Free Republic

Homosexual activists are outraged after ExxonMobil once again refused to explicitly include sexual preference in its anti-discrimination policy, marking the 17th time the company has done so. New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli has led the charge to add sexual preference to the gas company’s equal opportunity policies, which currently state that individuals employed by or seeking employment with the corporation will be evaluated without regard to “race, color, sex, religion, national origin, citizenship status, age, genetic information, physical or mental disability, veteran or other legally protected status.” ExxonMobil argues that their “zero-tolerance” standards for discrimination already exceed federal regulations...

I guess you can put this in the “Now Only in Chicago, But Soon To Be in Your Backyard As Well” file. Writing for Breitbart, Warner Todd Huston discovered government officials in Will County, located just outside of Chicago, had issued a fine based on nothing more than a private individual’s Facebook post, no due process necessary: "The police department of a Chicago area forest preserve district used a local woman’s social media post as a basis to send her a citation in the mail after she made a Facebook post about a county park." Due to a number of...

Every year in Rochester, NY, an organization called Metro Justice holds a Peace Parade on Memorial Day . The organization claims to fight for “economic, social, and racial justice,” but their efforts have been compromised in the past where the pre-born are involved. The pro-life organization Feminists for Nonviolent Choices (FFNVC) became a victim of Metro Justice’s dichotomous view of peace when they were excluded from the organization’s peace parade earlier this week. After attending planning meetings where the organization was told by Metro Justice that they would be allowed to participate as long as their message focused on peace,...

Last week, Michelle Obama made headlines when she exhorted graduating high schoolers in a commencement address to monitor their families for politically incorrect thoughts and behaviors. To one journalist, this was more than an off-hand comment made by the first lady. In the opinion of Cheryl Chumley, a reporter for The Washington Times and the author of “Police State USA,” Michelle Obama’s remark reflects a growing trend in America to target and attack individuals for committing “thought crime.”

The number of careers and professions available to practicing Christians is shrinking by the day. You can add a career in public health to that list. Dr. Brendan Bain, one of the leading AIDS experts in the Caribbean, has been unceremoniously cashiered from his post for having the temerity to tell the truth about the cause of AIDS. A long-time and highly respected professor at the University of West Indies until his retirement in 2012, Dr. Bain was praised by all as a "pioneer” in the effort to combat HIV/AIDS, which is at epidemic proportions in Caribbean nations. Since his...

"Feisty campus dissent is back. And it’s winning," exulted msnbc.com's Aliyah Frumin in her May 15 story, teased on the main page with the header, "Commencement speakers drop like flies." [see screen capture below page break] "In the last few weeks alone, campaigns at three schools forced commencement speakers to pass up significant speaker fees rather than face angry campuses," Frumin noted, adding that "[t]he last-minute cancellations have proved embarrassing to school leaders" and conceding that in turn they "have raised concerns about free speech and exposure to opposing views in settings designed to foster free thought." Although Frumin did...

While Tuesday's Washington Post covered ESPN's elaborate planning to broadcast "a kiss that rocked the sports world" -- after openly gay Michael Sam was drafted, and they don't mean the later cake-shoving kiss that seemed a little scarier given Sam's size -- the debate over the kiss submerged the flagrant liberal editorializing that ESPN aired a few minutes before the Rams selected Sam with the 249th pick. ESPN reporter Chris Connelly (formerly with MTV) uncorked pre-emptive anger, that if Sam went undrafted, the verdict of "history" (read: liberals) "will be derisive laughter, aimed at a league thus deemed by many...

Before I begin, I want to pose a question to the powers that control our society today: Am I allowed to comment on issues that pertain to homosexuality if I don't echo the views of our masters? Will people who read this column willingly twist what I say to justify condemnation of anyone who disagrees with them? They certainly do it to many other people. Note to those waiting for an excuse to pretend to be offended so they can cram their views down our throats with McCarthyite tactics: Please read precisely what I say and don't draw unwarranted inferences,...

In an interview with Yahoo News surrounding the 40th anniversary of his comedic masterpiece "Blazing Saddles," co-writer/director Mel Brooks blasted present-day political correctness and says he was "lucky" to have made the film in the days when he still could: "They can't make that movie today because everybody's so politically correct. You know, the NAACP would stop a great movie that would do such a great service to black people because of the N-word," says Brooks. "You've got to really examine these things and see what's right and what's wrong. Politically correct is absolutely wrong. Because it inhibits the freedom...

Racial slur written on dorm whiteboardWhen a housekeeper who works in Easton Hall arrived for his shift Friday morning, he saw offensive language written on a lounge whiteboard. (Deleted) had been scrawled repeatedly on the whiteboard stationed in the communal room on one of the floors he cleans in the dorm, said the housekeeper, who asked to remain anonymous. University Police received a call at about 9 a.m. regarding the hate bias incident and officers responded to the dorm to find the derogatory word written all over the whiteboard, police spokeswoman Sgt. Rosanne Hoaas said. After the incident, Residential Facilities...

An Indiana-based energy distribution group that operates in Ohio has informed the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) that the company will not hire homeschool graduates, a situation that may not only reflect discrimination, but also the possibility that, with a nationalized set of standards such as Common Core, homeschoolers could be shown the door when they apply for jobs in the future.

Throughout history, religion has sanctioned and fueled the persecution of homosexuality. That dynamic may be drawing to an end. Polls, clerics, and denominations are shifting. Theology is adapting. Resistance to same-sex marriage is dwindling, and there’s no end in sight. For 15 years, the Ethics and Public Policy Center has hosted the Faith Angle Forum, a regular conference on religion and public life. Several weeks ago, the group met again to discuss current issues. Transcripts of the conference have just been posted on EPPC’s website. They underscore the extent of the anti-gay collapse. The first session, led by papal biographer...

In November 2009, Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling settled a lawsuit in which the Department of Justice alleged that Sterling had discriminated against Hispanics, blacks and families without children in his rental properties. The lawsuit contained testimony that Sterling had suggested Hispanics were poor tenants because they "smoke, drink, and just hang around the building," and that "black tenants smell and attract vermin." The settlement cost him and his insurers $2.73 million. The NBA and the national media said virtually nothing. That same year, the NAACP gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2005, Sterling signed a check for...

In today's press conference covering the lifetime ban and $2.5 million fine against Clippers owner Donald Sterling over his racist remarks, a Fox News' The Kelly File reporter asked NBA Commissioner Adam Silver if he was on a "slippery slope." “Should someone lose their team for remarks shared in private? Is this a slippery slope?” Jovian Lien is not the first person to raise the question of freedom of speech in the handing down of punishment against Sterling. On Monday, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban asked the same essential question, also using the phrase "slippery slope." "I think there's a constitution...

Modern greens who inappropriately and metaphorically often use the term “denier” to compare global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers are shockingly betrayed by their very own environmental history. Modern environmentalism was largely born in the racist forests of Germany in the 1800's that was at first anti-Semitic, but later became mixed up with Social Darwinian biological science in which the very word 'ecology' was coined in 1866. Today, the green movement is no longer racist, but has evolved into anti-humanism in general ...

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>