Free Republic

You may have heard that the government is forcing businesses not to discriminate. It isn’t. If you chose to run a business, you have to follow the laws. If you don’t, that’s a choice—and you choose to suffer the consequences. Still, in the wake of the controversy surrounding Indiana’s law, conservatives don’t see it that way. Even potential Republican presidential candidates are getting in on the assertions. Rick Santorum recently said: If you’re a print shop and you are a gay man, should you be forced to print ‘God Hates Fags’ for the Westboro Baptist Church because they hold those...

For centuries, the essential meaning of marriage was universally understood (and taken for granted) in Western civilization, and, with very few modifications, in the pagan world as well. Because a marriage was always seen as the defining core of a family, providing a context for bearing and rearing children, its purpose and nature were taken to be self-evident, and seldom was thought to require defining. Among those societies informed by Scripture, marriage was also understood to be necessarily heterosexual, monogamous and life-long. With the coming of the sexual revolution of the 1960’s, many of these assumptions began to be eroded...

A few years ago, while visiting family in Maryland, I attended church with my brother. It was a very hip contemporary church. The pastor, who looked in his early forties, wore a shirt and jeans. I saw a parishioner with a Mohawk haircut and others with tattoos. This is not a judgment, merely an observation that the congregation was very racially diverse, as well as in their attire. The topic of the pastor's sermon was homosexuality. He disclosed that his sister is a homosexual. Folks, filled with national statistics and documented facts, the pastor delivered the most loving and compassionate...

On a CNN special hosted by Chris Cuomo on Thursday night about the religious freedom laws, former NBA great and TNT NBA analyst Charles Barkley offered his open on that issue. According to Barkley, he sees those laws as having more than meets the eye motivating them. “Listen, I don’t think gay people went out to try to go after, they came out as a gay people let get that straight,” Barkley said. ...more (w/video)...

This past Sunday, the lives of the Rev. Kaci Clark-Porter and the Rev. Holly Clark-Porter intertwined in perhaps an even more extraordinarily spiritual way, as the couple walked down the aisle at Wilmington, Delaware’s First and Central Presbyterian Church to become ordained Christian ministers. The ordination came just days after the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) announced a change in its constitution that embraced a more inclusive definition of marriage, defining it as being between "two people" instead of between a man and a woman. With this change, PC(USA) becomes the largest Protestant group to offer a nationwide welcome for LGBTQ...

March 31, 2015 (MercatorNet.com) -- March 29 marked the first anniversary of legal same-sex marriage in England and Wales. Look around, say the twitterati – no plagues of locusts and frogs have blighted the land; no fire and brimstone have rained down upon Westminster; no earthquake has swallowed up Sir Elton. All is well.Well, actually not.In an article in The Conversation, an academic at the University of Kent, Dr Mike Thomas, reported on how happy gay couples in the UK, the United States and Canada feel after tying the knot. He found that most of them welcomed the benefits that legal...

At Starbucks’ annual shareholder’s meeting in Seattle on Wednesday a shareholder complained to Billionaire CEO, Schultz about the fact that Starbucks has lost customers because of its support of gay marriage. Starbucks supported Washington’s state’s referendum backing gay marriage last year and in response the National Organization for Marriage started a boycott of the company. Tom Stobhar, founder of Corporate Morality Action Center, complained about the company’s support of gay marriage, citing that the company’s support for gay marriage has resulted in boycotts against the company that have cost Starbucks a considerable amount of business. “In the first full quarter...

The National Black Church Initiative (NBCI), a faith-based coalition of 34,000 churches comprised of 15 denominations and 15.7 million African-Americans, has broken its fellowship with Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) following its recent vote to approve same-sex marriage. The Presbyterian General Assembly, the top legislative body of the PCUSA, voted last June to revise the constitutional language defining marriage. This arbitrary change of Holy Scripture is a flagrantly pretentious and illegitimate maneuver by a body that has no authority whatsoever to alter holy text. Rev. Anthony Evans, NBCI President noted: "NBCI and its membership base are simply standing on the Word...

People who call gay sex ‘disgusting’ will be allowed to stay in the UK Independence Party. Nigel Farage defended party members with ‘old-fashioned’ views about homosexuality, as he warned that with the government passing same-sex weddings ‘nobody knows where it will end up’. MPs last night backed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, but Mr. Farage said ministers were ‘picking a war with middle England’. …

“How can you call yourself a Christian, let alone a minister?!” I get asked that question frequently and the questioner is hostile more often than not. Still, I like to answer it if I believe the questioner is sincere. Though I self-identify as a Christian and I am an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), I raised eyebrows a few years ago when I posted an article on my website about how my personal beliefs don’t align with those of most Presbyterians. For example, I believe that: - Religion is a human construct - The symbols of faith are...

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...

Members of the Presbyterian Church (USA) have voted to make the 1.8-million-member, 10,000-congregation denomination the largest Protestant group to formally recognize gay marriage allow same-sex weddings. The Presbytery of the Palisades in New Jersey cast the necessary 86th vote Tuesday night to establish that a majority of the church’s 171 regional presbyteries now support an amendment to the church constitution that redefines marriage, the Associated Press reported. “Marriage involves a unique commitment between two people, traditionally a man and a woman, to love and support each other for the rest of their lives,” the church’s Book of Order will read,...

If the Supreme Court decides that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, will that signal the end of social conservatism? People have long predicted the end of the religious right and, increasingly, even the demise of “white Christian America.” These obituaries typically prove premature. First, why assume a loss at the Supreme Court will end the religious right’s reason for existence? Organized social conservatism was built from such defeats, including high court rulings against school prayer and legalizing abortion. The school prayer decision will turn 53 in June. Roe v. Wade turned 42 in January. Neither of those...

Modern liberalism is fundamentally illiberal. The evidences for this can be clearly seen all around us. There are hardly any basic areas of the liberty of the individual which today's progressives – in both parties – haven't trampled in their on-going efforts to destroy America That Was and replace it with a progressive utopian version in which individual rights are completely submerged and washed away in a flood of "social justice." Free speech, to the Left, should only cover saying things they agree with. Nobody needs to be secure in the privacy of their own homes (and indeed, privacy is...

The founder and president of a coalition of black pastors has called upon U.S. Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan to recuse themselves from the same-sex marriage case that is currently before the high court. In a recent press release, Rev. William Owens of the Coalition of African-American Pastors (CAAP) cited Ginsburg’s and Kagan’s “stated bias” as reason to recuse themselves in order to preserve the integrity of the court. Owens and his organization have launched a petition to bring attention to the alleged “lack of impartiality” on the part of the two justices. In February, Ginsburg,...

A popular insurance company pays a great deal of advertising money to let everyone know that they are in fact “our good neighbors.” They populate commercial after commercial with cheery, miraculously at-your-service agents who care about their clients above all else. While I am sure their real agents are customer relations friendly, the reality is they are likely no more so than any other public facing company. The associates, employed by the company, who personify saintly best friend types the most, are the actors in the ads. The truth is, customers are not important loved ones in the lives...

Almost six in ten Americans say they favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to enter into same-sex marriages, the highest level of support ever recorded in a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.In the new survey released Monday, 59 percent of Americans said that they favor same-sex marriages while just 33 percent said they oppose them.View the full poll results here.The numbers have shifted dramatically in the past decade. In 2004, only 30 percent of Americans said they supported same-sex marriage, while 62 percent disagreed. Half of those polled at the time said they strongly opposed allowing gays and lesbians...

Why are so many conservatives, not just Republicans but I mean social-conservatives, unable to form communicate a coherent argument against this logic in interviews and debates? The latest was Ben Carson’s meltdown where he was asked on CNN if being gay was ‘a choice’ and he replied absolutely, then he offered up prisoners who engage in same sex as his example, then later repudiated and apologized for his response, Ben Carson :” I do not pretend to know how every individual came to their sexual orientation. I regret that my words to express that concept were hurtful and divisive. For...

Just as it appears all barriers to “same-sex marriage” in America are falling like dominoes, the world gets a glimpse of what’s to come. It was predictable. I predicted it. Justice Antonin Scalia predicted it. And it’s here – at least as a grand “fairytale” experiment in Thailand. Three avowedly homosexual men got hitched in Thailand on Valentine’s Day in what they refer to as a “fairytale ceremony.” That’s right – three men, one so-called “marriage.” Given the speed at which “same-sex marriage” has reached acceptance by government, judges, the media, the pop culture and cultural institutions, I’m actually surprised...

I stink at acronyms, and unfortunately we are awash in them. I live one block from SPS (Standard Pressed Steel) and a few more from CVS and SVS. (The latter is a mom-and-pop produce store, and I have no idea what the letters stand for.) ACLU is very close to ACLJ, but I wouldn’t want to dial the wrong number. AA is for drinkers; add another “A” and it’s for drivers—who had better not be drinkers. And as a relative newcomer to the cell phone world, I thought LOL meant “lots of luck” till I was apprised of its less...