Free Republic

Like many people at the Supreme Court last month, I was deeply moved by the historic ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges recognizing the constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry. At such a transcendent moment, it is difficult to do anything but celebrate the triumph of what Justice Anthony Kennedy called the “dignity” and “profound hopes and aspirations” of the many loving couples who had been denied the recognition of marriage. But Kennedy’s moving language was more than just aspirational thoughts on dignity. He found a right to marriage based not on the status of the couples as homosexuals but...

Russell Moore makes the case for respecting the rights of conservatives on CBS' Face the Nation. Click the link to view.

None of you who have turned your avatar "rainbow" on Facebook appear to have actually read the Supreme Court opinion. Why are you celebrating without understanding what you are celebrating? Are you a thinking individual or are you a member of a mob? If the latter, get the hell away from me; you're dangerous, to be blunt, and I want you nowhere near my person or property. To the extent I can do so I will distance myself from your person and behavior as both are destructive to both self and others. Incidentally, if it matters, I don't care who...

I've pasted the whole column below. But there is a video that can only be seen on the site/not embedded here. So please, if you support my work, visit the site. If not, no problem. "Now before you label this as a “crazy” post, I’m not talking about, nor am I predicting some doomsday scenario. Don’t expect me to be selling you seeds, food preserves or bomb shelters anytime soon. That is not what I am suggesting here. I’m also not suggesting that you need to buy yourself an AR15 to fight off an onslot of newly married gays. Okay?...

Today, the country has suffered a terrible blow. Over the past week, the fight for states’ rights, which has been going on since the founding of the union, has suffered two terrible blows. The Confederate Naval Jack -- colloquially, and erroneously referred to as the “Stars and Bars”—has been taken down by popular opinion, and in its place, and at the behest of the highest court, the striped flag of gay pride has arisen to fly higher than ever before. Now, the purpose of this is not to comment on the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality, or of gay marriage,...

If transgender people can do their thing and receive special treatment even when their DNA is 100 percent the opposite of what they want to be, why can't I claim to be Mexican and get special benefits?

The thought occurred to me last night that the left is hard at work replacing our God-given rights with godless rights. Think about the rights our Christian Founding Fathers enumerated and how those rights were assumed to have existed long before the advent of government and kings. We have the rights to speak freely, to defend ourselves even from our own government, we have the right to own property, we have the right to say who can be on our property, we have the right to travel without having to explain to anyone else what we're doing, and etc. The...

The Obama Environmental Protection Agency rewrote the Clean Water Act from 88 pages to 2,200 pages. The new regulations will put the EPA in control of muddy farm puddles and prairie potholes. The Clean Water Act limits the federal government to regulating the “navigable waters of the United States” like the Colorado River or Lake Michigan. In 1986 the EPA expanded that definition to seize jurisdiction over tributaries and adjacent wetlands. Now it is extending federal control over just about any creek, pond, prairie pothole or muddy farm field that EPA says has a “significant nexus” to a navigable waterway....

The so-called “mainstream” media likes to spin a scary narrative of lawlessness, even of anarchy, when “permitless carry” (sometimes called “constitutional carry”) is brought before a state legislature. When the media does this, whether through ignorance or bias, they’re simply ignoring the facts. For example, Vermont, which has long had permitless carry, has also long had one of the lowest violent crime rates in the nation. States, nevertheless, can still be laboratories of democracy—even with politically incorrect gun laws. That is part of what’s going on with permitless carry. As of this writing, states with some legal form of permitless...

Recent reports indicate federal bureaucrats are finalizing the details of a behemoth new Environmental Protection Agency mandate that would supersede property owners’ rights on any piece of land that contains any body of water – including a ditch that fills with rain water. Heritage Foundation Agricultural Policy Research Fellow Daren Bakst explained the ramifications of the rule, which will update the Clean Water Act of 1972, in an interview with The Blaze. “Property owners will not be able to engage in activities they should be able to engage in,” he said. “This will be devastating to private property rights.”

This could have been one of the biggest weeks for immigrant rights in modern history, opening up sweeping deportation relief and extending a temporary legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants nationwide. Instead, they will have to continue waiting – but it won’t be quietly. Rallies are scheduled across the country on Tuesday as advocacy groups protest what would have marked the unofficial kick-off date to President Obama’s second – and most sweeping – executive action program on immigration. Known as DAPA, the executive measure would have benefited as many as 3.7 million undocumented immigrant adults who have children born...

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!!...