scientific reasons, don’t they? But they rarely stop there. And of course in addition to creating tri-parent offspring, which creates ethical and genealogical nightmares in its own right, virtually every instance of embryonic modification involves a slew of violations of the moral law, from in-vitro fertilization to the destruction of fertilized human embryos — human life — deemed imperfect or unnecessary to achieve the desired outcome. This morning, I read...

On Friday, Vice reported about a 23-year-old girl named Bailey who, after becoming unexpectedly pregnant, has turned to the crowdfunding site GoFundMe to help pay for her much-needed abortion, asking a total of $2,500 to help pay for the operation. Her GoFundMe page, originally titled "Stop Bailey From Breeding Fund," has been met with tremendous controversy, forcing the site to remove the page for some time. According to Vice, the page reads: "Bailey is currently unemployed, completely broke, in debt, and in no position to hold down a job due to severe symptoms of a rough, unplanned and unexpected...

A teenage mother is fighting a do-not-resuscitate order imposed over her objections on her brain-damaged daughter, saying she should be responsible for medical decisions. Child welfare officials who intervened after the baby was severely injured say life-saving measures in the event she stops breathing would only prolong her suffering. The mother, Virginia Trask, originally agreed to the do-not-resuscitate order. At one point, the infant was removed from life support and placed in her arms to die, then opened her eyes and began breathing. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Maine and Christian Civic League of Maine are joining the Alliance Defending...

People around the world use the GoFundMe web site and it’s normally a place for heartwarming campaigns to help people who have adverse medical conditions, who have been in accidents or who are raising money for other people in need or good causes. But one woman is using it to raise funds for her abortion.Bailey’s Abortion Fund has already raised $1,654 of $2,500 by 106 people over the last two days who want to give her their hard-earned cash to pay to kill her baby in an abortion.With the projected cost of the abortion well over the typical $450-$500 price...

An online fundraising project to publish new LGBTQ2S picture books for children aged 4-8, with the hope of having the books picked up by schools, has recently met its fundraising target.  693 backers pledged a combined $56,793 to the project, called the “Flamingo Rampant Book Club.”  The fundraising goal was $49,000. The books will “celebrate a great and wide variety of LGBTQ2S kids, families, and communities,” according to the description of the project.  The books will also “celebrate gender-independent kids and adults.” The individual behind the project is S. Bear Bergman.  Given that his same-sex spouse, who goes by the...

Alliance Defending Freedom filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights Wednesday on behalf of Tom Mortier, who is challenging Belgium’s laws that allow euthanasia. Mortier’s mother was put to death by a doctor for “untreatable depression” even though she was not terminally ill. Mortier did not find out what had happened until he received a telephone call the day after her death. “The government has an obligation to protect life, not assist in promoting death,” said ADF Litigation Staff Counsel Robert Clarke. “A person can claim that she should be able to do whatever she pleases, but...

It wasn’t “the Nazis” that caused the mass euthanasia deaths of disabled infants and adults. It was the eugenics ideology of the era that denied human exceptionalism.We are heading in the same direction–although certainly not mass murder of the kind that happened in Germany circa 1939-1945.But we too have accepted the idea that there is such a thing as an unlivable life. Indeed, in the Netherlands, babies born with serious or terminal disabilities are killed in their cribs by doctors.In Belgium and the Netherlands, people with serious mental illnesses are euthanized–to widespread applause.All of this reminds me of the words...

Early 20th century photo depicts Samoan girls preparing for the 'ava ceremony.' Wikimedia Commons If Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Reports was the “Father of the Sexual Revolution,” perhaps no one woman can be more accurately called the “Mother of the Sexual Revolution” than Margaret Mead. Margaret Mead was a young anthropologist who set out to help anthropology professor Frank Boas of Columbia University prove a very specific thesis: that a person’s upbringing and environment shaped a person’s actions to a greater extent than genetic factors did. Together with another young scholar named Ruth Benedict, Mead set off to...

On Monday, PBS aired the controversial documentary “After Tiller,” a film that sympathizes with the four remaining late-term abortionists in the country. Pro-life groups immediately filed petitions urging the station to remove the film from its lineup, to no avail. Today, the documentary’s filmmakers and Dr. Susan Robinson, one of the abortionists featured in the film, participated in a Google Chat to field viewers’ questions. Their “answers” were misleading, accusatory, and, at times, outright lies.“What is the hardest part of your job?,” one Google participant asked Dr. Robinson: “Listening to the desperate, sad stories and not taking it on as...

The main web site behind Planned Parenthood’s attempt to lure students with a sex educational campaign that leads to abortion now points those teenagers to a web site promoting pornography. The pro-life group Iowa Right to Life discovered the change and how the Planned Parenthood Teenwire web site — which is linked to by thousands of web sites across the country and whose URL is printed on sex ed literature distributed in schools nationwide — now points to a porn site. “Over the holiday weekend, we became aware of a new danger for Iowa children and teenagers,” Iowa Right to...

So how are a boat anchored in international waters off Dublin, Ireland, border town flea markets in Texas, a businessman in India, and a storefront in rural Iowa all related?According to an article written by Emily Bazelon appearing in last Thursday’s New York Times (8/28/14), they’re all key pieces of the abortion industry’s transition from relying almost exclusively on standard brick and mortar clinics that performed surgical abortions to a new model where chemical abortifacients can be ordered over the internet or purchased over the counter and performed at home by women on themselves—hence the acronym D-I-Y (Do-It-Yourself) abortions.Bazelon’s article,...