Free Republic

[Catholic Caucus] Pope Francis on the Church’s ban of birth control: Morality is ‘always on a path of development’Pope Francis' comments appear to lend further credence to speculation that he might soon issue an encyclical overturning the Church's ban on contraception.VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — During his return flight from Canada on Saturday Pope Francis replied to a question regarding the Catholic Church’s prohibition on contraceptives, saying that dogma and morality are “always on a path of development.” Speaking to selected reporters, Francis responded to questions regarding his health, possible retirement, Germany’s Synodal Way and international politics. While many headlines addressed...

Tired of having to live your sex life online during lockdown? You’re in luck. Government coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci says that heartsick isolationists can hook up with asymptomatic Tinder matches in real life — but, like love, it involves some risk. The 79-year-old immunologist dropped the unorthodox dating tip in a Tuesday interview on Snapchat’s “Good Luck America.” Toward the end of the taped segment, Fauci was asked: “If you’re swiping on a dating app like Tinder, or Bumble or Grindr, and you match with someone that you think is hot, and you’re just kind of like, ‘Maybe it’s...

SOLDOTNA, Alaska — A Satanic Temple member who won the right to open a regional Alaska government meeting declared “Hail Satan” during her first invocation, prompting about a dozen officials and attendees to walk out. Tuesday’s invocation that started the meeting of the Kenai Peninsula Borough also spurred a protest outside the southern Alaska borough’s administration building that drew 40 people, The Peninsula Clarion newspaper reported . Protesters held signs saying “reject Satan and his works” and “know Jesus and his love.” During her invocation, Satanic Temple member Iris Fontana said, “That which will not bend, must break, and that...

As the weed of secularization continues spreading its roots through the belly of western civilization, Christians must be active and vocal when discerning the damaging effects on our society’s sexual ethic. Confused, disoriented, and unable to draw a straight line between wrong and right – our culture’s moral compass is spinning out of control. 2017 granted us no shortage of examples to demonstrate that society is altogether ignoring scripture’s warnings about licentious sexual behavior. Undeniably, we are drunk and lost at sea in a ship named Moral Relativism. Moral relativism, collateral damage from secularization and postmodernism, looks past Christianity’s objectivism...

Milo Yiannopoulos announced at a Tuesday New York City press conference his decision to resign as Breitbart Tech editor.

LIVE STREAM: Milo Yiannapoulos Holds a Press Conference. In a statement published minutes ago, Yiannopoulos said, “Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved,” continuing, “I would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting, so today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately.” After Yiannopoulos was slated to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a video of him discussing pedophilia made the rounds on Twitter and earned pretty widespread condemnation. Yiannopoulos responded to the outcry insisting that he has an “utter disgust [for] adults who sexually abuse minors”...

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter has made an entire career out of saying shocking, deliberately offensive things in response to public controversies. So she did today when she weighed in on the career meltdown of Breitbart Editor and fellow conservative Milo Yiannopoulos in terms calculated for maximum outrage. Coulter’s tweet comes after video emerged over the weekend in which Yiannopoulos defended pedophiliac behavior at length, referred to people as young as 13 as “sexually mature,” and joked that his own experience as a victim of molestation made him good at oral sex.

The other day, I was channel surfing in the evening and came across Madonna's Rebel Heart tour video on Showtime. I always felt that Showtime is one of the most liberal cable channels out there, but this programming really epitomized it. I know Madonna has made her career pushing the envelope with the promiscuous sex, blasphemous uses of the crucifix and Catholic icons, and her liberal antics. This concert showed her strutting around the stage with her ass cheeks hanging out. Her female backup dancers were pole dancing on stripper poles that were crosses, and they were wearing what looked...

Pro-life and abortion activists alike gathered outside the U.S. Supreme Court building today awaiting the hearing on an important abortion case out of Texas. The U.S. Supreme Court case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was bought by abortion businesses against a pro-life Texas law responsible for closing abortion clinics that could not guarantee they could protect the health of Texas women. The law has been credited with saving the lives of more than 10,000 unborn children. Among the pro-abortion speakers was the Rev. Debra Haffner, a Jewish Unitarian Universalist who “preached” in favor of abortion in front of the Supreme...

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...

Given its huge success in describing the natural world for the past 150 years, the theory of evolution is remarkably misunderstood. In a recent episode of the Australian series of "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here", former cricket star Shane Warne questioned the theory - asking "if humans evolved from monkeys, why haven't today's monkeys evolved"? Similarly, a head teacher from a primary school in the UK recently stated that evolution is a theory rather than a fact. This is despite the fact that children in the UK start learning about evolution in Year 6 (ten to 11-year-olds),...

Take note Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith: Getting political has its risks. After the actress declared Monday that she will be boycotting the Oscars after her husband was snubbed, Alexis Arquette took a major swing at the pair for what she alleges is hypocrisy. The transgender actress and gender-rights activist "outed" the married couple with a Facebook post that argued that Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s comments on race and the Oscars were invalid because they won't ’fess up about their alleged homosexuality. "When Jada comes out as Gay and her beard husband admits his first marriage ended when she...

“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.” – St. Augustine Moral clarity is the ability to see things as they really are. This type of clarity is only possible when one believes what is true. America lost her way when she chose the lies of moral relativism over the moral clarity of truth. For to dispose of truth in favor of moral relativism creates moving targets of the standards by which society must agree to live. If we cannot call something “evil,” how can we refer to anything...

Today, Salon gave a platform to a self-confessed pedophile to explain his urges in sympathetic terms. “I’m a Pedophile, But Not A Monster” reads the headline. It’s a long, self-pitying screed that ends with a call to be “understanding and supportive” of adults who crave sexual intimacy with children. Forgive me if I’m not first to start the standing ovation. In fact I’m pretty sure most people will find the existence on Salon’s website of this post both shocking and distasteful. The timing of Nickerson’s post, barely a week after multiple high-profile progressives rallied around progressive activist Sarah Nyberg, couldn’t...

In one short sentence, [Amira Hass] neatly encapsulates the moral rot at the heart of the modern multicultural left: “We don’t rate suffering.” .... No one has the right to compare in any way the suffering of peoples and human beings, or to quantify it, rank it, calculate it … We don’t quantify. We don’t rate suffering. This, in a nutshell, is the moral abdication at the heart of today’s multicultural left: In its ostensibly noble desire to ensure that no suffering goes unnoticed or unattended, it has abandoned the very essence of morality – the ability to draw distinctions,...

On March 22, 2013, Pope Francis addressed the Diplomatic Corps with a warning against the “tyranny of relativism.” He then explained his selection of the name Francis as in part stemming from St. Francis’ battle for peace, a peace which Pope Francis underscored was impossible without Truth. The necessary struggle for truth not only remains part of the context for Francis’ choice of name, but also for his papacy. In his remarks, Francis explicitly linked his concerns with those of his predecessor Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, whom he named.In the then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s homily of April 18, 2005,...

A national evangelical Christian leader has written that his fellow believers should vote for Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, because she will radically reduce the abortion rate. Hillary, in whose campaign abortion industry lobbyists play a conspicuous role, favors abortion-on-demand throughout pregnancy. Yet Tony Campolo believes a second Clinton presidency will halve the number of abortions nationwide. “Hillary Clinton is one of the few candidates on the political stage who has a plan for cutting the abortion rate in America by at least 50 percent,” Campolo, a sociology professor emeritus at Eastern University, wrote in a debate on Religion News...

Pulling on his pants after our intimate encounter in my Las Vegas hotel room, the cute 23-year-old I’d just picked up holds out his cellphone, urging me to tap in my number. “You really don’t have to take it,” I say. Having sex with a stranger is thrilling, but I’m not that interested in a repeat performance. Two minutes after he’s gone, I climb back into bed and text my husband, Scott, whom I’ve been with for 18 years. “Just saying good night,” I type. “Good night, dove,” writes back Scott from wherever he is. Scenarios like these were typical...

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...

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...