Free Republic

THE White House has livestreamed a church service which saw the US vice-president speak and a bishop claim “the devil” causes homosexuality. After Mike Pence addressed the congregation in Tennessee, the preacher took to the pulpit to talk about same-sex relations in a sermon still available on the administration’s YouTube channel. “It is a demonic spirit that causes a woman to want to live with another woman,” he said. “It is a demonic spirit that causes a man to be attracted to another man.” The preacher, who has been named as Bishop Jerry Wayne Taylor, claimed the “devil” was trying...

Utah has become the 19th — and most conservative — state in the U.S. to ban "conversion therapy" for minors. The widely discredited practice, aimed at changing a patient's sexual orientation or gender identity, is now formally barred in the state after the new rule took effect late Tuesday. A spokesperson for Republican Gov. Gary Herbert, who directed licensing regulators to make the change, confirmed the move to NPR on Wednesday. "We want to thank Governor Herbert and his administration for not allowing this issue to be politicized," Troy Williams, the executive director of Equality Utah, said at a Wednesday...

Ron Reagan Goes Scorched Earth On 'Traitor' Trump: My Dad Wouldn't Have Voted For Him Ronald Reagan’s son lacerated Donald Trump in a scathing interview with The Daily Beast published Friday, saying his late father never would have voted for Trump. “He would have been embarrassed and ashamed that a president of the United States was as incompetent and traitorous as the man occupying the White House now,” said Ron Reagan, 61. “He’s a disgrace to the office of the presidency.” Reagan, speaking to the Beast from Italy, where he lives half the year, said if his father were alive...

Singer Boy George has barrelled back into relevancy after saying that use of pronouns is a “modern form of attention seeking”. The Culture Club singer’s tweets quickly became a lightning rod for criticism from LGBT+ circles, with countless trans and gender-diverse folk slamming the star while his words attracted support from gender-critical groups. Simply specifying your pronouns, whether on a social media bio or to in an email signature, is a small act that helps encourage inclusivity and building solidarity with the trans community. But George has kicked off the new decade with a take on pronouns labelled ‘transphobic’ by...

A group launched a 2020 ballot initiative Tuesday to expand Michigan’s civil rights law to include anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, a step that would put the issue to voters if the Republican-led Legislature does not pass the measure. Fair and Equal Michigan, a committee backed by business, political and philanthropic leaders, submitted petition language to the Board of State Canvassers. Once it is approved, the group will have until late May to collect the roughly 340,000 valid voter signatures needed to place the initiated bill before lawmakers. If legislators do not adopt the legislation — similar bills have long...

With just over a year left in President Donald Trump's first term, another late-breaking news item barely made waves: The Interior Department — which manages the majority of the federal government's public lands — deleted "sexual orientation" from its anti-discrimination guidelines, as HuffPost first reported last week. The removal was just the latest in a nearly three-year-long effort to strip mention of LGBTQ people from the executive branch bureaucracy. Reports of such changes began the day Trump assumed office, when LGBTQ content was deleted from the White House, State Department and Labor Department websites within "minutes" of his having been...

The Hallmark Channel certainly wasn’t expecting to find itself at the center of a viral culture war controversy this weekend. But in 2019, corporations never know which move might grab the internet’s attention. The controversy started when Hallmark decided to cancel an advertisement they had accepted from the wedding planning service Zola. The ad depicted, in a humorous fashion, a lesbian wedding, and at one point, the couple kisses. The conservative group One Million Moms complained to Hallmark and launched a petition, angered that an advertisement on the family-friendly network showed a type of family arrangement not in accordance with...

"We consider two communities fundamental, the family as one man, one woman and the children," said the leader of Poland's ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) at a recent convention. LGBT+ rights have become the single biggest cultural issue in Poland's election campaign ahead of Sunday's vote. In the eyes of Jaroslaw Kaczynski's national-conservative party and the Catholic Church, those rights are a threat to traditional Polish families and values. Mr Kaczynski likes to identify threats to Polish society - during the election campaign four years ago, he said Middle Eastern migrants might bring "parasites and protozoa" to Poland. This...

.... and asked for a way out of his $15 million a year contract - while a former staffer says it will be 'telling' to see who is chosen as his replacement

Poland’s ruling conservative party has targeted gays as a campaign tactic. Its programming on state media has drawn comparisons with communist-era propaganda and it has asserted so much control over the judicial system that the European Union has declared the rule of law at risk. Yet, Law and Justice heads into Sunday’s election to the 460-seat lower house and the 100-seat Senate as Poland’s most popular party, largely thanks to generous social spending and an assertive Poland-first stance toward the EU and other countries. Concerns about democracy have made this one of the country’s most momentous election since the fall...

Protesters interrupted the CNN LGBTQ town hall on Thursday to highlight the plight of black transgender women, at one point taking the mic from a questioner. Advocates tracked the deaths of at least 26 transgender people in the US in 2018, according to the Human Rights Campaign. In 2019, at least 19 transgender people have been fatally shot or killed, according to HRC.

In the summer of 2018, a transgender student at West Point High School in West Point, Va., had transitioned, asking his French teacher to refer to him with masculine pronouns: he, him, his. But the instructor, Peter Vlaming, did not comply, he said in a lawsuit. Citing his religious beliefs, he promised to use only the student’s name and avoid pronouns entirely. Administrators eventually gave the teacher an ultimatum: Use the student’s correct pronouns, or face disciplinary action, he said. Then, on Oct. 31, 2018, his second-year French students wore virtual-reality goggles and walked around the classroom. The transgender student...

A gay high school senior in Tennessee was crowned to his school's homecoming court Friday night while wearing a dress, which was met with widespread support from school officials and fellow students. White Station High School in Memphis, Tennessee, posted a photo Friday congratulating Brandon Allen, 17, on his victory. The image, which has been liked and shared thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter, showed Allen covering his mouth in shock and wearing a gold sequin off-the-shoulder gown, diamante tiara and holding a floral bouquet awarded to members of the royal court, a gender neutral title that the school...

Fox News host Shepard Smith criticized fellow network personality Tucker Carlson for not defending Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano after a guest on his show called the judge “a fool.” Former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova appeared on Carlson’s opinion show Tuesday night after news broke that Democrats had begun an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. On the show, diGenova tore into Napolitano, calling him a “fool.” Smith went after Carlson and diGenova, calling the incident “repugnant.”.........."

The last time presidential candidates gathered to address LGBTQ issues specifically was 2007. Since then, there’s been a sea change in rights and acceptance. When 10 of the Democratic candidates for president gather in Iowa on Friday evening, it will be at a forum to address issues that are top of mind for one of their party’s most reliable constituencies: the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community. The candidates — Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Sestak, Elizabeth Warren and Marianne Williamson — will take the stage at Coe College...

Fox News contributor Guy Benson married his boyfriend of four years, Adam Wise, on Saturday. The couple tied the knot in front of 150 guests at the Charles Krug Winery in Napa Valley, Calif., People reported. Wise, 24, said of Benson, “We’re both organized and driven human beings. We just work well together. We’re best friends. He’s my home.” The pair met after Benson came out as gay on Fox News' "The Kelly File" in 2015, where he'd been promoting his book, "End of Discussion."

Vice President Pence was greeted by a series of rainbow flags this week as he arrived in Reykjavik to meet with President Guðni Jóhannesson of Iceland. Pence met with Jóhannesson on Wednesday at Hofdi House, across the street from the IT company Advania, which had lined its entrance with several rainbow flags, according to The Guardian. And a nearby office housing the headquarters for the Efling trade union swapped out the flags typically flying outside to display rainbow ones. “We just felt the need to celebrate diversity today and wanted to show that by flying the flags,” Ægir Már Þórisson,...

CNN and the leftist group the Human Rights Campaign Foundation will host another marathon town hall with Democratic presidential candidates focusing on “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer issues.” CNN made the announcement the day after a seven-hour climate change town hall and that the next one tied to National Coming Out Day: HRC said the October 10 primetime event, airing live on the eve of National Coming Out Day, will feature the largest-ever audience for a Democratic presidential town hall devoted to LGBTQ issues. The candidates will take questions from the audience and CNN journalists on specific LGBTQ concerns...

A married father-of-two from South Carolina who founded one of the nation's largest conversion therapy programs has come out as gay and strongly denounced the widely discredited practice. McKrae Game, 51, the former leader of Hope for Wholeness, came out of the closet in June, nearly two years after he was fired from the faith-based conversion therapy ministry. He is now trying to come to terms with the harm he inflicted on LGBTQ people when he was advocating for religious efforts to change a person's sexuality.

Remarkably, Taylor Swift’s poke at the president on the MTV Video Music Awards show for his lack of support for LGBTQ rights legislation hasn’t yet resulted in a Trump twitterstorm. But Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News Tuesday night to defend the administration’s position against the Equality Act … and to give Swift a sick burn in return by attempting to render one of her songs toxic. “I actually like the new Taylor Swift song,” Conway told Fox’s Martha MacCallum. “It’s called ‘You Need to Calm Down.’ I can sing it for you.” Rather than do what any reasonable host...