Free Republic

When some of us expressed fear of what we saw and heard about the protests against religious-rights laws, many people either saw no issue or condemned us for being alarmist or hate-filled Christians. It is time for well-meaning people to think this through. Hillary Clinton said last week culture and religious beliefs “have” to be changed to achieve women's rights. Is that just feel-good rhetoric, or does she really mean it? If so, what does it imply to say religious beliefs “have” to be changed? We don’t need to discuss theology. At its foundation this isn’t about theology at all,...

April 29, 2015 (AlbertMohler.com) -- “It is … it is going to be an issue.” With those words, spoken yesterday before the Supreme Court of the Unites States, the Solicitor General of the United States announced that religious liberty is directly threatened by the legalization of same-sex marriage. Donald Verrili, representing the Obama Administration as the nation’s highest court considered again the issue of same-sex marriage, was responding to a question from Justice Samuel Alito. His answer confirms with candor the threat we have long seen coming.Back in 2005, long before the movement to legalize same-sex marriage had gained cultural...

Every year, law enforcement agencies seize millions of dollars simply by suspecting the property is connected to criminal activity. Friday, April 10, after being unanimously passed through the legislature, HB 560 was signed into law by New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez. Read her Executive Message here. Among other improvements, HB 560 reforms the current law on forfeiture procedures by requiring a criminal conviction for seizure and proper reporting. Civil asset forfeiture is a practice in which assets suspected of being associated with crime may be seized and subsequently forfeited, often without the owner being charged with a crime. Law enforcement...

Sen. Rand Paul wasn’t invited to speak at this weekend’s National Rifle Association annual convention because the Kentucky Republican is caught in the crossfire between competing gun-rights organizations. Top NRA officials are unhappy that Mr. Paul has for years lent his name to fundraising solicitations for the National Association for Gun Rights, a group that fashions itself a more conservative alternative to NRA. Mr. Paul’s aides have been told by the NRA he will be unwelcome to participate at NRA events as long as he remains affiliated with NAGR, according to people familiar with the conversation. Publicly, the NRA chalked...

Natural and negative rights provide for a free, voluntary society, while legal positivism and positive rights provide for a coercive, totalitarian society It has previously been shown that constitutionalism, by which is meant the general proposition that government should be restrained by well-defined principles and structures under which it operates (whether written or unwritten), depends up a recognition of the rule of law as reflecting natural law. From this natural law arises the recognition, in turn, of the natural rights of individual citizens, which ought to be acknowledged and protected by just government, but which are not granted by any...

Vice President Joe Biden once told Chinese President Xi Jinping that U.S. leaders only support human rights as a matter of political optics, and that this makes the United States no better than China, according to a new New Yorker profile of Jinping. The New Yorker relates encounters between Biden and Jinping in 2011 and 2012, when both were vice presidents of their respective nations: Biden told me that Xi asked him why the U.S. put “so much emphasis on human rights.” Biden replied to Xi, “No President of the United States could represent the United States were he not...

Why do so many young adults paint absurd caricatures of Christians who request government protection of their religious freedoms, arguing their true goal is to ban gay men from sitting at the local lunch counter? Why do they spread falsehoods about legislation, insisting that bills like the one recently signed by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence will unleash a Republican-led Jim Crow revival aimed at the LGBT community? Why do so many people, Gen Xers and younger, invent a monster of anti-gay bigotry and keep screaming the monster is real despite a mountain of contrary facts standing before them? The answer...

Guess who is the number one violator of women’s rights in the world today? Israel. Violating the rights of Palestinian women. At least that is the view of the UN’s top women’s rights body, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). CSW ends its annual meeting on Friday, March 20 by condemning only one of the 193 UN member states for violating women’s rights – Israel. Not Syria. Where government forces routinely employ rape and other sexual violence and torture against women as a tactic of war. Where in 2014 the Assad regime starved, tortured and killed at least...

The lethality of Home Owner Associations (HOAs) stocked with resident Condo Commandos involves the characteristics of narcissists with delusions of something between grandeur and Godhood. Texas HOA wars are quickly beginning to rival those taking place in Southern Florida. A conservative talk show host from Central Florida E-mailed, wanting more information about what could be happening that is so bad, we’re begging Tallahassee to rally to our defense in the March legislative session. Go to the link below to watch a video of a Homeowners’ Association Board Fist Fight in Houston: (1) Caution: Liberal Use of FU__ can be heard!!...

One of the most admirable things about Europe is that most (if not all) of the right-wing rhetoric that you hear in the US is explicitly against the law there. For example, attempting to link Islam with terrorism, saying that gay marriage isn’t really marriage, or saying that trans women aren’t really women would get you charged with discrimination and/or incitement to hatred. Numerous European public figures have been charged with hate crimes for implying that large-scale immigration is connected to higher crime. In fact, a politician in Sweden was prosecuted for hate crimes for posting statistics about immigrant crime...

During a heated discussion over gay marriage, CNN morning Anchor Chris Cuomo opined that the unalienable rights endowed to all Americans do not come from God. Cuomo was debating Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. Near the end of the back-and-forth and after Moore argued that rights cannot be handed down by men, Cuomo blurted out:“Our rights do not come from God, your honor, and you know that. They come from man... That’s your faith, that’s my faith, but that’s not our country. Our laws come from collective agreement and compromise.”

"This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history. This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for the, at least, 150 years, since the industrial revolution." Those were the words spoken on Feb. 4 by Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), under the auspices...

<p>Matthew Aune and Derek Jones were...strolling through Main Street Plaza just east of the Salt Lake Temple, the holiest site in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.</p> <p>Aune bussed his partner on the cheek. Church security guards appeared. The twentysomething men said they were cuffed and forced to the ground. The church's official statement said the couple had been "engaged in passionate kissing, groping, profane and lewd language" on private church property, an account the two men vigorously contested.</p>

Hey moms and dads, if you’re like me, before you had kids, you imagined yourself teaching them, raising them, and being responsible for them.  After generations of our parents and grandparents shedding their responsibility to the government in exchange for a selfish, me-centered life, we no longer have primary authority to raise our children as we see fit.  That authority now lies with the government. We’ve given away so much authority to the all-powerful state in the name of protecting children, that it’s a crap-shoot when kids who really need protection will get it.  And when the state gets it...

Our kids are in second grade (homeschooled with me and my husband) and while they probably know more about the Civil War than most seven-year-olds, we haven't gotten into civil rights issues from the 1950's and 60's yet. However, our kids are old enough now to pick up on things from the radio and newspaper, so I think it's time to start to cover that. I'm looking for a relatively short documentary (or recordings of particular speeches, etc.) that presents Jim Crow, civil rights, MLK, etc. fairly factually and without a heapin' helping of white self-hate added in. (I also...

That children have a right to grow up with their biological mother and father should be uncontroversial, but unfortunately it isn’t. The International Children’s Rights Institute was recently founded in order to defend this important right. Below are three practices which it thinks often involve gross and depressingly-common violations of children’s rights.

The most dramatic shift in opinion took place among black Americans, according to the nonpartisan Pew. In December 2012, only 29 percent of black respondents said owning a gun helps protect people from crime, but this year, 54 percent said so. Many women also changed their view, Pew says, citing the 51 percent who said owning a gun protects people from becoming victims of crime in 2014, compared with only 40 percent who said so in 2012.

A few days ago, I reported that the Ebola air ambulance (one of them) was en route to the Canary islands. Today, we find that the plane somehow jumped over to Portugal without filing a flight plan, and is now scheduled to arrive at Joint Base Andrews. The plane’s twin, N173PA, has also visited the same airport in Portugal in recent weeks.

The victims of a burglary captured their alleged intruders after spotting them in the street - on the way back from another break-in. The Wyatt family's surveillance system filmed the moment a woman and two men took two TVs and numerous Christmas presents from their home in Warrior, Alabama, last Friday. Just two days later, Chris Wyatt spotted the suspects' Ford Ranger pickup truck driving down a road and swerved to block them into a corner.

The Miami-Dade County Commission is set to vote on an ordinance that would ban discrimination against transgender men and women. The commission is expected to vote Tuesday on the measure that would expand the county's law that prohibits discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations to include transgendered people. It already bans discrimination based on gender, religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation.