Free Republic

Boys are being put off reading because of the influence women have on children’s literature, says an award-winning children’s author. Jonathan Emmett warned that children’s books were too girly because of the influence of mostly female panels of editors, publishers, reviewers and judges. One publishing company’s research suggested women bought 95 percent of picture books for children, he added. The writer believes boys are being starved of what they enjoy in books, such as swashbuckling pirates, battles, or technical details about spaceships, and so are driven to more action-packed video games instead. …

Just when you think you know a state ... Hours after an outpouring of support for gay basketball player Derrick Gordon had sent a message that tolerance reigns in Massachusetts, John Ashcroft came to Amherst on Wednesday. The former attorney general of President George W. Bush spent his University of Massachusetts visit fending off hecklers who called him a hyprocrite and a war criminal among other things. I am not here to defend Ashcroft. I am here to dispute hypocrisy, a label that becomes attached to university communities such as UMass when freedom of speech and opinion is treated as...

Are conservatives linguistically challenged? Or are they just naïve enough to think they can win the battle of ideas with — ideas? Okay, and money. Conservatives, like liberals, will spend huge amounts of money this year to get their ideas across to voters. But what they fail to do is bundle their thoughts into a bright, shiny linguistic package that explodes in the face of their enemies when opened. The left has assembled a rich lexicon of phrases that serve either as stilettos that can be turned again and again in the guts of their opponents, or shields that obscure...

If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every...

<p>‘as time goes on, weirdly, I’m growing less liberal. I’m more like, ‘No, religion is ruining the world, you need to stop!’.</p>

Over the past few days, we have received a lot of questions and seen a great number of media stories about the events surrounding Brendan Eich’s resignation from the role of CEO. Many of the media stories have incorrect facts, so we compiled the following FAQ as a resource for everyone to have access to the core facts. Here is the announcement on Brendan Eich stepping down as Mozilla CEO.

The war that has been brewing between the Sexual Activists of America, and every day people of faith, morals, and conscience has moved into the major campaign of the conflict. This week has been bloody. For the better part of the past two years I have repeatedly stated on my radio show that we have entered a day where the Constitutional guarantee of absolute legal protection for one's freedom of religious faith and expression is running headlong into a culturally driven force that is a non-Constitutional right to sexual freedom. The United States Constitution doesn't address sex, sexuality, sexual...

A new Westmoreland grocery isn't even open yet and already its owner has created a controversy with statements she made online. But the owner told KGW Thursday she wants to make amends. In about one week Chauncy Childs plans to open her natural grocer on Southeast Milwaukie Avenue. But after a series of postings she made on her Facebook page, she now finds herself at the often dangerous intersection where social media and gay rights meet. The Moreland Farmer's Pantry will offer fresh produce, raw milk and foods that are free of genetic engineering. Westmoreland resident Sean O’Riordan was looking forward to the...

Bill Maher used his HBO show on Friday to call out an element of the gay community that he says enforces political correctness like James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano dished out mob justice. “I think there is a gay mafia,” the Real Time host said during a panel discussion. “I think if you cross them, you do get whacked.......”

Just a couple of weeks into his tenure as CEO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich has been ousted by a mob of jackbooted same-sex marriage supporters, for the unforgivable crime of donating $1000 in 2008 to the Proposition 8 gay-marriage ban in California.  Eich co-founded Mozilla and created the indispensable Javascript programming language, but none of that counted for much against his long-ago financial support of traditional marriage.We've had a few nasty culture clashes of late, but this one takes the cake.  Eich was quite literally persecuted for a thoughtcrime.  He didn't say something that the gay marriage crowd found offensive,...

A New York appeals court has affirmed a lower court’s 2012 ruling that a lesbian chef is owed $1.6 million for being forced to attend weekly prayer meetings where her boss would regularly warn that "gay people" were "going to go to hell." Mirella Salemi sued Gloria's Tribeca Inc., Gloria's Tribecamex and principal owner Edward Globokar for violations of the New York City Human Rights Law after a string of incidents that occurred between 2004 and 2007. Gloria's Tribeca is a Mexican restaurant. Salemi was awarded $400,000 in compensatory damages and $1.2 million in punitive damages in what her lawyer,...

To hear Alec Baldwin tell it (in this very magazine), he was "labeled a homophobic bigot" by Anderson Cooper, "the self-appointed Jack Valenti of gay media culture," after his use of terms "toxic little queen" and [Deleted} But on the radio with Howard Stern today, Cooper insisted, "I didn't really speak out against him. I sent maybe two tweets." After stressing that he has "nothing against the guy," the CNN host then carefully, somewhat nervously explained where he was coming from. And yes, he said the word. "When he called the person a ... a ... [Deleted]," Anderson stammered, "and...

A Christian preacher arrested and imprisoned without food and water after he told two gay teenagers the Bible says homosexuality is a sin, has won £13,000 in compensation for poor treatment by police. John Craven, 57, says he was held by Greater Manchester Police after he told the couple 'God hates sin, but he loves the sinner'. The young men then kissed in front of him and approached a police officer and claimed Mr Craven's comments were 'insulting' and had caused them 'harassment and distress.' Mr Craven said he was 'grabbed roughly by the arm' on suspicion of public order...

PALO ALTO, CA, March 21, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A group of about 100 homosexual activists at Stanford University have successfully intimidated the Graduate Student Council (GSC) into withdrawing $600 in previously-approved funding for a pro-marriage conference to be held on campus in April. The university administration also tried to charge the organizers $5,000 for security costs, but backed down amidst public pressure after the organizers accused them of “impos[ing] a tax on free speech.” The Stanford Anscombe Society (SAS) is sponsoring the event, called “Communicating Values: Marriage, Family and the Media.” Featuring prominent pro-family speakers, the event’s goal is “to...

Preface:  The scientific method requires allowing a free-for-all of hypotheses, which then rise or fall based upon the results of actual experiments.  In other words, science means that you throw out theories - no matter how good they look on paper - that are disproven by experimental results, and adopt those confirmed by the results. [Economics is supposed to do that, too ... but hasn't.]For example, putting Galileo to death because he didn’t agree with the “accepted” consensus that the Sun revolved around the Earth was not a great example of the scientific method. Instead of conducting experiments to see...

To most ears, it probably sounds inoffensive. A little outdated and clinical, perhaps, but innocuous enough: homosexual. But that five-syllable word has never been more loaded, more deliberately used and, to the ears of many gays and lesbians, more pejorative. “ ‘Homosexual’ has the ring of ‘colored’ now, in the way your grandmother might have used that term, except that it hasn’t been recuperated in the same way,” said George Chauncey, a Yale professor of history and an author who studies gay and lesbian culture. Consider the following phrases: homosexual community, homosexual activist, homosexual marriage. Substitute the word “gay” in...

A wealthy gay couple has decided to launch a lawsuit to force their church to perform their wedding. The Drewitt-Barlows, a millionaire couple from the U.K, stated, “We’ve launched a challenge to the government’s decision to allow some religious groups to opt out of marrying same-sex couples.” Both attend St. John the Baptist church, a branch of the Church of England, and have been in a civil partnership since 2006. Barrie Drewitt-Barlow said that he and his partner Tony, “feel we have the right as parishioners in our village to utilize the church we attend to get married. “It is no...

“Maybe we can reach a point of reconsideration” on Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Kerry said during a forum at the State Department. The Ugandan president committed to meeting with American “experts” on homosexuality to try to change his mind about the Anti-Homosexuality Act signed into law last month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday during a forum at the State Department moderated by BuzzFeed. Museveni claimed to have signed the law, which imposes up to a lifetime prison sentence for homosexuality, after being convinced no one is “born gay.” “I talked personally to President Museveni just a few...

A local official in Virginia has subpoenaed the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the SPLC Task Force on Hate in the Public Sphere for the criteria it uses to designate other organizations as “hate groups.” The subpoenas were filed February 28th in Loudoun County Circuit Court. They request "all written criteria, guidelines, bylaws or rules used by Southern Poverty Law Center to designate organizations or groups as 'hate groups' from the inception of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the present date."

The homosexual lobby is now putting a full-court press on the Massachusetts Legislature to pass H3909 which would change the state's school "anti-bullying" law -- to completely silence any negative discussion of those behaviors and threaten schools and administrators that do not comply. Their stated goal is to use the anti-bullying laws to "change the overall climate and culture" in the every school in the state by "addressing bigotry and discrimination." In other words, the goal is not to reduce bullying per se, but to punish opinions by students and staff that are critical of homosexual or transgender behaviors, or...