Free Republic

A push by activists to ease the 30-year-old blanket ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men faces a key test this week as a federal panel hears results of the latest research. The findings will be released amid growing pressure from politicians and advocates, including college students, to change the policy. Critics say the ban is a hangover from the early, fear-filled days of AIDS, stigmatizing gay men and ignoring advances in treatment and detection in the decades since...

OAKLAND, Calif. — The weekly meetings of Mouthing Off!, a group for students at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, always start the same way. Members take turns going around the room saying their names and the personal pronouns they want others to use when referring to them — she, he or something else. It’s an exercise that might seem superfluous given that Mills, a small and leafy liberal arts school historically referred to as the Vassar of the West, only admits women as undergraduates. Yet increasingly, the “shes” and “hers” that dominate...

CHELSEA, MICH. — Kristi and Michael Burns have a lot in common. They love crossword puzzles, football, going to museums and reading five or six books at a time. They describe themselves as mild-mannered introverts who suffer from an array of chronic medical problems. The two share similar marital résumés, too. On their wedding day in 2011, the groom was 43 years old and the bride 39, yet it was marriage No. 3 for both. Today, their blended family is a sprawling, sometimes uneasy ensemble of two sharp-eyed sons from her two previous husbands, a daughter and son from his...

The owners of a Christian guesthouse who were ordered to pay damages for turning away a gay couple have lost their UK Supreme Court fight. Hazelmary and Peter Bull refused to let civil partners Steven Preddy and Martyn Hall stay in a double room at Chymorvah House in Marazion in Cornwall in 2008. The couple, who had already lost cases at Bristol County Court and the Court of Appeal, said they were "saddened". Mr and Mrs Bull have said they regard any sex outside marriage as a "sin". Steven Preddy (l) and Martyn Hall Steven Preddy (l) and Martyn Hall...

Dr. Donna Freitas, perhaps the nation’s leading expert on university hookup culture, has being doing research among college students and on college campuses regarding sex, the hookup culture, and student religiosity for several years.  She has produced many scholarly publications and studies.  One consistent finding she has observed is that evangelical college students are significantly less likely to hookup than any of their counterparts (Catholic or secular).  Why?  An excerpt from an interview: The attitudes toward sexuality on evangelical campuses were remarkably different from everywhere else. Everyone is struggling with sex, but they do it in very different ways.It’s impossible on...

If Signorile and other "LGBT" activists get their way, this would mean that churches, mosques, synagogues, religious schools, Bible bookstores, as well as any and every other business in America with 15 or more employees, would be forced, under penalty of law, to abandon the biblical and traditional-values viewpoint on human sexuality, and hire (and otherwise not offend) those who openly flaunt expressly sinful and demonstrably self-destructive sexual behaviors.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America has just announced a new insidious Internet presence referred to as “mobile interactive tools to help teens make healthy decisions.” STOPP’s national director, Rita Diller, joined ALL’s Jim Sedlak on his Radio Maria “Armed for Battle” broadcast November 1 to warn about what lurks within the many webpages of this new “tool” for indoctrinating both children and parents. “By ‘mobile interactive tools,’ Planned Parenthood means it is on its website so that kids can access this stuff from their smart phones or their computers when their parents aren’t looking,” Diller said. “And by ‘helping teens...

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, November 7, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The New Zealand Family Planning Association is trying to save face after public backlash over the Association’s plan to release a sexuality resource for children aged 5 to 8 later this month. The resource has drawn attention to the fact that “sexuality” is already included right through each year level of the health curriculum. Even in Catholic schools “sexuality” education is compulsory, although parents do have the right to be informed and are given the option of removing their children from these classes. The Ministry of Education’s 2002 document “Sexuality Education –...

In true Marxist form, the ludicrously named "Affordable Care Act" mounts an all-out attack on marriage. In 2010 the Heritage Foundation pointed out under the bill couples would face massive financial penalties if they marry or remain married. Conversely, couples who cohabit without marriage are given highly preferential financial treatment. If the Senate bill becomes law, saying 'I do' would cost some couples over $10,000 per year.

<p>NEW YORK (AP) Actors Jonah Hill, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kristen Bell are among a batch of celebrities donning Russian-language "Love Conquers Hate" T-shirts to show support for gays in Russia alarmed by a new law banning pro-gay "propaganda."</p> <p>It's part of an initiative launched Monday by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest U.S. gay-rights group.</p>

Note: I did not write this. Rather it was posted on Facebook by the good folks at Monergism Books. _____________________________________________________ I have not historically spent much time, if any, obsessing on the various sexual liberation agendas in our culture. But it has come to my attention that perhaps the most troubled people in our current society are those who accuse Christians of hate speech and homophobia for simply wanting to share the gospel with them. Such groundless declarations of hate betray the speakers themselves as a people driven by irrational prejudice. in doing so they are creating a cultural, educational...

A new survey suggests that marriage is actually more important to men than it is to women. In fact, just since last year, the number of women who say their definition of success is not linked to marriage (or relationships at all) has nearly doubled. According to the third “Professional Women Report” (h/t the Atlantic), a survey of over 1,000 male and female professionals released yesterday by LinkedIn and Citi, 9 percent of women say that marriage and relationships do not factor into their consideration of success, compared to 5 percent last year. It turns out that men are more...

I'm pretty sure I'm bisexual. I say "pretty sure" because I was raised Mormon, a religion that proclaims homosexuality is a terrible sin, so I never really experimented until my twenties. Residual guilt kept me from fully exploring that side of myself that had been so repressed all those years. Mormon hangover, I call it. So I had a few encounters with women in my twenties and then fell in love with and married my husband. So that's that. Except we all know that marriage doesn't stop us from being attracted to other people, it's part of life. I often...

Here's a fascinating chart that probably comports with what you're seeing in real life. The age at which people are first getting married is soaring. (Via John Podhoretz). The jump in the last decade is particularly notable. There are various theories for why people are getting married later, but one notion has to do with cultural attitudes towards marriage, and the growing perception that marriage is a "capstone" of life achievements, rather than a cornerstone.

Try getting an answer out of Bill Ayers. I dare you. Last week, I emailed the former Weather Underground bomber to quibble with an account in his latest book, “Public Enemy.” The chapter in question detailed the dinner Ayers hosted for me, Tucker Carlson, Matt Labash and Andrew Breitbart, among others, in January 2012. Ayers had donated the dinner for a local Chicago-area charity auction and Tucker pulled a fast one and purchased it. It was a bizarre evening, but my quibble was with how Ayers said I defined conservatism. I don’t recall defining it the way he said I...

Have you ever heard the expression, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” It appears that some women on college campuses have become “cows” as women sell themselves short, allowing casual sexual “hooking up” to dominate their relationships with male students.

In January of last year, Roman Sidorenko and Alexander Kukhtenko had an idea to break their sexual dry spells the way they solved many of their other problems: with an app. "We wanted an easy way to find sex, basically," says Sidorenko. But the two friends (who describe themselves as "pomosexuals") were too impatient to use the available dating apps on the market, all of which required them to spend hours flirting with potential flings via chat or text message before getting a date and, possibly, sealing the deal. They knew there were horny people around them looking for sex...

... A new study comes to a startling conclusion: Among primates, including perhaps humans, monogamy evolved because it protected infants from being killed by rival males. Living in pairs, what researchers call social monogamy, has repeatedly evolved among animals, although in widely varying proportions among different groups. Thus, about 90% of bird species are socially monogamous, probably because incubating eggs and feeding hatchlings is a full-time job that requires both parents. But in mammals, females carry the babies inside their bodies and are solely responsible for providing milk to young infants—and only about 5% of species are socially monogamous.

At 11 on a weeknight earlier this year, her work finished, a slim, pretty junior at the University of Pennsylvania did what she often does when she has a little free time. She texted her regular hookup — the guy she is sleeping with but not dating. What was he up to? He texted back: Come over. So she did. They watched a little TV, had sex and went to sleep. Their relationship, she noted, is not about the meeting of two souls. “We don’t really like each other in person, sober,” she said, adding that “we literally can’t sit...

Among all the arguments against the extremely modest abortion regulations being proposed in Texas, this one from Burnt Orange’s Ben Sherman has to be the most bluntly forthright and entertaining. It turns out the issue is really about men’s ability to control their bodies: