Free Republic

Technology can often drastically improve our lives, but it can also sometimes bring about severe, long-term disruptions in our overall social, economic, and moral landscape. Science came up with the birth control pill decades ago. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for wide availability in 1960. Gradually, it became increasingly legalized and used throughout the U.S. Eventually, millions of women in our country would use it, and millions still do. Additionally, newer forms of chemical contraception such as injections, and patches applied to the skin, have been introduced and successfully marketed in more recent years. Now, you’d...

Ireland has long been the world leader in maternal health and respect for women, but now the Irish government has launched a vicious attack against women, exploiting them to build a case for brutal abortion legislation. … In 2011, Enda Kenny was brought to power as the Prime Minister of Ireland, after promising that he would uphold the country’s pro-life laws and never legislate on abortion. … Nearly two weeks ago, the coalition government, with Fine Gael Prime Minister Enda Kenny as its leader, introduced legislation that would legalize abortion and allow doctors to directly end the life of a...

I’ve recently been made aware of a strange new tribe who refer to themselves collectively—they do everything collectively—as “progressives.” I think they used to call themselves “liberals” until it became clear that they don’t care much for liberty. Males and females in this tribe both tend to wear beards and gather in urban coastal areas, where they pay too much for apartments, water, coffee, and bean sprouts. They speak a strange and exotic tongue unfamiliar to my ears. But they repeat certain terms so frequently, I feel as if I’ve begun to get a handle on what they’re driving at....

An all-too-familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting on May 4 to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that deal in fossil fuels. As a speaker was beginning a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a disinvestment would cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone, and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object. Although there were professors and administrators in the room — including the college president — apparently nobody had the guts...

The federal Affordable Care Act, better known as “ObamaCare,” may provide activists and government a little-known wedge to advance their obesity agendas through regulated health-care providers — specifically America’s nearly 3,000 non-profit hospitals. One organization, The STOP Obesity Alliance, recently identified this wedge as a way to have such hospitals embrace its core convictions, including one principle which questions the role of personal responsibility as a cause and a solution to obesity.Community Health Needs Assessments. Section 9007 of the Act requires non-profit hospitals, as a condition of maintaining their tax-exempt status, to conduct Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs). These documents, which...

Statism: Pope Francis seemed to have an economic blind spot, to say the least, when he urged more "state control" to cut global poverty Thursday. On the contrary — the biggest poverty-killer in history is free enterprise.Before we go further, let us say that we know that the pope does seem to have the best intentions and his devotion to the poor is indisputable. But it appears he has been infected by the local economic pathologies of his homeland, Argentina, and its liberation theology among the Jesuits, at least when he warned ambassadors about "the tyranny of money" and called...

On April 25, 2013, I took the oath to become a citizen of the United States. Perhaps only those who have taken this oath can fully understand how I felt that afternoon in Boston. I felt a strong sense of belonging, and tears welled up in my eyes more than a few times during the hourlong ceremony. I have no reason to doubt that the 1,834 other men and women who took the oath with me also felt that special sense of homecoming. On that sunny afternoon, it seemed unreal that just 10 days earlier, another new citizen of this...

Harvard students, outraged over a doctoral dissertation arguing that Hispanic immigrants lack “raw cognitive ability or intelligence,” this week urged the university to investigate how the thesis came to be approved and to ban future research on racial superiority. The students presented 1,200 signatures to president Drew Faust and the dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, David Ellwood. “Academic freedom and a reasoned debate are essential to our academic community,” the petition said. “However, the Harvard Kennedy School cannot ethically stand behind academic work advocating a national policy of exclusion and advancing an agenda of discrimination.” …

Sometime near the end of the twelfth century, a wealthy young man named Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone came upon a shepherd driving his flock to market. And apparently for the sheer joy of it — the extravagant pleasure of saving those sheep from slaughter — the young man promptly bought the entire flock, led the sheep out to open meadows, and set them free.This is the man everyone knows as St. Francis of Assisi (ca. 1182–1226) — namesake of the newly elected pope, a saint beloved throughout the world, even by people who have nothing to do with the Catholic...

A student’s bid to become associate vice president of diversity and inclusion at Northwestern University was derailed last Wednesday over accusations that his status as a white heterosexual male would make it impossible for him to perform the position’s duties. Stephen Piotrkowski was apparently denied a position on Northwestern's student government because he is a "heterosexual white male." The Wednesday hearing began with student senator Jesse Seitz reportedly asking the nominee, Stephen Piotrkowski, how he could possibly interact and serve a minority community as a white male. Piotrkowski reportedly attempted to appeal to the Student Senate on the grounds that...

A lot to think about here. Maybe I should have saved it for Sunday...

"The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it." That's taught to University of Hawaii students by Professor Haunani-Kay Trask. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and the U.N. Human Rights Council's Palestine monitor, explained the Boston bombings by saying, "The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world." Professor Falk has also stated that President George W. Bush ordered the destruction of the twin towers. University of Southern California professor Darry Sragow preaches hate to his students in his regulation of elections and political finance class,...

hey do not like conservatives very much. In fact, they come to an immediate boil when we enter their admittedly limited range of perception. It all began back in the 1960s when radical thought gained a footing with American liberals. By 2012, the left, led by their leader, the improbable president Barack Obama, completely took over the Democratic Party. These people are not like the liberals, who, while condescending to conservatives, did not hate us. These left-wingers really do hate us. That is why not much in the way of compromise can be achieved in Congress. I know we are...

An international poll has revealed the world’s least tolerant countries—with Hong Kong at the top of the list and Britain near the bottom. The global social attitudes study claims that the most racially intolerant populations are all in the developing world, with Bangladesh, Jordan and India in the top five. By contrast, the study of 80 countries over three decades found Western countries were most accepting of other cultures with Britain, the U.S., Canada and Australia more tolerant than anywhere else. …

Men who are physically strong are more likely to take a right wing political stance, while weaker men are inclined to support the welfare state, according to a new study. Researchers discovered political motivations may have evolutionary links to physical strength. Men's upper-body strength predicts their political opinions on economic redistribution, according to the research. The principal investigators - psychological scientists Michael Bang Petersen, of Aarhus University in Denmark, and Daniel Sznycer, of the University of California in the U.S., believe that the link may reflect psychological traits that evolved in response to our early ancestral environments and continue to...

Should you ask your neighbors if they own a gun before your child plays at their house? And what do you do if they say yes? After the tragic accidental death this month of a two-year-old Kentucky girl who had been shot by her five-year-old brother, the answer may seem obvious: Do not let your child play at a gun owner’s home, at least if you are not sure he is locking up his guns. This shooting came just a couple of days after a prominent opinion piece in the Motherlode blog at the New York Times, in which a...

When I first heard about plans this coming Fourth of July for an armed protest march from Arlington, Virginia, into and around the heart of Washington, D.C., I was all for it, and excited about it. I even thought I might join it, if the organizer’s stated sufficient numbers (10,000 people with guns) showed up for the event to be attempted. Of course, I learned immediately that the march is supposed to be led by none other than the Alex Jones-like, rabble-rousing Iraq veteran & anti-war activist Adam Kokesh, a person of whom I have been pretty leery during these...

Let me address all my Democrat friends. Take yourself back to 2007, and imagine you found an old lamp. You rubbed it, and out came a genie, who said, "I am here to grant you three wishes." You might remember those dark days of 2007. Our president was a stupid cowboy, George W. Bush. The world hated us. We were stuck in Iraq, a quagmire, losing more troops every month, while Bush insisted on sending in even more troops -- a surge. Osama bin Laden was on the loose, probably in Afghanistan, while Bush nation-built, futilely, in Iraq. Bush held...

On Monday, May 6, Robert Rector and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation published a study of the fiscal effects of immigration amnesty, arguing that the costs would amount to $6.3 trillion. Controversy greeted the report, but of the normal kind, with critics making specific allegations that the costs were calculated using unrealistic assumptions. On Wednesday, the Washington Post revealed that Richwine’s 2009 Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard’s Kennedy School had said that, on average, Latinos have lower IQs than do non-Latino white Americans and the nation should consider incorporating IQ into immigration decisions. The blogosphere and some elements of the...

Larry Koler recently wrote an excellent post asking whether or not we are having an intellectual debate with the Left. Of course, they don't want one. I keep thinking that the problem with politics in America is that those who listen to NPR nod their heads to the received knowledge of the cognitive elite. Meanwhile, on the street level, I have found that arguing politics with people is like trying to talk to the Obamaphone woman. I cringe at the idea of making a multi-pointed argument for free markets to Obamaphone woman. But, really, that's what we are up against....

In the first months after the Benghazi attack, the most urgent question, and one only rarely asked, was "What were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton doing during the seven and a half hours between the initial emergency communications from Benghazi and the final American deaths?" A negative answer was provided in February by Leon Panetta: they were not engaging with their subordinates; they were not contacting anyone to discuss options; they were giving no orders for action; they remained entirely uninvolved. We are left to speculate about the positive answer to that question. Were they sleeping? Curled up by the...

PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM IN THE UNITED STATES. BY EDWARD BELLAMY, AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD." Technically, the term Nationalism, as descriptive of a definite doctrine of social and industrial reform, was first used in 1888 by clubs made up of persons who sympathized with the ideas of a proper industrial organization set forth in "Looking Backward," and believed in the feasibility of their substantial adoption as the actual basis of society. Nationalism, in this strict sense, is the doctrine of those who hold that the principle of popular government by the equal voice of all for the equal benefit of all,...

Ever wondered where those hateful, discriminatory tweets on Twitter were coming from? A group of researchers from the Floating Sheep project – who also mapped racist tweets surrounding President Barack Obama's re-election – have geotagged racist, homophobic and ableist (directed at disabled people) tweets in the United States and plotted them on an interactive map. Students at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., looked up all the geotagged tweets in North America between June 2012 and April 2013, manually reading and coding the sentiment of each tweet to determine if the given word was used in a positive, negative or...

Canvassing the craven and deviant (which is to say, left-oriented, mainstream) response to the Boston Marathon bombing among media and intellectual elites — yes, the Tsarnaev brothers killed and mutilated but they were displaced, troubled, resentful of Western domination, etc. — Bruce Bawer offers an astute diagnosis. The progressive multiculturalism to which these elites adhere, he writes, is both decadent and jejune, enabling them to remain mental and emotional children who preen themselves on their kindness. “What made multiculturalism attractive to these people,” Bawer continues, “is that it’s tailor-made for spoiled, narcissistic grown children who don’t want to have adult...

Dozens of copies of a booklet calling on ultra-Orthodox Jews to emigrate from Israel were handed out last week near the main synagogue in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood, on the backdrop of the battle between Israel’s haredi and secular publics over the attempt to draft yeshiva students to the Israel Defense Forces and introduce core subjects into haredi schools’ curriculum. Although the booklet was written about 15 years ago by Rabbi Moshe Dov Beck of the extreme Eda Haredit faction, it was handed out once again this week in light of the haredi draft issue, which has reached the High...

How many of you have flower or vegetable gardens at your home? I know many people are growing their own herbs to use for cooking as well as indoor and outdoor vegetable gardens. Others have flowers in pots, window boxes, hanging baskets, in flower beds and outdoor gardens.My wife and I have a number of vegetables and fruit growing outside which include apples (2 varieties), beans (purple and wax), broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cantaloupes, carrots, cherries, cucumbers (bush), grapes (5 varieties), onions (red), peas (green and snap), potatoes (3 varieties), sage, radishes, tomatoes (6 varieties), and watermelons (3 varieties). We also...

The term Liberal Redneck will strike progressives as an absurd contradiction. Yet, Conservatives will have an immediate, wearying familiarity with the angry, judgmental, uninformed and doctrinaire viewpoint of this group. In fact, the Liberal Redneck is every bit as small-minded, bigoted, dismissive, self-righteous, judgmental, uneducated and intolerant as the worst fundamentalist. The problem in America today is that there is never a level playing field offered for the discussion of ideas. Therefore, most important topics are only mentioned in a predetermined format. In other words, one can mention, for example—gay marriage, but only with the proviso that the topic for...

Mother's Day is Sunday. Traditionally, it is a day to honor and respect all that mothers do and sacrifice for the sake of their children. And while this day is important, special, and necessary, we can't help but wonder what our country would be like if we celebrated mothers every day. If mothers and babies were held in the highest regard, as they should be, each and every day of the year, think about the lives that could be spared. Think about the heartache that would not come about because a mother chose to abort her child. That would truly...

Nobody gets the crowds rocking harder than the Motor City Madman, and his appearance at the NRA Convention on Sunday was no exception. This experience, however, began a little different than the others. Sure there was talk of guns and politics and the spirit of the hunt, but that soon gave way to a more somber moment. The moment when the Nuge revealed one of his darkest secrets. "I've got to admit something right here. I feel guilty. You know it's hard to find ammo. I'm sorry … I've got it all. "I'm really sorry about that. I've got...

There are a ton of clips of Jason Richwine talking about race and immigration floating around the Internets. For example, Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed posted a one-minute excerpt from an AEI event that Richwine attended and wrote: Here’s Video Of Another Time The Heritage Analyst Said Blacks and Hispanics Have Lower IQsJason Richwine, a senior policy analyst at the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation and co-author of a controversial report on the economic costs of immigration reform, said at a 2008 event that the “most important way” race was different was in IQ. He made similar comments in...

As a presidential speech writer for the first Bush White House, I am always very interested in what presidents say in their formal speeches. They know, of course, that their remarks will be widely covered by the press, studied by analysts, and influential in contemporary political debates. For that reason, presidents rarely speak off-the-cuff, and their every word is carefully chosen for exactly the message the White House wants to convey to the public. Their graduation speeches, like all presidential addresses, go through many drafts and are reviewed by high-level administration officials to ensure that they accurately reflect the administration's...

Jewish Scouting leaders are taking a vocal role in efforts to pass a historic resolution that would partially lift a ban on gays in the Boy Scouts of America. In a meeting of the National Jewish Committee on Scouting in February, members voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution lifting the BSA’s longstanding ban on gay members. … The resolution would not change the BSA’s ban on gay adult leaders. “I am advocating for complete change and inclusiveness,” NJCOS Chairman A.J. Kreimer told JTA this week. “I’m speaking with other people and as an area president, one of 26 in...

What began as an outburst in class is now making the rounds online. Video of a student reprimanding his teacher for her allegedly poor teaching methods has gone viral. Several versions of the cell-phone video, which each have garnered hundreds of comments and thousands of likes since being uploaded to YouTube Wednesday, identify the school as Duncanville High School in Duncanville, Texas. In an impassioned speech, the student criticizes his teacher for "handing them a frickin' packet" instead of providing "face-to-face" lessons.

As a journalist who has consistently experienced the wrath of Tebow Nation — mostly for passing along the slings and arrows voiced by various NFL players, coaches and talent-evaluators — I'm well aware that many devotees of the world's most celebrated unemployed quarterback carry a heavy persecution complex. Yet as Tim Tebow's career wheezes to an underwhelming halt, with less apparent interest in his services than Massachusetts funeral parlors have in Tamerlan Tsarnaev's remains, something strange is happening. Against all odds, I'm starting to wonder whether the man who helped the Denver Broncos become one of the league's most stunning...

Driving along at 35 MPH on a 2-lane avenue around 10 PM, a single headlight appeared in my car's path. I swerved onto a side street, shaken and uncomprehending. Leering down at me, astride a high tech bike, I could see in the light of the street lamp the person responsible for the near-miss. I rolled down the window and said -- remaining surprisingly noncombative -- "Hey man, I barely missed hitting you. You could have been killed." Expecting a thank you or an apology, instead I was the victim of an insane tirade, to the effect: "Hey buddy, you...

The American Conservative Union has just released a statement in support of Sen. Marco Rubio’s bipartisan effort on immigration reform, suggesting that there was widespread conservative support for the bill. “It is an honor to bring together fellow conservatives who feel strongly that we need to act now to fix our broken immigration policies and our borders,” said ACU Chairman Al Cardenas in the statement. “I congratulate my friend Senator Marco Rubio for his leadership on this issue and believe that conservative support for his efforts is growing.” Cardenas clarified that the bill was “not perfect” but that Rubio was...

A recent convention in Ireland on same-sex marriage has highlighted the depth of social change in a country that decriminalized homosexuality only 20 years ago. The 100-strong constitutional convention—made up of citizens (66%) and legislators—in April found an overwhelming majority (79%) in favor of amending the constitution to allow same-sex marriage. The gathering also was strongly in favor (81%) of changing laws to reflect different family structures and to give all family members the same rights. … A recent poll show that 75 percent of people support same-sex marriage. …

According to voter registration records, Ariel Castro, the Cleveland kidnapper, is a registered Democrat. He was also the alleged leader among the three Castro brothers, who were arrested this week, and the owner of the house at 2207 Seymour Ave., where the three abducted local women had been kept in captivity for over a decade. Why is this important? Whenever a crime or a scandal captures national attention, the pattern in the mainstream media is to either identify the culprit as a Republican or hold silence -- in which case we can rest assured that the culprit is a Democrat....

What are “progracists”? Progracists are people who continually classify individuals by “race” and yet can’t see how that is racist. Progracists hate Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an America in which people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” because progressive policies are based on race consciousness, ethnic division, and identity politics. Progracists keep minorities addicted to government benefits and entitlements specifically to make sure they remain poor and economically enslaved, and therefore a reliable voting bloc. Progracists always seek to restrict everyone‘s freedoms because they think that’s the...

GOVERNMENT BY JOURNALISMGOVERNMENT by kings went out of fashion in this country when Charles Stuart lost his head. Government by the House of Lords perished with Gatton and Old Sarum. Is it possible that government by the House of Commons may equally become out of date? Without venturing into the dim and hazardous region of prophecy, it is enough to note that the trend of events is in that direction. Government tends ever downward. Nations become more and more impatient of intermediaries between themselves and the exercise of power. The people are converting government by representatives to government by delegates....

Piers Morgan is leading the liberal media and Hollywood in another ignorant attack of the National Rifle Association (NRA). The CNN host tweeted Sunday: “Just when you thought the @NRA couldn’t get any dumber or more dangerous” and linked to a story in Huffington Post titled “NRA Convention Speaker Rob Pincus Advises Keeping Gun Safes In Kids’ Bedrooms For Home Defense.” The story shows a video secretly taken by liberal blog Think Progress of one of the nation’s leading self-defense experts explaining why that can be a good idea. The left was quick to jump all over the home-protection advice to insinuate...

Death, it seems, is no longer Shakespeare’s undiscovered country, the one “from whose bourn no traveler returns.” Not according to contemporary bestseller lists. Dreams and visions of the afterlife have been constants across human history, and the near-death experiences (now known as NDEs) of those whose lives were saved by medical advances have established, for millions, a credible means by which someone could peek into the next world. Lately a fair-sized pack of witnesses claim to have actually entered into the afterlife before coming back again to write mega-selling accounts of what they saw and felt there. Afterlife speculation has...

Add another one to the man's list of prudent business decisions. As relates to his previously documented loathing of Fox News, it's now known that the late Steve Jobs backed up his harsh words by wisely withholding Apple's advertising dollars, according to an upcoming book about the 2012 presidential campaign. The book's author, Jonathan Alter, a Bloomberg political columnist and contributor to MSNBC, tells of Jobs "personally ordering that Apple ads be removed from Fox News," according to a blog post in the New York Times over the weekend. Alter's book, "The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies," is scheduled...

For a long time conservatives have warned that the heavy propaganda and regulatory hands of the Obama administration were not going to change the exercise or eating habits of 315 million Americans... Now comes early statistical proof that after reelecting Obama with fewer votes the second time and 1,567 days of his reign of government intervention and stimulation, many Americans are deciding that maybe the Obamas' plans for their lives do not fit their plans for their own lives.

It was reported the other day on an inside page of the Pioneer Press, and without nearly enough fanfare, that more than six out of 10 women who give birth in their early 20s are unmarried. That is census data, from census demographers, from the very government that then becomes responsible for many, if not most, of those unmarried women and children. If that isn't an astonishing statistic, it should be. Why, to any logical person's way of thinking, it explains everything in terms of government at all levels bloating out of control. Supposing that even angels might fear to...

If there is ever a contest for words that substitute for thought, "diversity" should be recognized as the undisputed world champion. You don't need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodize about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as ugly as reality seems almost sordid. To ask whether institutions that promote diversity 24/7 end up with better or worse relations between the races than institutions that pay no attention to it is only to get yourself regarded as a bad person. To cite hard...

During oral arguments on Prop 8, Justice Kennedy alluded to the views of children of same-sex couples as if their desires and concerns are identical to and uncritical of their parents’ decisions. But the reality is far more complicated. During the oral arguments about Proposition 8, Justice Anthony Kennedy referred to children being raised by same-sex couples. Since I was one of those children—from ages 2-19, I was raised by a lesbian mother with the help of her partner—I was curious to see what he would say. (snip) I have heard of the supposed “consensus” on the soundness of same-sex...

"There’s a brouhaha a-brewin’ over comments by Niall Ferguson at an investor conference. Ferguson suggested that because John Maynard Keynes was gay, effete, and childless he might have lacked concern for posterity. After all, Keynes famously proclaimed ”in the long run we’re all dead.” In a nigh-upon hysterical and terribly written item, Tom Kostigen of Financial Advisor says Ferguson took “gay-bashing to new heights.” He adds, “Apparently, in Ferguson’s world, if you are gay or childless, you cannot care about future generations nor society.”  Now, I don’t know exactly what Ferguson said, and I don’t trust Kostigen’s version of events either. There are few full quotes and virtually...

Last year, my friend Bruce Kesler, who blogs at a wonderful conservative group blog called Maggie’s Farm, directed me to a book called Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. What makes this book different from other books about that era is that it doesn’t just examine the murderous years of WWII. Instead, it also examines the carnage Hitler and Stalin wrought during the 1930s, in the lead-up to WWII. It is an absolutely devastating book, describing the unimaginable scale of death that two socialist leaders — Stalin and Hitler — visited on the region between their two countries. Although Hitler...

Scientific studies are used to support controversial social policies like same-sex marriage. But can we rely on them? Even in scientific laboratories Georg Wilhelm Richmann is not a household name. But he ought to be. Richmann was an 18th century Russian scientist who died trying to repeat Benjamin Franklin’s famous experiment of attracting lightning to a kite. A ball of lightning travelled down the cord and struck him dead. The first martyr for the cause of science died trying to replicate another scientist's results. The ability to reproduce the results of an experiment is a key step in the rapid...