Free Republic

Rights Rights, right to life, unless you are unborn ... some of us think the unborn has the right to live. Rights come up often of late. America enumerated our reasons to break away from the unlimited powers of King George III to live under Nature’s Law. The Declaration of Independence recognized our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The nation instituted a government to protect rights we got from our Creator. I have difficulty in reconciling the right to life as granted by our Creator with the right to abort a baby. The difficulty is that...

Wowwww.

Wealth inequality? Blame local government, whose meddling in property rights causes artificial scarcity in housing. ... Matthew Rognlie, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral student in economics .. makes an interesting insight; housing prices are going up because of artificial scarcity caused by land-use regulation. Put another way, the concentration of wealth is not an issue of the “1 percent” winning while the rest of us lose—it’s an issue of homeowners benefitting from government restrictions on property rights that prevent a free market in homebuilding, restricting supply and driving up prices. ... If Rognlie is correct (and the data suggests...

Human rights advocates on Monday accused the State Department of making political calculations when it upgraded Malaysia and Cuba in the annual ranking of where countries stand in combating human trafficking. Both countries were removed from the list of the worst offenders in the Trafficking in Persons Report issued Monday. Last year, they were Tier 3 countries, a category reserved for nations that don’t meet minimum standards to fight modern-day slavery, and aren’t doing anything to improve.

Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, who led the fight in the last Senate for a ban on job discrimination against gays, has said for months that he's shifting to a more expansive approach. On Thursday, Merkley and his allies introduced their new bill, and it is indeed far more sweeping than anything the Oregon Democrat has proposed on gay rights in the past.

Just so you know your rights.

President Obama said he will voice support for gay rights during his Friday trip to Africa, despite warnings from some leaders to steer clear of the issue. In an interview with the BBC on Thursday, Obama said he has delivered a "blunt" message on gay rights to African leaders in the past and the topic will be "front and center" when he visits Kenya and Ethiopia.

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...