Free Republic

Cardinal Raymond Burke at the extraordinary Synod on the Family in Rome in October 2014 (CNS photo) Kaya Oakes, a revert to Catholicism after spending time as a self-described pro-choice liberal, has penned a little screed—a veritable bundle of befuddlement!—aimed at the recent New Emangelization interview with Cardinal Raymond Burke (which I posted about on Monday). I've not read Oakes' book about her spiritual, uh, arc, which is titled, Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Catholic Church, but my impression is that she has some—nay, numerous—issues with orthodoxy, or what she apparently calls "Catholic conservatism", which is in...

My "Aha Moment" happened because of a package of hamburger meat. I asked my husband to stop by the store to pick up a few things for dinner, and when he got home, he plopped the bag on the counter. I started pulling things out of the bag, and realized he'd gotten the 70/30 hamburger meat - which means it's 70% lean and 30% fat. Read more at http://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/610/I-Wasn-t-Treating-My-Husband-Fairly-And-It-Wasn-t-Fair#EY4FIxGCmr92Qrb1.99

From an article titled "8 Quirky Ways Epiphany Is Celebrated Around the World": 1) “Women’s Christmas” Also known as “Little Christmas,” in Ireland Epiphany is a day that women take off from work to rest and celebrate for themselves after all the work of the Christmas holidays. Women gather together in pubs without men for special meals and wine (in commemoration of the Wedding at Cana miracle, of course!). Women also receive gifts from their children and grandchildren. (How do we bring this tradition to more places??)

You might not think that it’s appropriate for the government to launch a campaign telling men how to sit on the subway. Well guess what? You’re wrong. If you “manspread” on the subway (which, by the way, means to sit with your legs apart, in case you are a fixture of the patriarchy who doesn’t educate himself on important women’s issues), you are doing so much more than taking up space. Here’s what’s really going on with manspreading, as explained by some of the bright, forward-thinking minds on the Feminist Internet: 1. Manspreading is saying, “Who gives a f*** if...

An ancient law of the sea says that, when at risk of shipwreck, women and children must be helped into the lifeboats first. This is what was done on the Titanic, in the most notorious shipwreck in history. On that famous ship the orchestra continued to play to buoy the courage of those who were doomed to drown, including the musicians themselves. And a Catholic priest gave confession and absolution to all those who asked for them, himself going down with the ship. Old-fashioned gentlemen? Nope, Christians. Because the unwritten rule of «women and children first» dates back to...

We asked some brave women to try on old-time bras and corsets. This is what happened.

Making it to the White House will shift prejudices not only in America, but far beyond. Hillary Clinton was on my mind even before word came of the death of Mario Cuomo. The former governor of New York will be remembered by those who have long forgotten, or never knew, his record running that state chiefly for his oratory and his knack for an enduring phrase. Eight minutes spent on YouTube watching his 1984 rebuttal of Ronald Reagan’s depiction of the US as a “shining city on a hill” will not be wasted. It was Cuomo who memorably told us:...

WATERTOWN, N.Y.— Elise Stefanik, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, has never held elected office, but her résumé looks more like that of a Beltway insider than a political newcomer. By the time she won her seat representing a swath of upstate New York in the November election, she had served as a domestic policy aide for former President George W. Bush , a policy director for former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty ’s 2012 presidential campaign and head of debate preparation for vice-presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan .

Thousands of sailors get out of the Navy every year because they want to start a family. Or to enroll in school. Or because they are burned out on frequent deployments and months away from home. With the national unemployment rate dropping and more service members leaving for the private sector, the chief of naval personnel says he wants to do everything he can to keep the best sailors in uniform longer — even if that means letting them go for a while. “We need to offer meaningful incentives to keep the best talent we can, both men and women,”...

Men who take part in violent conflicts are more likely to father more children, researchers have found. Researchers at Harvard University studied a small tribal populations in eastern Africa - and found violent conflict does result in more wives and children for certain warriors. They studied the Nyangatom, a group of nomadic herders living in a region of southwest Ethiopia and South Sudan.

Bill Cosby has refused to address the scores of rape allegations that have been hurled at him in recent months, but that doesn't mean he isn't working to clear his name. The comedian is allegedly paying private investigators six-figure fees to dig up dirt on the more than two dozen women who have come forward to accuse him of rape, according to a report in the New York Post. A source told the paper that Cosby has hired a Glendale, California, firm to discredit his many alleged victims' stories.

I’ve been dismissive of Jim Webb’s prospects for winning the Democratic presidential nomination. But Jacob Heilbrunn’s column on Webb, and Steve’s commentary on that column, made me take another look. On second look, I still don’t see Webb getting very far. Will female Democrats favor Webb — currently in his third marriage and the author of what some might consider a sexist novel — over Hillary Clinton? Not likely. Will African-Americans favor Webb — so proud of his Scotch-Irish heritage — over the wife of “our first black president”? Not likely. Will white southern Democrats favor Webb? Arguably. But he’s...

The risk of being raped in Sweden during one’s lifetime is one out of four (if every raped woman is only raped once), which is probably equal to the risk of being raped in countries in war, such as Iraq or Syria. When it comes to rapes, Islamized Sweden is already in a state of war. Sweden does not publish statistics on immigrant crime. If we want to have a hint about who is committing these tens of thousands of rapes and other types of sexual assaults yearly, we can turn to another Scandinavian country, Sweden’s neighbor Norway, the country...

Authorities on the alert to ensure only men attend much-anticipated football match in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabian authorities have intensified security around a stadium in the Red Sea city of Jeddah to ensure no woman could sneak in to watch a football match. ... Saudi Arabia has a very strict policy regarding female attendance at sports matches. Permissions are needed to allow foreign women to watch the matches in which their home teams play.

Two Saudi women detained for nearly a month in defiance of a ban on females driving were referred on Thursday to a court established to try terrorism cases ... The Specialized Criminal Court, to which their cases were referred, was established in the capital Riyadh to try terrorism cases but has also tried and handed long prison sentences to a number of human rights workers, peaceful dissidents, activists and critics of the government. For example, this year it sentenced a revered Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a vocal critic of the government, to death for sedition and sentenced a prominent...

Women and girls from Iraq's Yazidi religious minority forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State jihadist group have committed suicide or tried to, Amnesty International said on Tuesday. IS militants have overrun swathes of Iraq since June, declared a cross-border caliphate also encompassing parts of neighbouring Syria, and carried out a litany of abuses in both countries. The group has targeted Yazidis and other minorities in north Iraq in a campaign that rights group Amnesty said amounted to ethnic cleansing, murdering civilians and enslaving others for a fate that some captives consider even worse than death. "Many of those...

Two Yazidi sisters held captive by ISIS have told of how they tried to kill each other when they realised they were going to be sold as wives to terrorist fighters. Wafa, 27, and her sister, who has not been identified, were captured along with hundreds of other Yazidi women when the town on Sinjar fell into ISIS hands in August. Fearing they would be forced to marry or sold to another captor, they tried to strangle each other late at night and only stopped after other girls they were with woke up and separated them.

According to Islamic law, Muslim men can take “captives of the right hand” (Qur’an 4:3, 4:24, 33:50). ... The rape of captive women is also sanctioned in Islamic tradition: .. The Egyptian Sheikh Abu-Ishaq al-Huwayni declared in May 2011 that “we are in the era of jihad,” and that meant Muslims would take slaves ... on May 25, 2011, a female Kuwaiti politician, Salwa al-Mutairi, also spoke out in favor of the Islamic practice of sexual slavery of non-Muslim women, emphasizing that the practice accorded with Islamic law and the parameters of Islamic morality. ... Asian father-of-four raped pub worker...

During President Obama’s year-end press conference Friday, he took eight questions — all from women. .......Considering what turned out to be a poor ending for the year in women’s issues — namely campus sexual assault — Obama needed to bring attention back on women. Obama tried in April to spearhead a movement this year and continue the momentum of the “war on women” narrative, but it suffered a number of setbacks: Due process supporters piped up, a major story about campus rape was exposed as a hoax, Republicans defeated candidates who overdid the "war on women" theme. To put it...

The owners of the Miss World pageant have announced that there will be no swimsuit round in next year's competition. In an interview with Elle, chairwoman Julia Morley explained: 'I really... don't need to see women just walking up and down in bikinis. It doesn't do anything for the woman. And it doesn't do anything for any of us.' She added: 'I don't care if someone has a bottom two inches bigger than someone else's. We are really not looking at her bottom. We are really listening to her speak.'