Free Republic

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 8, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) -- Marco Rubio is staunchly pro-marriage, but he’s facing questions after the revelation that he is appointing Paul Singer, a major gay “marriage” proponent, as his campaign finance chairman. Politico speculated that the choice is part of a Wall Street campaign to stop Donald Trump.  Merco Press claimed the choice "shows just how willing Rubio is to risk voter backlash in order to continue raising money for his campaign march." Singer founded the hedge fund Elliot Management Corporation, and is worth about $2.2 billion according to Forbes. In 2012, he started a Super PAC...

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland, March 7, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Minutes after addressing a packed room at the 2016 CPAC, two leading social conservatives told LifeSiteNews that sexual agendas are putting religious liberty at risk. The Family Research Council's Travis Weber told LifeSiteNews that "for a lot of us, religious liberty's only been a hot-button issue recently, we're seeing in the news. Why is that? It's driven by agendas affecting matters of sexuality – marriage, abortion, contraception, and all sorts of other issues." "So what do we do about this? Some of these claims are going to be dealt with in the...

WOONSOCKET, Rhode Island, March 7, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – A Rhode Island Catholic school has instituted a policy against enrolling transgender students. However, in the face of backlash the school says it is open to rethinking the policy. “Mount Saint Charles Academy is unable to make accommodations for transgender students,” the school’s handbook states. “Therefore, MSC does not accept transgender students nor is MSC able to continue to enroll students who identify as transgender.” The policy against admitting students identifying as transgender has been in effect at the Woonsocket, Rhode Island, prep school as of October of last year, according to...

Jeannine Parvati Baker talks about New Age yogis and abortion: “Allow me first to first turn my attention to the yoga community wherein it is all too common for women yogis (yoginis) to abort their babies … I have watched many of my yogini sisters procure abortions knowing that it was breaking the primary vow of ahimsa (harmlessness) that yogis make. They justified their actions with the confused philosophy of reincarnation and “free will.” In other words, they said that the soul knew “on some level’” what it was getting by choosing incarnation into a woman who did not want...

Mario Melazzini at work in Rome    Monday, February 29, was Rare Disease Day, an international initiative to promote awareness of the thousands of crippling disorders. It’s a good opportunity to highlight how courageously their victims deal with adversity.It would hard to find a better example of this than the new chairman of the board of Italy’s peak body for regulating pharmaceutical products, Agenzia italiana del Farmaco (AIFA), Mario Melazzini.Melazzini was appointed by the Minister of Health in January, after his predecessor resigned over conflict of interest issues. He was an unusual choice. For about 20 years he practiced as...

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland, March 3, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) -- As the Conservative Political Action Conference got underway Thursday, they faced strong criticism for welcoming a Republican homosexual activist group as a sponsor for the first time. The Log Cabin Republicans state on their website that their group exists solely to “make the Republican Party more inclusive, particularly on gay and lesbian issues.” “Working from inside the Party—educating other Republicans about gay and lesbian issues—is the most effective way to gain new Republican allies for equality,” the group’s website states. “We believe equality for LGBT Americans is in the finest tradition...

On January 21 of last year, the eve of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I was teaching a night class in literature. The topic was Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” [For any who haven’t read it, a big SPOILER ALERT is necessary here.]Jackson’s 1948 story was set in a rural community. The cheery townspeople gather one sunny, happy day, amidst much joking, for the annual lottery. Families draw from a black box, then, when an individual family is chosen, each member of the family draws again. Only at the very end of the story is the purpose of...

The Pope and the Baby Killer In 2010, after I had lived in Italy about two years and had begun to understand the byzantine complexities of this country's politics, Emma Bonino decided to run for the office of governor of the region of Lazio. Once I found out what kind of person she was, I was seized with the urge to buy a crate of spray paint and go around Rome writing, "10,000 bambini assassinati non abbastanza per Emma 'la Bicicletta' Bonino," on all her posters. "10,000 murdered babies not enough for Emma 'the bicycle' Bonino." I thought of it...

SANTO DOMINGO, March 1, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Tomorrow, the Dominican Republic's LGBT Chamber of Commerce will be inaugurated at a luxury hotel in downtown Santo Domingo, and it is being pushed almost singlehandedly by the United States government and its taxpayers.  The following press announcement was sent to all major news outlets in the staunchly pro-family Caribbean nation by the United States Embassy. The Embassy of the United States of America, the LGBT Chamber of Commerce of the Dominican Republic (CCLGBTRD) and the United States Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce  (NGLCC), under the auspices of the United States Agency...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, February 29, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) -- Last week the youth wing of Sweden’s Liberal Party voted to call for the decriminalization of sexual relations between siblings as well as sexual relations with a corpse, on the argument that laws should not be based on “morality” or on a societal consensus on what is “disgusting.”“We are a youth organization and one of our tasks is to think one step further,” said Liberal Youth leader Cecilia Johnsson to  Swedish news site Aftonbladet last week. “I understand that [incest and necrophilia] can be seen as unusual and disgusting but legislation can not be...

It was a big year for salacious affairs between teachers and their students. Here are 10 of the most scandalous of these stories that captured the public’s imagination in 2015. (WAY less than 50%)

UNITED KINGDOM, February 29, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) -- A postgraduate student on an educational path to enter social services has been expelled from his university after being told by administrators that Facebook comments he made months ago arguing the Christian position against gay “marriage” made him unfit to become a social worker. Two months after posting to Facebook comments defending U.S. county clerk Kim Davis and her decision to not grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples as well as quoting the Bible’s condemnation of homosexual acts, 38-year-old Felix Ngole found himself before a disciplinary hearing at Sheffield University due to a student...

WASHINGTON, D.C., February 29, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – In a first-of-its-kind analysis, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have concluded that one in two black men who are gay or bisexual will contract HIV.In an infographic released last week, one in six men who have sex with men (MSM) will contract HIV in their lifetimes, with half of black MSM likely to contract. Black men are the most likely racial and gender demographic to contract HIV, with a five-percent chance of contraction.White women are the least likely to contract the disease of the demographics examined – blacks, Hispanics, and whites of...

A few days ago, Pope Francis and his spokesman Federico Lombardi directly contradicted the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church on contraception, including directly contradicting the clear words of Pope Paul's 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae. Various "Catholic" individuals and groups quickly lined up to support Francis, including the often heterodox Filipino Catholic Bishops Conference. But a surprisingly large and strong set of Catholics--beyond the expected set of minority traditionalists--has now risen up to resist, as if Francis, after years of this this sort of thing, has now crossed an obvious line. Who knew that line would be you know where....

Dear Pope Francis: I write this letter to you as a priest to the Bishop of Rome and as a son to a father. I write with a heavy heart, and I know that heaviness of heart is shared by many of my Catholic brethren both clergy and laity. I watched the early news one morning last week to find that one of the headlines proclaimed that in an interview on the flight from Mexico to Rome you indicated that the Church's teaching on contraception may be undergoing a change. As in the past, I went to the official translation...

I wanted to briefly mention a few observations of discussions about the Holy Father's latest plane interview. 1. Astoundingly, when Catholics raise concerns about Pope Francis suggestion to women that they can use birth control pills and condoms to prevent perfectly healthy babies from being conceived because of a remote chance of birth defects, I am still seeing Catholics claim the press is misinterpreting what is being said. I will not cite the dozens of examples, suffice it to say that the Father has accountability for his own words and actions. His contradiction of Humane Vitae was as clear as...

From the canonist Ed Peter’s fine blog In The Light Of The Law. He doesn’t have a combox over there and doesn’t mind if we use his stuff here. DO, however, go over there to his place regularly. Emphases are from Peters, comments mine: Misunderstanding the (alleged) 'Congo contraception' caseEven by the standards of his reign, the presser Pope Francis conducted on his return flight from Mexico has provoked an unusual number of questions. [No kidding. You should see my inbox, too!] I wish to address only one of those here.Preliminarily, I note that the burden is not on the...

Two months and two billion box office dollars later, Star Wars: The Force Awakens has reaped huge returns for Disney with its most progressive episode yet. Now that Daisy Ridley’s Rey and John Boyega’s Finn have given the Star Wars franchise its first female Jedi and black lead, respectively, does its fearless director J.J. Abrams see a future for a gay character in the galaxy? “Of course!” Abrams said Thursday night at his Bad Robot HQ, where he hosted the US-Ireland Alliance’s annual Oscar Wilde Awards ahead of Sunday’s Oscars, where The Force Awakens is nominated in five categories. “When...

Appearing as a guest on Friday's Fox and Friends, FNC's Geraldo Rivera touted GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump as "the reasonable man on the stage" at last night's presidential debate, and went on to praise Trump's "unparalleled courage" for taking a position of neutrality on the Arab-Israeli conflict. After acknowledging that the GOP presidential candidate would have to answer for his history of having illegal immigrants doing construction work for him, Rivera brought up Trump's position on Israel as he added: My point, Brian, is that in the big picture this was the reasonable man on the stage. How is...

Abortion supporters attacks pro-lifers as abortion patient is loaded into an ambulance Bakersfield, CA – Bedlam broke out at the FPA Women’s Health abortion facility in Bakersfield as an ambulance arrived to transport a patient suffering a medical emergency. During the incident two abortion supporters assaulted pro-life activists trying to document the incident, which took place on February 23, 2016. As the ambulance arrived, several clinic workers wearing red scrubs surrounded the ambulance with white sheets to impede those who were trying to photograph the incident. As a woman was being prepared for emergency transport, a man and woman began...