Free Republic

A push by activists to ease the 30-year-old blanket ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men faces a key test this week as a federal panel hears results of the latest research. The findings will be released amid growing pressure from politicians and advocates, including college students, to change the policy. Critics say the ban is a hangover from the early, fear-filled days of AIDS, stigmatizing gay men and ignoring advances in treatment and detection in the decades since...

BOULDER, Colo. -- Boulder Police are looking for a man who was seen hiding inside a portable toilet during last Friday’s Hanuman Yoga Festival at Boulder High School. “A female patron of the festival walked into a portable toilet and told police she noticed that something was moving inside the tank when she lifted the lid,” said police spokeswoman Kim Kobel. Believing there was a person inside, the female left the portable toilet and asked a man who was standing nearby to go in and check. “The man told police that when he entered the toilet, he did see someone...

DAYTONA BEACH -- The men's restroom on the second floor of the Volusia Mall Sears is no place for children, police said Wednesday with the release of surveillance photos of a man believed to have made sexual advances toward a 13-year-old boy. "Our biggest fear is children going into these bathrooms, especially with these predators circling around," Police Chief Mike Chitwood said. "It was just a matter of time before something like this was going to happen." The boy, visiting from Illinois with his godparents, was propositioned two weeks ago in the restroom, Chitwood said. The man was in a...

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) ― A Minneapolis man arrested in the same airport bathroom sex sting that netted U.S. Senator Larry Craig has been acquitted. Thirty-nine-year-old Vince Tuzon used a similar argument to Craig in pleading not guilty. Tuzon claimed he wasn't guilty because the police officer initiated the foot-tapping. A Hennepin County jury agreed with Tuzon. His lawyer says Tuzon feels he was set up after being "essentially bombarded with overtures" while in the bathroom. A Metropolitan Airports Commission spokesman says they were "disappointed" with the verdict. Craig was arrested June 11 in the same operation. The Idaho senator first pleaded...

AMSTERDAM, 08/03/08 - The police's National Diversity Expertise Centre (LECD) wants sex allowed in all public parks in the Netherlands. The police institute has advised the cities to follow the example of Amsterdam, De Telegraaf newspaper reported Friday. In Amsterdam's Vondelpark, owners of dogs let off the leash can be fined, but sex will shortly be permitted. "Why should we try to maintain something that is actually impossible to maintain, which also causes little bother for others and for a certain group actually signifies much pleasure?" says Paul van Grieken, the responsible Alderman in the Oud-Zuid district of Amsterdam. Van...

SAN FRANCISCO - The San Francisco Fire Department is investigating a tailgate party involving about 30 off-duty firefighters outside a soup kitchen run by nuns with Mother Teresa's order - and the rumor that a booze-fueled firefighter may have groped a female kitchen volunteer, then dropped his pants in front of a second volunteer in a bathroom. According to those familiar with the investigation, it all began when the off-duty firefighters were holding a barbeque at the old fire station just down Third Street from AT&T Park after attending a Giants day game Aug. 29. The brick building is the...

TITUSVILLE - State Rep. Bob Allen told police he was just playing along when a undercover officer suggested in a public restroom that the legislator give him oral sex and $20 because he was intimidated, according to a taped statement and other documents released Thursday. Allen has already denied any wrongdoing, but the recordings and documents offered new details about what he and police say happened on July 11 inside the men's room at Veterans Memorial Park. "I certainly wasn't there to have sex with anybody and certainly wasn't there to exchange money for it," said Allen, R-Merritt Island, who...

A gay Web site’s praise of bawdy bathroom behavior in Malden City Hall has sparked a tempest over the toilet. The mayor is ordering the first-floor men’s room to remain open while city councilors want it locked up or a security plan put in place. “The public needs these kinds of facilities and I don’t see the need of closing it,” said Malden Mayor Richard Howard, adding others are “overreacting” to the gay site. An anonymous letter sent to the City Council alerted them to a five-star ranking on the Gay Universe site for male-on-male sexual encounters in the stalls.The...

A gay Web site's praise of bawdy bathroom behavior in Malden City Hall has sparked a tempest over the toilet. The mayor is ordering the first-floor men's room to remain open while city councilors want it locked up or a security plan put in place. "The public needs these kinds of facilities and I don't see the need of closing it," said Malden Mayor Richard Howard, adding others are "overreacting" to the gay site. An anonymous letter sent to the City Council alerted them to a five-star ranking on the Gay Universe site for male-on-male sexual encounters in the stalls....

Sodom and Gomorrah University -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: February 19, 2003 Thank goodness for conservative college student journalists. They bravely blow the whistle on the cultural rot plaguing the nation's institutions of higher learning. And they alert the public to the ugly truth about campus hedonism, which is downplayed by clueless administrators, admissions flacks and faculty enablers. Just how dangerously out of control has the campus social environment become? A recent report by student journalists Seth R. Norman and Ashley Rudmann of the California Patriot, the conservative journal at the University of California, Berkeley, provides some hair-raising answers. According to Norman and...