Free Republic

Meilin Keen was studying for the bar exam and preparing to move to New York City last June when she started throwing up blood. Keen, 27 years old, learned days later that she has gastric cancer. She postponed the bar exam. Brain fog from chemotherapy made it hard to do her legal work. Surgeons removed her stomach in December. Keen is coming to terms with all that means for her diet, her health, even her dating life. “That’s a fun icebreaker: I don’t have a stomach anymore,” she said. Cancer is hitting more young people in the U.S. and around...

WASHINGTON (AP) - If gay service members are allowed to serve openly, the military will face another tough question: Should gay partners be entitled to military benefits? Momentum appears to be building for ending the ban on gays in the military. New rules ordered Thursday by Defense Secretary Robert Gates make it harder to discharge men and women under the policy known as "don't ask, don't tell." His decision is intended as a stopgap measure as Congress weighs whether to go along with President Barack Obama's request to repeal the law. Since the draft ended in 1973, spousal benefits have...

Two gay Iranians living in Britain say they fear for their lives after their partners were sentenced to death by Iranian authorities and their requests for asylum in Britain were denied. Advocates for Mehdi Kazemi, 19, and Pegah Emambakhsh, 40, say they will face harsh physical punishment, prison, and possible execution if forced to return Iran. The two cases have provoked an international public outcry and have increased scrutiny of British policies toward gay and lesbian asylum-seekers. While studying English and science in the U.K., Kazemi learned that his boyfriend had been executed for sodomy back in Iran. His father...

How to address a bitter, war-torn but still somehow giddy and deeply horny nation. My fellow Americans, we're not as royally screwed as everything Bush has done during his miserable term in office would have you believe.

What do the bitter neocon nominee and the amazing Oscar-bound film have in common? There is this theory, more of a truism really, tossed about like a fuzzy beach ball by the gurus and the masters and the mystics since Jesus was but a lint ball of possibility in the Great Belly Button of Time. . . .

You just pulled a thread with no profanity and no agression. Get your head out brother and let some late night discourse happen outside your own personal interests. "Do I fit in" was not offensive in any way except to demented the click that lurks here.

Just in time for your morning breakfast sausage, it's all-American rape and torture and rampant entirely condoned military sadism. Mmm, patriotism. The pictures are worth a thousand disgusted moans. It's all flag-draped coffins and dog chains and forced masturbation and pistol whippings and miserable bloody hooded Iraqi men -- not terrorists, just men -- with wires attached to their fingers and genitals and made to stand up for hours and days on end until their feet swell and their lungs collapse and their livers fail, and you can hear our stunned death-drunk nation cry: Hey, whatever happened to our nice,...

Can you hear the outcry? Can you feel the snippy puritanical heat? Can you feel John Ashcroft's hot, predatory breath bearing down on your life and your box of vibrators and your adult DVD collection and snatching away your copy of "Weapons of A-- Destruction #2" and smacking you across the face with a Bible, all before skipping off to the dungeon to feed the flying monkeys? Because while 9/11 and the process of gleefully decimating your civil liberties via the USA Patriot Act may have delayed him a few years, Ashcroft & Co. is back on the anti-porn warpath,...

<p>And then you hear the one about the "top Vatican official," one of those ultra-dour black-robed cardinals who never see daylight or the modern world or love, espousing the official Vatican line in a recent interview, claiming that condoms do not, in fact, prevent the transmission of the AIDS virus.</p>

<p>Did you hug a priest today? Run from a scary homosexual person? Coo over a copy of Bride's magazine? Fall on your knees and thank God Almighty that your child isn't yet gay or pagan or libertarian and if she is that's OK because it's nothing that regular lithium and electroshock therapy can't "cure"?</p>

I'm out. I didn't strike out. I wasn't thrown out. And above all, I wasn't forced out. I'm out because I no longer, in good conscience, choose to ignore the unabashed homophobia that is so cavalierly tolerated within the world of sports. I'm out, because the silence of a closeted gay man only serves to give his implicit approval to bigotry. I'm out, because I refuse to continue hiding from the truth that an openly gay man has as much right as a straight man to play sports or report on them. Frankly, I'm out because I can't come up...

<p>Hordes of quivering GOP lawmakers and vast throngs of proudly homophobic right-wing Christian Americans fell into an adorable tizzy the other day as the entire really, really big country of Canada announced it will change its law to allow full-on homosexual marriage anywhere in the whole country including Vancouver and Toronto and even "that weird province with all the gay French people."</p>