Free Republic

A draft UN report has revealed that UN peacekeepers routinely flout a ban of the international organization and pay for sex with money, dresses, jewelry, perfume, cell phones and other items in a flagrant exploitation of poverty-stricken populations they are meant to protect. Reuters received a copy of the draft report, which was conducted by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), and detailed how UN forces bought the sexual services of hundreds of women in Haiti and Liberia who said they were forced to sell their bodies due to hunger and poverty. "Evidence from two peacekeeping mission countries...

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 11, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) -- The sponsor of the Senate's 20-week ban told LifeSiteNews that when it comes to laws about aborting children conceived from rape, "I'm going to leave that to the family, to the mother."GOP presidential candidate and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, introduced the "Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act" shortly before a press conference on Thursday morning. During the conference, Graham referred to his desire to address saving late-term unborn children in a "fair way."LifeSiteNews asked Graham about this comment after the press conference, noting that his bill -- which bans abortions after 20 weeks'...

Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush says his views toward single mothers "have evolved" since he suggested 20 years ago that they were becoming too accepted by society. In a 1996 book, Bush and co-author Brian Yablonski expressed concern about changing cultural mores and wrote, regarding unwed motherhood, that there was "no longer a stigma attached to this behavior." This was in a chapter titled "The Restoration of Shame."

In April 2011 a 16-year-old girl came to Dr Deirdre Little's surgery in rural New South Wales asking why her periods had stopped. When Dr Little investigated she found that the girl was in menopause. No cause for this could be found, and usually isn’t in 90 percent of cases of ovarian failure. But this was not just another case; the incidence of menopause developing without cause in a young teenage girl is so rare that there are no figures for it."Susan" asked if her condition could be due to the human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV) Gardasil, because it was after...

NEW YORK, June 11, 2015 (C-Fam) -- The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report last week on LGBT issues. In that document he called for an end to “conversion therapy.”President Obama also made a call for the end to “conversion therapy” last week.Various American states have made “conversion therapy” illegal for minors. The Southern Poverty Law Center, along with gay activist Wayne Besen, is campaigning for “conversion therapy” to be made illegal coast to coast.Opponents of therapy for those with unwanted same-sex desire and behavior use the term “conversion therapy” as an epithet. They also use the...

June 10, 2015 (Mercatornet) -- Within the month, the nation will receive the opinion of the US Supreme Court as to whether the US Constitution requires all of the states to jettison their domestic laws and sanction same-sex marriage. Numerous federal judges have so ruled, and most states have simply yielded to those federal court decisions. In a few cases, beginning with Vermont and Massachusetts, state courts ruled for same sex marriage, and state officials have accepted passively those decisions as well.Generally, courts have ruled for same-sex marriage using either the “due process clause” or the “equal protection clause” of...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today applauded the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for ruling in favor of several health and safety provisions in Texas legislation, House Bill 2, which ensures that abortion clinics meet the safety standards of state Ambulatory Surgical Centers and requires that abortionists qualify for admitting privileges at a local hospital. House Bill 2 also bans abortions after 20 weeks. “This week Texas has once again led the way in affirming the dignity of women and the unborn,” said Sen. Cruz. “I applaud the Fifth Circuit for ruling in favor of applying commonsense...

The breakdown of the family has been one of the most dispiriting changes over the past 50 years, and conservatives have rightly sought to combat it at almost every turn. That being said, in their efforts to encourage family formation and to keep families strong, conservatives have often focused on laws rather than economic policies. But it’s not an either-or. It’s a both-and. Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, has rightly argued that human flourishing requires more than simply economic flourishing. He has pointed out that the conclusion from the majority of studies that have been done on...

It happened without a Summer of Love, without Timothy Leary, without a groovy anthem or a shaggy new national look. In the past decade or so, there’s been a silent revolution in American culture, one at least as profound as the ’60s upheavals. We’ve hardly taken notice of it, because it happened in people’s minds instead of in the streets, happened in ordinary people instead of in the elites and the punditocracy. Compared to just a few years ago, we have a completely different set of ideas about what constitutes acceptable behavior. As Caitlyn Jenner puts it in her new...

A group of religious leaders and health experts yesterday called on President Obama to provide access to funding so that women who have been raped by terrorists abroad can have abortions. Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders met at St John's Episcopal Church, just opposite the White House, to raise awareness of the need to provide post-rape care, including abortions, for the victims of groups such as ISIS in Syria and Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria. "Women are dying now. Families are being pushed further into poverty now because this care is not available to them," said Rev Harry Knox,...

MOSCOW, June 5, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Churches that have deemed homosexuality morally acceptable have rejected Christianity and are preparing their followers to accept the Anti-Christ, according to one of the leading figures in the Russian Orthodox Church. His statement came as the Russian Orthodox Church announced that it is ending “formal contacts” with the United Protestant Church of France and the Church of Scotland over those churches’ abandonment of traditional Christian sexual morality. In its statement, the church said ecumenical dialogue was pointless after France’s United Protestant Church last month voted to allow pastors to officiate at same-sex “marriages” and...

A European court has issued a ruling that a disabled patient can be starved to death against his will.Vincent Lambert, a tetraplegic patient who has been in a state of minimal consciousness in hospital for six years following a car accident, is current receiving food and water via a feeding tube. The decision to cut his intravenous food and water supply has divided his family. LambertÂ’s doctors and wife wanted to starve him to death while his parents, who are vehemently opposed to ending his life, took his case to court.In January 2014 a court in France ruled against starving...

America will never be the same. The Food and Drug Administration voted Thursday to recommend approval for a drug that would increase a woman’s sex drive, The New York Times reports. The drug, Flibanserin, is a pink pill meant to be taken daily. It had been denied two times by the FDA, but the third time was the charm. The drug makers have been directed to work to lower the drug’s side effects, which can include sleepiness, low blood pressure, nausea, fainting and dizziness. After the second refusal from the FDA, a group of advocates rallied around the little pink pill. They founded a group...

June 4, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- Unlimited access to the internet and 24-hour news cycles would give one the impression that extensive information is being conveyed to the public regarding the crucial issues of our day. But in large part, the same old uninformative stuff gets regurgitated over and over again. The gatekeepers, intent on presenting a one-sided portrayal of one of the most coordinated and funded social movements of our day, are fine with misrepresenting the news. This is “Pride” month for a community that enjoys the most protection of any people group by news organizations. There’s no journalistic objectivity,...

Minneapolis, MN, June 3, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Parents in Minnesota are outraged after learning that a school sex education teacher took their pre-teen children to a sex toy store without parental consent.Last week, the director of Gaia Democratic School – a small, private K-12 school – took approximately a dozen students as young as 11 to an establishment known as the Smitten Kitten. Describing itself as "a progressive sex toy store for everyone," Smitten Kitten showed students its variety of sex toys, though it says it took its pornography section down during the visit.Now, Lynn Floyd and his ex-wife have...

A recent Gallup poll, "Moral Acceptability: Changes Over Time," shows Americans made a startling move to the left over the past 15 years. A blanket blaming of the church is the easy answer, but today, where black and white has faded into varying shades of gray, we are better served going back to where it began because we didn't get where we are today overnight. America's moral decline began with Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt [FDR]. Their arrogant defiance and blatant hostility toward the U.S. Constitution inspired them to lead an insurrection from the Oval Office, effectively convincing...

My guess is that you, gentle reader, will be as astonished as we were by the top-of-the-website New York Times article discrediting the population alarmism of the past fifty years. In “The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion” the newspaper has finally (several decades too late) thrown population control on the ash heap of discredited ideas. The article included a video interview with Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb. He was the butterfly scientist from Stanford who scared tens of millions with the specter of overpopulation—and the population apocalypse that would supposedly result. He predicted that by the 1970’s...

May 29, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In the wake of revelations that Josh Duggar allegedly sexually molested five minor girls – four of them his younger sisters – when in his early teens, many familiar with the evangelical Christian Duggar family and their ten-season-long TLC hit reality show “19 Kids and Counting” are inevitably putting themselves in Jim Bob and Michelle’s shoes and asking: What would I do if faced with a similar situation? What should I do? Many parents and families are ill-equipped to respond when faced with such circumstances, leaving them frightened and uncertain about their responsibilities both to...

The difference between Right and Left addressed in this column concerns a fundamentally different method that each utilizes in order to improve society.Conservatives believe that the way to a better world is almost always through moral improvement of the individual — by each person doing battle with his own moral defects. It is true that in particularly violent and evil societies such as fascist, communist and Islamist tyrannies the individual must be preoccupied with battling outside forces. Almost everywhere else, however, and certainly in a free and decent country such as America, the greatest battle of the individual must be...

In his office in the Alabama Judicial Building, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker proudly displays a four-volume 1773 edition of Commentaries on the Laws of England. Written by William Blackstone, the famous English jurist, Commentaries formed the core of American jurisprudence both before and after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, said Parker, who was first elected to the high court of Alabama in 2004 and reelected six years later.An introduction in the reprint from University of Chicago Press begins with this startling sentence: “Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765-69, is the most important legal...