Free Republic

Friends, This article was published in my snail-mail newsletter on March 20, 2015 but I have decided to publish it here as well in light of the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act debacle http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/changes-to-indiana-law-largest-step-ever-toward-gay-rights/ which confirms my thesis. I take no joy in being right in this prediction. Satan’s Superbowl During the 1992 election cycle I was the Communications Director for Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) during the Measure 9 campaign to amend Oregon’s constitution to define homosexuality as “abnormal, unnatural and perverse” (the Biblical perspective in secular terms). From the initial filing of the ballot measure language in April, 1991...

Sex Is the New Religion Frank Turek | Apr 03, 2015 Sex is the new religion in America, and it’s a religion of the sword. That’s the real reason this controversy has risen in Indiana. A determined and vocal minority from the religion of sex is bullying and cutting down traditionalists who need a law that would allow them to be left alone. This clash of orthodoxies has opposing values with moralists on both sides demanding their rights. One side says, “everyone must celebrate my same sex marriage” (a moral position). And the other side says, “God or my conscience...

“It is when the majority in a country becomes weak, indifferent and confused that a criminal minority, beautifully organized like all gangs, seizes the power”, wrote Ayn Rand in her open letter To All Fifth Columnist. Speaking about the tragedy of today, Rand concludes that “by remaining unorganized, mentally unarmed, indifferent and confused, we are serving as innocent Fifth Columnists of our own destruction”. This indifference in America to cultural issues that we believe are seemingly unimportant is akin to the appalling fascination of watching a man being hanged with the slowly dawning realization that it is a reflection in...

My fellow Americans: This week as American families draw together in worship, we join with millions upon millions of others around the world also celebrating the traditions of their faiths. During these days, at least, regardless of nationality, religion, or race, we are united by faith in God, and the barriers between us seem less significant. Observing the rites of Passover and Easter, we're linked in time to the ancient origins of our values and to the unborn generations who will still celebrate them long after we're gone. As Paul explained in his Epistle to the Ephesians, "He came and...

Recently while reading Acts 2, this verse leaped out at me: “With many other words he [Peter] warned them; and he pleaded with them, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’” The reason this caught my attention is because we are about to launch our oldest child (who is now 19) into the world. Soon she will be on her own, mingling with new people in new places. She will face temptations, she will experience different lifestyles, she will be challenged by others whose morals and values she does not share, and she will make mistakes. In short, she will be...

Editor: Just like Bo and Luke Duke, I’m just a good ole boy trying to get by. Unlike your columnist Robert Minch, I speak plain English not correct English for I don’t have the command of those big fancy words he and all the liberal intellectuals use. I’m guessing they’re not really talking to me but to the intellectuals that read what these liberal elite chose to put in print. However, once in a great while Bob, I mean Robert, submits a column that catches my eye, as the one about Ted Cruz being dangerous and deranged and I laboriously...

An authentic piety penetrates every recess of our souls, naturally stirring our most intimate emotions. Piety, however, is far more than feelings. It arises deep within ourselves from our knowledge of the truths that govern an interior life formed in accord with the Faith. To be sure, these life-giving truths are often acquired through diligent and disciplined study, but intelligence, like emotion, is an inadequate foundation for piety, which also resides in the will. Thus we must desire to live the truths we know. It is not sufficient to understand that God is perfect, for example. We must also love...

The American Civil Liberties Union, theoretically a non-ideological defender of the Constitution but in practice increasingly hard left, is running into financial difficulties and just announced (memo to staffers here) layoffs for 7 percent of its lawyers. Why the difficulties? It’s a little unclear, but Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit writes, “What I hear is that they’ve moved too far left, too fast, and it’s hurt their donations.”

Apparently, parents should visit the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) website to find out how to teach their children good eating habits.The agency in charge of the country’s agricultural sector is now in the nanny business, thanks to First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative to fight childhood obesity, which links to choosemyplate.gov on its website.In the kids’ section of My Plate, advice is dished out on how parents can help pre-schoolers “develop healthy eating habits,” including a warning about praising an empty plate.“Avoid praising a clean plate,” the website states. “Your child should stop eating when he or she...

The hullabaloo over false information being propagated about Indiana’s Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA) reveals a much more serious underlying problem in America. Morality according to the 3 Percent (the gay community in America) is defined by imposing conformity, control, coercion, and oppression over those who disagree with their definition of equality, fairness, tolerance, or even love. The 3 Percent’s “outrage” cannot be about equal rights, as same-sex couples already benefit from civil unions, domestic partnerships, marriage, adoption and fostering children, in addition to receiving health benefits and other legal rights. Nor can it be about fairness. I recently...

(Snip) They [Christian small business owners]are in this sense more like religious believers under compulsion in a society with an established church than like believers denied the freedom to exercise their religion. Liberals are in this respect right to say they’re not trying to kill religious liberty. They’re trying to take it back to something like the form it had in the Anglo-American world when the Anglo-American world had a formal state religion—except now the state religion is supposed to be progressive liberalism. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/416421/church-left-yuval-levin

Earth Day’s 45th anniversary could be the most exciting year in environmental history. The year in which economic growth and sustainability join hands. It’s our turn to lead. So our world leaders can follow by example.

In a race to see who can cave the fastest, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson reneged on his promise to sign his state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), instead sending it back to state legislators with a request to “recall it and change the language.” Perhaps he was upset that Indiana Governor Mike Pence was getting all the attention for wimping out on his own state’s religious freedom protections. Why should Republicans cave once when they can cave twice? Clearly, the beatings have been effective. The brouhaha in Arkansas stems from the RFRA bill that passed the legislature on Tuesday and...

Ted Cruz’s official campaign isn’t even two weeks old, and already it’s done the nation a favor—by highlighting the duplicity of the “multicultural” left and what it is really after. Ever since Cruz announced his candidacy for president, “Latino leaders” have been stepping all over themselves to declare that not only does he not speak for Hispanics (something only they presumably do) but he’s not even a “legitimate” Hispanic. All of which serves to pull the curtain back on multiculturalism: Defined by liberals, it’s a concept that exists solely to advance liberal objectives. It’s not ancestry that makes one a...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/Cruz-poll-president-campaign/2015/04/03/id/636359/

Following a recent round of PPP polling which showed Texas Senator Ted Cruz firmly in the top tier of GOP presidential candidates, Allahpundit provided a lengthy and well thought out analysis of how real and durable these numbers might be. (Short version: don’t expect him to fall out of the upper ranks just because more people officially get into the race.) It’s true that Cruz saw a bump from his official announcement, but the renewed and increased media attention he’s been receiving has expanded his name recognition, and with it his potential donor pool. Liberals have predicted – in a...

Thanks to brilliant tactics by gay activists, huge doses of corporate hypocrisy, tongue-tied politicians, and the silence of religious leaders -- religious liberty lost big battles in Indiana and Arkansas this week. Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote a column in The Washington Post deploring a "dangerous happening" of a "wave of legislation, introduced in more than two dozen states" that would "allow people to discriminate against their neighbors." For example, he said Indiana and Arkansas passed laws that would allow individuals to "cite their personal religious beliefs to refuse service to a customer." Incorrect. First, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act...

A routine car stop in Brooklyn led police to apprehend a man in possession of a high-powered machine gun — a weapon that the NYPD's new gunshot-detection system may have recorded being used recently, cop sources said. Anti-Crime Unit cops from the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant pulled over a 2013 Chevy Impala on Ralph Ave. near Bainbridge St. on Wednesday evening because it had excessively tinted windows.

On April 2, NPR reported that concealed carry permits and gun ownership for self-defense is surging in the black community. This marks a seismic shift toward guns in the black community, as more and more individuals realize the safety of their lives and the the lives of their families is literally in their own hands.

In his first campaign for the presidency, then-Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill, declared that the phrase “culture war” was “so 90s.” Nevertheless, there are strong indications, seven years later, that the conflict is still with us, late and soon. “But ask yourselves this question: apart from conservatism, what have been the most important intellectual and social movements of the past forty years?” historian George Nash asked rhetorically at a meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Philadelphia last month. “As a historian I will give you my answer: feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism.” “Since the 1970s America has been moving Right and Left...