Free Republic

High school football games are typically considered to be good entertainment for the entire family. Maybe an older sibling is playing, so parents come with their younger children to watch them play and have fun all together. So given that high school football games are typically family events, it’s not surprising that parents were outraged when they saw what these cheerleaders were wearing. A video uploaded to FlyHeight shows cheerleaders performing in outfits that appear to be closer to lingerie than to cheerleading uniforms. Each cheerleader, believed to be from a high school in Miami, holds a bag and a...

It’s been a beautiful spring day in the suburbs of Pennsylvania on this Thursday, June 7th, 1961. You just got home from work and your wife is almost finished preparing one of her typically delicious dinners. Your kids, a boy and two girls, aged 15, 13, and 9, have been out all day riding their bikes around the neighborhood and playing with friends. Now everybody’s hungry and ready to sit down for the family meal. Last night was game night, and you barely emerged with a victory in Monopoly. Your kids are getting good, and your wife, normally the more...

Episode 026, Recorded on September 12, 1966 Guest: Hugh M. (Hugh Marston) Hefner

Aug. 15 (UPI) -- President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended his initial response that "many sides" were involved in the violent confrontation between white supremacists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Va. "You had a group on one side that was mad, and you had a group on the other side that was violent," Trump told reports at Trump Tower in New York. "Nobody wants to say that, but I'll say that." He noted it was a "fine statement" Saturday even though Republicans and Democrats criticized him for not specifically condemning those who staged the demonstration in the city. Trump said he...

In their passion to achieve a government-crafted utopia, the liberal/progressive movement often does more harm than good. This is because their tool of choice – the government – can only apply superficial solutions that come with harmful side effects. Efforts to correct “income inequality” and “fight poverty” through government entitlement programs are a prime example. As columnist George Will recently asked and answered, “[W]hat if large causes of poverty are not matters of material distribution but are behavioral – bad choices and the cultures that produce them? If so, policymakers must rethink their confidence in social salvation through economic abundance.”...

All Together Now: What the Catechism Has to Say on Assessing Moral Acts Msgr. Charles Pope • April 18, 2016 • The Catechism of the Catholic Church states the following regarding moral acts:The object, the intention, and the circumstances make up the “sources,” or constitutive elements, of the morality of human acts (CCC # 1750).Note, therefore, that in assessing a particular moral act we must look not only to what is done, but also to the circumstances under which it is done, and to the intention of the one doing it.For example, to steal is wrong. However, one’s culpability...

There's a tension so deep in how we think about free expression, it should rightly be called a paradox. On the one hand, regardless of ideology, artists and writers almost unanimously insist that they do what they do to change minds. But the same artistes, auteurs and opiners recoil in horror when anyone suggests that they might be responsible for inspiring bad deeds. Hollywood, the music industry, journalism, political ideologies, even the Confederate flag: Each takes its turn in the dock when some madman or fool does something terrible. The arguments against free speech are stacked and waiting for these...

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised? I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture. What I...

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised? I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshman in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture. What I...

It’s easy to get depressed that we’ve all but lost the battle for fiscal conservatism, but look on the bright side. The battle for social conservatism is … no, looks like that one’s pretty much a rout too.One of the Internet’s recent misfortunes is the explosion of overheated liberal takes about the resemblance of modern American culture to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the series on Hulu about a Christian theocratic takeover of the country in which women are enslaved by the patriarchy. Behold the state of the looming theocracy, via Gallup:Of the 19 issues tested, not a single one has...

The moral sentiments of the population determine what political leaders are willing to do. The moral sentiments of a country may be consistent with reality or may be based on Utopian *fantasies, but, either way, they control public policy. To illustrate, lets examine the concepts “earn” and “deserve”. In reality, material products and human services are the product of human labor. Food and shelter, for example, do not exist in nature ready for your use. Medical care does not exist in nature. Humans must work to create these things. This is not a situation that was devised by mean people....

..let me talk about abortion for a moment. The abortion battle is not over babies. The abortion battle is not a battle about whether we ought to kill babies just for the sake of killing babies...Nobody would legalize the murder of those babies if storks brought babies.... Willing to do that – follow this one – willing to do that in the face of the strongest instinct to protect, which is motherhood.... We were worried all the time about Russia, we were worried all the time about the Iron Curtain world, And we were having a revolution here that has...

Have you ever heard somebody say “I’m not religious, I’m an atheist/agnostic”? On the contrary, atheism and agnosticism are subsets of Humanism, which can certainly be classified as a religion.

One hears a great deal these days about the universal nature of story. It's a gratifying conceit that deep down we all share the same fundamental narrative. But what about the more factional, political nature of story? I don't mean the depiction of torture in Zero Dark Thirty or corporate cunning in Promised Land. I mean the intrinsically political nature of how character is portrayed and plot structured. Stories stage conflict. And the strongest conflict always dictates inseparable, irreconcilable opposites. If Henry Adams was right, that politics in practice is always "the systematic organization of hatreds," then what better place...

Liberals constantly stake a claim to some religion-free moral high ground, which is laughable considering liberalism’s ideology is immoral at its core. Since November of last year, leftists have been too blinded by inane hatred for Trump to see the irony. Sure, there are liberals out there who lead decent lives and you can find some on the other side who don’t. Difference is, though, the longer a liberal remains liberal, the harder it is for them to see the light...the truth…that all their ideology does is cover them with a cloak of morality. The false sense of morality gives...

Former Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is a socialist. So were Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and a host of other charming fellows. But Sanders makes a distinction, he stresses that he’s a “democratic socialist.” You see, Bernie needs some criterion to separate the good socialists, like him, from the moral monsters. Bernie likes to make grand pronouncements about morality; what’s moral and what’s immoral. Bernie thinks “acting on climate change a moral obligation.” Bernie thinks that it is immoral as well as unjust that our government doesn’t provide healthcare for all; after all, all those socialist European nations provide...

Vice President Joe Biden has officiated a gay wedding, a first for the early proponent of same-sex marriage. Biden presided over the union of Joe Mahshie and Brian Mosteller, both longtime White House aides. The White House says the couple asked Biden to officiate.

Some of my Christian friends tell me they can’t in good conscience vote for Donald Trump because, when faced with a choice between “the lesser of two evils,” the morally right thing is to choose neither one. They recommend voting for a third-party or write-in candidate. As a professor who has taught Christian ethics for 39 years, I think their analysis is incorrect. Now that Trump has won the GOP nomination, I think voting for Trump is a morally good choice. American citizens need patience with each other in this difficult political season. Close friends are inevitably going to make...

Tuesday, after FBI director James Comey spent about 15 minutes laying out the legal case against Hillary Clinton and then spent about three minutes declaring that he was going to ignore the evidence and recommend no legal action against Mrs. Clinton, TheBlaze's Matt Walsh declared that "The law is Dead." Walsh wrote: July 5, 2016. 11:15 a.m. One day after America's 240th birthday. When historians conduct their autopsy on Lady Justice, that will be the time of death. That is the precise moment when Justice drew her last labored breath, cursed our ridiculous country and our hopelessly corrupt government, and...

I don't think Comey's presser heralds the end of law in the U.S., but he surely did put another nail in the coffin. Like the Supreme Court rulings on abortion and marriage, few should be surprised at this outcome. America has been on a long ugly road when it comes to law and justice, reason and logic, morality and truth.