Free Republic

Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz said Thursday that Starbucks' bathrooms will now be open to everyone, whether paying customers or not. "We don't want to become a public bathroom, but we're going to make the right decision 100 percent of the time and give people the key," Schultz said at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. "Because we don't want anyone at Starbucks to feel as if we are not giving access to you to the bathroom because you are 'less than.' We want you to be 'more than.' " Two black men, business partners Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson,...

The Episcopal General Convention is scheduled to meet next summer in Austin, the Lone Star State's capitol city, where July temperatures easily soar into the triple digits beneath a blazing Texas sun suspended in a cloudless azure sky. However, as the Episcopal Executive Council prepared to meet in Lithicum Heights, Maryland, the two presiding officers of General Convention -- Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and House of Deputies President Gay Clark Jennings -- penned a joint letter to the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, Joe Straus (R-San Antonio) protesting Texas' latest privacy bill which, if passed, would "require Texas...

Politics, it has been said, makes strange bedfellows; and what could be stranger than an alliance of Christian pro-family activists and radical feminists? Yet that is precisely what has occurred in response to the Obama administration’s attempt to force schools to open up sex-segregated private spaces to “transgender” individuals.The Family Policy Alliance (FPA), a public-policy partner of Focus on the Family, has joined with the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), which describes itself as “a radical feminist organization dedicated to the total liberation of women,” to oppose the administration’s “bathroom policy.”That policy, articulated last year in directives from the Justice and...

(WND) – State looks to allow men who identify as women to use restroom of choice A move by the state of Iowa to classify churches as “public accommodations” and require them to allow men who say they are women to use women’s restrooms is causing an “objectively reasonable” fear that they will be prosecuted, a federal judge has ruled. U.S. District Judge Stephanie Rose refused to dismiss a case brought by the Fort Des Moines Church of Christ against the state’s Civil Rights Commission, finding that the church already was self-censoring its statements because of a fear of prosecution....

Adding to the handful of lawsuits involving transgender students across the country, lawyers representing a group of 51 families in a Chicago suburb asked a federal judge to temporarily suspend a school policy that grants a transgender student access to the girls’ restrooms and locker rooms. “Every parent sends their kids to school expecting that the school is going to protect them at the most basic level—their safety, their privacy, their dignity,” Jeremy Tedesco, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the case, said after the hearing wrapped on Monday afternoon. “What we’re asking for is a temporary injunction that will...