Free Republic

The real median income of American men who work full-time, year-round peaked forty years ago in 1973, according to data published by the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1973, median earnings for men who worked full-time, year-round were $51,670 in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars. The median earnings of men who work full-time year-round have never been that high again. […] By comparison, the real median earnings of American women who work full-time year-round peaked in 2007, when women who worked full-time earned $38,872 in constant 2012 dollars. …

Before Gurbaksh Chahal was convicted of domestic violence and battery against his girlfriend and fired from his job as CEO of marketing firm RadiumOne, his rags-to-riches story had been touted as a case study in the push for comprehensive immigration reform. Chahal's family, Business Insider wrote in 2012, came from India to the United States with only $25 to their name. Less than two years after he dropped out of high school at 16, he sold an Internet company for $40 million.

Just because your opponent is hurling baseless or even ridiculous charges does not mean that you are free to disregard them. You may think it's absurd to argue that you are engaged in a "war on women." But contempt for the accusation is not enough. Some strategists suggest (they have for years) the key for Republican candidates is to downplay social issues in favor of economic arguments. Pocketbook appeals are great, but the premise -- that social issues damage Republican candidates -- is shaky at best. When Pew asked women voters to rank a list of issues in order...

Schools in Birmingham are illegally segregating pupils, discriminating against non-Muslim students and restricting the GCSE syllabus to “comply with conservative Islamic teaching”, an official report leaked to The Telegraph discloses. Department for Education inspectors said that girls in a school at the centre of the so-called “Trojan Horse” plot were forced to sit at the back of the class, some Christian pupils were left to “teach themselves” and an extremist preacher was invited to speak to children. The report, into three schools in the city, follows weeks of controversy over the alleged plot to “Islamise” secular schools in Birmingham and...

AUSTIN, TX, April 16, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new survey by a liberal polling firm is bad news for Wendy Davis, the Democratic would-be governor of Texas who rose to national prominence after filibustering a bill to restrict abortions in the state. Although Davis promotes herself proudly as a candidate who cares about “women’s issues” – a euphemism for legalized abortion-on-demand, or as the Davis team describes it, “expanding access to women’s health care” – it seems women in Texas aren’t interested in what she’s selling. According to Public Policy Polling, 46 percent of Texas women view Davis “unfavorably,” and...

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...

April 14, 2014 (Tanya Granic Allen) - At the UN’s 47th Commission on Population and Development, the message from some Non-Governmental Organizations with vested interests couldn’t be clearer: nothing will stop them from conducting more abortions. The tone of these meetings has, at times, been uncomfortable to anyone who holds life to be sacred, or believes maternal health initiatives is an excellent way to support women, especially those in the developing world. While at an UN affiliated meeting hosted by International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and Ipas, two abortion supporting and providing global powerhouses, I was targeted, discriminated against, man-handled,...

The "war on women" political slogan is in fact a war against common sense. It is a statistical fraud when Barack Obama and other politicians say that women earn only 77 percent of what men earn — and that this is because of discrimination. It would certainly be discrimination if women were doing the same work as men, for the same number of hours, with the same amount of training and experience, as well as other things being the same. But study after study, over the past several decades, has shown repeatedly that those things are not the same. Constantly...

The Obama White House, for all its talk about openness and transparency, is hardly in the business of promoting openness and transparency in government — and is way worse when it comes to clamping down on the media than previous administrations, Sharyl Attkisson said.

"HONOR DIARIES" might not be coming to a theater near you, at least not if CAIR gets its way. The award-winning documentary about "honor" violence against girls and women in much of the Muslim world was released last month in honor of International Women's Day, and it didn't take long for the Council on American Islamic Relations to slap its all-purpose "Islamophobic!" label on it. The film has been shown in dozens of venues, but CAIR has raised enough of a stink to get screenings cancelled on several college campuses, including the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois....

After months on the defensive over his health law, a more combative President Barack Obama has emerged to fight about gender politics, leading to an election-year competition with Republicans for support from women. No single group will be more important to Democrats’ fortunes, say White House advisers, than unmarried women, who are likely to go Democratic—if they vote, and that’s far from certain when trust in Washington is low. The president is trying to convince women that Democrats are more concerned about improving their financial standing in difficult economic times, and he charges Republicans with standing in the way. “Republicans...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., scheduled a Friday session that won't have any votes, rejecting Republican and Democratic requests that he allow a vote on a bill that would allow rape kits to be processed more quickly. “Debbie Smith is an extraordinary woman and an effective advocate," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told the Washington Examiner. "She's personally asked me, John Cornyn and others to pass this critically important legislation that bears her name, and it's deeply disappointing that the majority leader is blocking it from reaching the president's desk. I will fight to get this done for...

Radical feminism is passé and in disarray. From pushing the wage gap myth to dismissing personal responsibility, our leftist sistas are clueless about true women’s rights. How did birth control access become the only issue women care about? Who decided it was acceptable to destroy human life? More importantly, why should we look to big government policies to advance our gender? Now, the feministas are going after Hollywood actresses. In an interview for the May 2014 U.K. issue of Harper’s Bazaar, actress Kirsten Dunst defied the status quo and did the unthinkable: she came out against blurring gender differences! "I...

A prominent advocate for transgender and women’s rights in the tech world has been charged with raping her wife, The San Francisco Examiner has learned. Dana McCallum, a senior engineer at Twitter who speaks and writes about women’s and transgender rights and technology issues, was arrested Jan. 26 and booked into County Jail on suspicion of five felonies, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

“When women gained their equality, they lost their superiority.” ~ Unknown It’s nobody else’s danged business what an employer pays any employee, provided both parties have freely entered into the arrangement without force or fraud. Despite the unfortunately already existing abundance of passed legislation in this area, and especially despite much more actual and urgent problems facing our country, it’s really none of the government’s damned business at all–but of course the cultural Marxists in the Obama administration and the Democrat party are at it, full-force, again. Out comes the stale, overused Democrat media script bemoaning Republicans’ broad (pun intended)...

In Pakistan, according to a report released by Movement for Solidarity and Peace, 100 to 700 Christian girls are forced to convert to Islam each year. The girls are usually between the ages of 12 and 25; they are abducted, forced to convert and then married to the abductor or to a third party. What commonly happens is that the family of the abducted girl files a First Information Report (FIR) for kidnapping to the police, and then the abductor files a counter FIR that accuses the girl’s family for harassing their ‘willfully’ converting daughter. The girl is forced to...

See a comprehensive takedown of liberals on this issue at Legal Insurrection.

Ali was raised in a strict Muslim family, but after surviving a civil war, genital mutilation, beatings and an arranged marriage, she renounced the faith in her 30s. ... Thomas Doherty, chairman of American studies, refused to sign the faculty letter. He said it would have been great for the university to honor "such a courageous fighter for human freedom and women's rights, who has put her life at risk for those values."

Politics: This fall, Democrats will no doubt resurrect the "war on women" theme to try to hold the Senate. But they don't really care about all women, just the unmarried ones. The IBD/TIPP poll shows why. According to the Washington Post, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is building a huge computer database that will let it predict women's marital status. That way they can "pinpoint unmarried women as the target of specific, poll-test messages," according to one source quoted in the story. Despite all the talk among Democrats and the media about the "gender gap" that has supposedly resulted from...

I have created a new species designation for the female Democrats who play hypocritical gender politics on behalf of Barack Obama. They're genderhawks. You remember the term "chickenhawk," don't you? During the Bush years, anti-war activists and journalists hurled the ad hominem epithet at anyone who supported military action against our enemies but hadn't personally served. I say let's give 'em a dose of their own tactical medicine. Genderhawks are feminist chickenhawks. They demand "equal pay" for women, practice militant identity politics based on chromosomes and purport to wage an all-out government war on gender inequity. Yet, they personally refuse...