Free Republic

Sunday, June 29, 2014 United Kingdom: Disciplinary Board Finds Christian Guilty of "Bullying" for Praying with Muslim Can anything be weaker than Islam? It brags about being the true religion, but recoils from the slightest challenge. Under Sharia, Christians are not allowed to share the Gospel with Muslims. In the United Kingdom, Sharia is already being enforced. Christians who so much as pray with a Muslim are accused of bullying and are punished accordingly. Victoria Wasteney The Telegraph—A Christian health worker has begun a legal challenge after being disciplined by the NHS for praying with a Muslim colleague. Victoria Wasteney,...

Miriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese Christian woman who faces a death sentence for apostasy from Islam, remains in prison, and pressure is mounting for her execution, the Archdiocese of Khartoum has warned. Contrary to some media reports, Ibrahim has not been released from prison, the archdiocese reported. Her sentence has been appealed, but there is no word on when that appeal will be heard. “According to the concerned authorities, Mrs. Miriam can only be released on the condition that she renounces Christianity and gets divorced from her husband,” the archdiocese said. While she has been urged by many people to submit...

Denver, Colo., May 30, 2014 / 05:10 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A commission’s ruling that Colorado baker Jack Phillips must bake same-sex “wedding” cakes forces him to choose between violating his conscience and supporting his family, the baker’s lawyer said. In America, we don’t separate a person’s creative expression from what he believes. Jack simply exercised the long-cherished American freedom to decline to use his artistic and creative talents to promote a message with which he disagrees,” said Nicolle Martin, the lawyer representing Phillips’ Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo. Martin, an attorney allied with the national legal group Alliance Defending Freedom,...

Catholic doctors who follow church teaching on sexual ethics cannot work as gynaecologists in Britain, the Catholic Medical Association (CMA) conference was told. Charlie O’Donnell, a consultant in emergency and intensive care medicine, said the best advice he could give to an “orthodox” Catholic wishing to specialise in obstetrics and gynaecology would be to “emigrate”. Dr O’Donnell told the conference at Ealing Abbey, west London, on 17 May that a Catholic training to be a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology would soon find he or she had conscientious objections to such tasks as prescribing artificial contraceptives, giving unmarried couples fertility...

Twenty years ago, new president Bill Clinton stepped on a political landmine when he tried to fulfill a campaign promise to permit gay soldiers to serve openly. Same-sex marriage barely registered as a political cause; the country was then three years away from the Defense of Marriage Act and four years from comedian Ellen DeGeneres’s prime-time coming out. Then came what historians will one day recall as a cultural revolution. Now we’re entering the endgame of the struggle over gay rights and the meaning of homosexuality. Conservatives have been routed, both in court and increasingly in the court of public...

Teaching the truths about homosexuality, chastity, adultery, and how God wants us to live our lives is not always an easy thing to do. Nor is living that life. But God asks that we do our best nevertheless, for our ultimate goal is eternity with Him. We cannot plead ignorance. We cannot justify that we chose otherwise. God's word is the truth, and though some may try to silence those who tell the truth, it doesn't change the facts. April 11, 2014 (ALL.org) - Sister Jane Dominic Laurel, a Dominican nun who has recently come under fire for a presentation...

Intimidation, coercion and bullying will not win arguments or silence other points of view Haven’t you learned anything from history? ‘Advancements’ earned through tyranny never endure. You can only win a debate by suffocating your opposition for so long. Your strategy is doomed for failure, because it has always failed. In the name of ‘fighting for the freedom to love,’ you’ve utilized hate. For the sake of ‘tolerance,’ you’ve wielded bigotry. In order to push ‘diversity,’ you’ve been dogmatic. You are everything you accuse your opponents of being, and you stand for all the evil things that you claim they...

Many Christians have been warning for years that the radical homosexual activist lobby is made up of Christian-hating fascists who are in rebellion against both God and nature, who are hell-bent on criminalizing Christianity and pushing to the fringes anyone who publicly acknowledges natural human sexuality and the age-old, immutable institution of legitimate marriage as created by God. Sadly, many people, even many Christians, think that I and others are using hyperbole when we refer to this sexual anarchist "LGBT" movement as "homofascist" or the "Gaystapo." I hope you'll think again. It's time to wake up and smell the impending...

Mozilla has now made its employment policy clear. No Catholics need apply. Or Evangelical Christians. Or Eastern Orthodox. Or Orthodox Jews. Or Mormons. Or Muslims. Unless, that is, you are the "right kind" of Catholic, Evangelical, Eastern Orthodox Christian, observant Jew, Mormon, or Muslim, namely, the kind who believes your religious or philosophical tradition is wrong about the nature of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife, and the view now dominant among secular elites is correct. In that case, Mozilla will consider you morally worthy to work for them. Or maybe you can work for them even...

On Sunday, two remarkable Christian women, Maryam Rostampour and Marziyeh Amirizadeh, spoke at our church, describing their harrowing tale of imprisonment by the Iranian regime because of their Christian faith. Both were raised in Muslim homes in Iran but never embraced Islam. As young adults, they became Christians and met each other while studying theology in Turkey in 2005. When they returned to Iran, they began evangelizing together for several years, covertly distributing Bibles to some 20,000 people and starting two secret house churches. In March 2009, they were arrested in Tehran for promoting Christianity, which is punishable by death....

ROME, March 20, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – President Obama’s policies “have become progressively more hostile toward Christian civilization,” said American Cardinal Raymond Burke in an interview published in English exclusively by LifeSiteNews today. Burke did not mince words in responding to a question about the Catholic reaction to President Obama’s attack on religious freedom, especially through policies such as the controversial HHS mandate. “He appears to be a totally secularized man who aggressively promotes anti-life and anti-family policies,” said Burke. “Now he wants to restrict the exercise of the freedom of religion to freedom of worship, that is, he holds that...

Christians in the U.S. military are being told they must forfeit their First Amendment rights. Bible verses are being erased from cadets’ personal dorm-room white boards, and military lawyers claim that legal protections for religion only pertain to matters such as clothing and growing beards but do not extend to any religious expression such as talking about one's faith or posting a Bible verse. Last year Breitbart News broke the story of a campaign by anti-Christian extremists to suppress traditional Christian expression within the U.S. military. There were conflicting stories regarding the possible court martial of service members who share...

The Air Force Academy removed a Bible verse posted on a cadet's whiteboard after it determined the posting had offended other cadets, a spokesman for the academy said. The cadet wrote the passage on the whiteboard posted outside his room. "I have been crucified with Christ therefore I no longer live, but Christ lives in me," the verse from Galatians read. Mikey Weinstein, director of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told me 29 cadets and four faculty and staff members contacted his organization to complain about the Christian passage. "Had it been in his room - not a problem," Weinstein...

"Christian Leaders to Obama: Thanks for Standing Up for Religious Freedom Abroad; Please Protect Religious Freedom in US Too" Ten Christian leaders sent a Wednesday letter to President Barack Obama, thanking him for his National Prayer Breakfast speech in which he called for expanding religious freedom abroad. They also urged him to pay greater attention to his own policies that are infringing upon the religious freedom of his own citizens. "As religious leaders we write to express our appreciation to you for lifting up the issue of international religious liberty in your recent address at the National Prayer Breakfast," they...

A federal district court has ruled that public universities may discipline professors for religious speech. In 2009, a graduate student at the University of Southern Mississippi, referring to a law professor, complained that “sometimes during conversations with Dr. [Thomas] Payne, religion or Bible verses are usually brought up by him in some way. This makes me and others very uncomfortable … Dr. Payne made the statement that anyone who is not a Christian is going to hell.” Subsequently, Payne alleged that the university “subjected him to various adverse employment actions … including, but not limited to, the denial of promotion,...

CNSNews.com) – Calling the Obama administration “the most tone deaf to religious liberty issues in recent memory,” Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput warned that religious freedom in the U.S. is “at risk,” and that “the more government mandates evil action, the more likely civil disobedience becomes.” Last February, Chaput urged his fellow prelates to take the “right action…whatever the cost” regarding the Health and Human Services’ contraceptive mandate, which requires nearly all insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act to pay for sterilization, contraceptives, and abortion-inducing drugs. Due to “an unfriendly political class” and believers’ own apathy, Chaput told CNSNews.com, “government...

Every conservative by now should have noticed that February has become Ronald Reagan Month for Republicans. The man’s birthday was last week, February 6, the forerunner to Lincoln’s birthday (February 12), Washington’s birthday (February 22), and President’s Day (February 17). Throughout the nation, county and statewide Republican groups have been changing their longtime annual Lincoln Day dinners into Reagan Day dinners. I’m speaking on Reagan multiple times this month, including at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, where we’re releasing (pardon the plug) my new book that endeavors to answer the question “What is a Reagan conservative?” Thus, this...

The stories told by five top Syrian Christian leaders about the horrors their churches are experiencing at the hands of Islamist extremists are biblical in their brutality. But they are emerging as part of a concerted push by Syrian Christians to get the U.S. to stop its support for rebel groups fighting Syrian president Bashar al Assad. “The US must change its politics and must choose the way of diplomacy and dialogue, not supporting rebels and calling them freedom fighters,” says Nalbandian. Given the United States’ increased support for non-terrorist rebel groups in the wake of the Assad regime’s use...

Christianity began in the East, not the West, yet today Christians in the East are enduring an all-out-assault by Islamic terrorists, while Christians in the West live their lives largely oblivious to it all. This has to change. This is no imaginary persecution; in Syria alone there have been reports of kidnappings, Christian communities intentionally displaced by militants and, worst of all, shootings and beheadings of Christians who refused to convert to Islam. In Egypt radicals have recently destroyed dozens of churches, and the once vibrant Christian population in Iraq has been decimated. Christians in the West should stand up...

ROME, January 29, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Archbishop Fernando Sebastián Aguilar is under fire from a Spanish homosexualist group who have launched legal action against him for comments that it is “not an insult” to say that homosexuality is a psychological disorder. The Archbishop, a retired theologian who was recently named as one of Pope Francis’ new batch of cardinals-elect, was blasted by the international press when he told a Spanish newspaper last week, “Homosexuality is a defective manner of expressing sexuality, because [sex] has a structure and a purpose, which is procreation.” “A homosexual who can’t achieve procreation is failing,”...