Free Republic

The Baton Rouge, Louisiana, bar where deceased LSU student Madison Brooks and the four men charged with rape crimes against her were allegedly drinking is now under fire, with a university official announcing, "It is time for action." "She should not have been taken from us in this way," LSU President William F. Tate IV wrote in a recent statement. "What happened to her was evil, and our legal system will parcel out justice." Brooks, a 19-year-old sophomore, died after she was hit by a ride-share driver in the early morning hours of Jan. 15 in East Baton Rouge Parish....

"A person's moral sense of right and wrong, viewed as acting as a guide to one's behavior" -- the dictionary definition of "conscience." Whenever I make the common-sense argument that people need to hold themselves accountable to a morality-giving, morality-judging God -- specifically, the God of the Bible, and more specifically, the God of the Ten Commandments -- a flood of incredulous, frequently mocking, responses immediately appears in the comments section and on atheist and left-wing websites. The gist of the God-is-morally-unnecessary argument is this: "Unlike Prager and other religious people, I don't need God to tell me murder is...

School librarians in Florida are now required to undergo specialized state training on the new rules for what can and cannot go in school media centers.

Churches have remained publicly quiet for decades on the moral issues of the day so as not to appear too controversial or too political. As a result, public debate is often left to those without a biblical worldview. The consequences of this passivity have contributed to the unraveling of American civil society. It is well past time to end the silence. The Progressive Elites talk endlessly about "democracy," but their intention is typically a ruse to implement a top-down liberal agenda. They allow normalizing pedophilia, trafficking children for sex, sexually grooming kids, encouraging transgender surgery for minors, and promoting unlimited...

You wonder where the churches are.As American society is awash in new morality, as ageless conventions are toppled and condemned, as the teachings of millennia are dismissed and the very definitions of humanity are changed, where are the shepherds of the Savior’s flock, and what guidance do they give?For the most part, they are passive and silent. Or worse, they have gone over to the side of confusion. But seldom are they heard, and seldom do they lead, and seldom do they seem to be a light of the world.Nowhere do you find the courage and clarity of Isaiah, who...

The Liz Truss tragicomedy, almost by accident, showed that we are a country in terrible debt. We live on a reputation for solvency that we no longer deserve. Jeremy Hunt's cancellation of the Truss Package on Monday morning was delivered and timed to placate the money markets. Our supposedly sovereign Parliament had to wait hours to be told the same thing. Let us look at the extent of the mess which this crisis has revealed, like a flash of lightning in pitch darkness which shows a traveller he is on the edge of a precipice. In a frantic attempt to...

i24 News – A coordinator from Israel’s security service Shin Bet spoke with a Palestinian resident of the Gaza Strip ahead of an Israeli strike on a Palestinian Islamic Jihad ammunition warehouse, according to a statement released on Sunday. During the conversation, the Shin Bet coordinator urged the Palestinian to make sure the area around the building was clear: “We don’t want anyone getting hurt.” The coordinator first demanded the full attention of his interlocutor. “Listen please, please. You know how we act, and I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I see people going back to their homes. Is...

As the nation goes through its periodic soul-searching as to the causes of recent mass shootings, I fail to see one major factor discussed. This factor is the gradual weakening of consequences for bad behavior to the point of threatening the very fabric of society. The latest manifestations of this can be seen in the refusal to prosecute not only minor, but major infractions of the law in a significant number of cities. But what are the origins of these relaxed attitudes? I was an elementary school teacher for 40 years. Starting in the mid-1970s, the various school districts I...

: ...a great many of our active supporters are health care consumers and health care providers who want to make informed health care choices, including vaccination choices, for themselves and their children. Many parents, who support our work, are not philosophically opposed to the concept of vaccination and do not object to every vaccine. However, they are philosophically opposed to government health officials having the power to intimidate, threaten, and coerce them into violating their deeply held conscientious beliefs in the event they conclude that either vaccination in general or, more commonly, a particular vaccine is not appropriate for their...

Left-wing Twitter went ballistic on Monday over coach Tony Dungy standing with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signing a pro-fatherhood bill into law. DeSantis signed HB 7065 into law on Monday, a $70 million initiative that reportedly aims to “will provide resources for educational and mentorship programs to help children, fathers and families in the state through the Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) and the Department of Children and Families (DCF),” according to the Hill.

In practically every old cartoon from the 1940s and 50s, you can find the trope where one of the characters faces a comic moral dilemma. At that moment, two tiny versions of the character poof into being at either shoulder—one in angelic garb advising the more difficult selfless action, the other in a red suit with pitchfork urging the wicked, selfish alternative. But just as these cartoons are considered hopelessly quaint and old-fashioned today, so are the notions of morality which undergird them. Consider that we have now moved from the youthful innocence of Disney in the mid-20th century...

After one year of the Biden presidency, it is clear that his administration is focused on weakening and even removing the constitutional underpinnings of America. The same underpinnings that our Founding Fathers put in place to safeguard us from human nature.The question is— are we surprised to see where we are as a country? I’m not. When I look around at our culture, I see darkness. A culture made up of people who have little regard for biblical morality.The prophet Isaiah warned about where we are today when he wrote, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,...

The Reality Is…There are threats that face the Christian Church, and the cause of those threats is sin. Sin affects every member of the Christian faith, no matter the status. Sin causes us to stumble and sets us back in our cause for Christ. Ultimately, it should remind us how desperate we need the forgiveness and guidance of God.But which sin seems to set us back the most? What are we glossing over, pushing under the rug, and pretending isn’t there? That, my friends, is sexual sin. In 2016, Josh McDowell told CBN News, “pornography is probably the greatest threat...

On Jan. 24, Europe's biggest religious freedom case went to trial. A Finnish member of parliament, Päivi Räsänen, has been charged by the Finnish prosecutor general with three counts of "ethnic agitation," a hate speech provision in Finland's criminal code. Each count relates to Räsänen's respectful expression of widely-held Christian beliefs.The first charge concerns a 2019 tweet in which Räsänen questioned the decision of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (her own denomination) to partner with Helsinki's gay pride parade; this tweet also featured an image of Romans 1:24-27. Räsänen had moved on and forgotten about this tweet — until...

As emperor of one of the largest empires that ever existed, Caesar Augustus was one of the most effective leaders in human history. Great-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar, Augustus gave birth to Rome’s golden age – the Pax Romana (“Roman Peace”) – a period of relative stability, expansion, and prosperity that lasted 200 years. As historian and philosopher Will Durant put it, he was worshipped as a god because after decades of wars, rebellions, and a lack of security that constantly disrupted trade and politics, Augustus had finally “cured the cancer of chaos” in Rome. But with all...

Sex is the most powerful, all-pervasive force in human experience. It may be intensely personal, meaningful, and creative at one moment, and depersonalized, meaningless, and careless the next. Much of its glory is that it can bring us as close as we may get in life to experiencing the mystery of our mortality, and because of this it is sanctified. Yet it can also be a blind, nearly irresistible force seeking wanton release on the biological level, and in this way its sanctity is perverted. Paradoxically, sex—the most chaotic, powerful, and untutored drive—can only be fully experienced when it includes...

I Warned You About What We’re Living Through TodayJan 7, 2021 RUSH: Hey, folks, it’s great to be back. Really great to be back, and I need to ask you a favor. I need to you to give me a few minutes here just to get my sea legs. This has been a very, very bad couple of weeks for me. I don’t want to get into any more detail about it. Those of you have been through this know exactly what I’m talking about. But it has not been a break in the sense that it hasn’t been restful...

I don’t spend too much time these days posting about the latest outrage coming from the Biden administration, other totalitarian leaders, or unhinged Leftists. The reason is simple: #1: It’s a waste of time to try to change those who are locked into their destructive ideology. #2: Many other conservative voices cover what the tyrants and the Left are doing to us, and some cover it well. It’s hugely important and I salute them. But I also know that the conservative movement has largely become an “outrage” movement, partly because outrage sells. But a large part of this is because...

“Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.“ 1 Corinthians 6:18 I remember… years ago, when corruption had taken hold of my mind and body. I was working “graveyard” shift in a medical lab. Just about every morning I’d come home to my seedy apartment. I’d gotten into the habit of smoking weed through a bong (water pipe) in order to relax enough to go to sleep, and be able to sleep through the ever-loud country and Western music coming though the wall of...

To the “woke” crowd, teaching civility and manners favors artificial concepts that reinforce power structures and control behavior. This Marxist perspective reduces everything to the class struggle terms of oppressor and oppressed. For this reason, manners must be eradicated and never taught to vulnerable children. So many things today reflect this anti-manners mentality. This trend can be seen in brutal and obscene speech or texting. It is found in ugly, dirty and torn clothing. Coddled children absorb this lack of manners from uncouth adults, who fail to impose rules lest they hurt feelings. Indeed, in the Marxist worldview, Western civilization...