Free Republic

March 17, 1973: A special evening with country music legend Merle Haggard in the East Room of the White House on St. Patrick's Day, 1973. Includes performances and a reading of a poem Haggard wrote for First Lady Pat Nixon on the occasion of her birthday. The program was filmed and produced by the Naval Photographic Center. The Naval Photographic Center White House Motion Film Unit Collection consists of motion film coverage of selected official activities of President Nixon filmed between 1969 and 1974.

It was a cold, solemn day on the Texas ranch. A biting, prairie wind was staved off with a thick, fur coat wrapped around an American music icon. Former President Lyndon B. Johnson had said before he died that at his burial he wanted the Rev. Billy Graham to pray and Anita Bryant to sing. Bryant, once Miss Oklahoma and a Miss America second runner-up, was known in 1973 as the vivacious spokeswoman for Florida orange juice and the Sunshine State. She nervously tried to get her voice ready to sing for a worldwide satellite television audience at the president’s...

I remember when Christians used to actually believe in Christianity. Those were the days. (Some still do, but their numbers are shrinking.) Back then, you could still visit an average (Protestant) church and hear a pastor actually teach real doctrine and share authentic insights. You could hear his thoughts on how to live an upright Christian life, or on why bad things might happen to good people, or how Christian marriages might be improved. And you could hear it all supported by actual Bible passages. After the sermon, you could hear the congregation sing hymns affirming the importance of obedience,...

What has happened to conservapedia.com? I haven't been able to access it for the last few days. The website appears to have disappeared. Does anyone know what happened to it?

February 17, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – A few years ago, the best way to trigger an advocate for redefining marriage to include same-sex couples would be to note that once the gender of those involved in the marriage became arbitrary, there really was no reason, strictly speaking, that the number of partners involved should be limited, either. This logical argument—that once you redefine one characteristic of an institution, there is no reason you can’t redefine others, too—was extremely inconvenient for the activists who recognized that they needed to move the Overton Window slowly enough that nobody would get too alarmed. It...

OKLAHOMA CITY, January 28, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – The City of San Francisco and the State of California have gained notoriety over the past few years for banning city employees from paid work trips to states with conservative values, and now the Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt has decided to return the favor. Stitt issued an executive order last week banning state-funded travel to California, citing the Golden State’s intolerance of pro-life neighbors, KFOR reported. “California and its elected officials over the past few years have banned travel to the State of Oklahoma in an effort to politically threaten and intimidate...

Celebrated Christian evangelist Franklin Graham has taken issue with the Democrats’ extreme push of the LGBTQ agenda, saying he will stand with biblical morality. “I will not bow down at the altar of the LGBTQ agenda nor worship their rainbow pride flag,” Rev. Graham said in reaction to Beto O’Rourke’s promise to strip churches of their tax-exempt status if they do not recognize homosexual marriage. “I’m going to stand with the Word of God, the Holy Bible, which is truth from cover to cover,” Graham added in a three-part tweet Friday evening. Rev. Graham, the son of “America’s Pastor,” Billy...

Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Harvard, 2013) is an impressively learned and important book. Still a youngish man (which means younger than me), Harper is already a professor of classics and letters and senior vice president and provost at the University of Oklahoma. As an expert in the history of the late Roman world, Harper explores in this volume how the Christian sexual ethic, so despised and seemingly inconsequential in the first century, came to be codified in law by the sixth century. Harper does not take sides in this...

This Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people in history to walk on the Moon. But it’s also the anniversary of the a lesser known event—the first celebration of the Lord’s Supper on the Moon. Here’s are nine things you should know about the first communion service on the Moon. 1. In 1969, Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. was an elder at Webster Presbyterian Church, a congregation just outside of Houston, Texas. He told the lead pastor of his church, Dean Woodruff, that he had “been...

Just as its loudest opponents feared, granting same-sex couples access to marriage has further aligned the hoary institution with sexual choice, helping sever the link between sex and diapers—at just the moment when abortion rights face their greatest test in a generation. If you want to understand the sexual revolution in a nutshell, read Nathaniel Frank’s Washington Post column from a few days ago. He argues that the gay rights movement has been at the forefront of decoupling sex from procreation and of establishing sexual liberation as a driving norm. Frank writes:

Have the present-day progressives who say they admire him ever read him? The American Left has an abiding attachment to Theodore Roosevelt. Everyone from MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews to former Harvard University Press editor-in-chief Aida D. Donald keeps Roosevelt on hand as a stand-in example of a “good Republican” — invoked, perhaps, when the name of Abraham Lincoln has been outworn, and a new exemplar of “acceptable” Republicanism is needed. A “trans-partisan” figure and an original “progressive,” Roosevelt represents what the GOP could have been. But on the social issues that loom so large in the liberal Democratic mind, just...

You know that things have really spiralled downward when Princeton atheist and bioethicist — Peter Singer — is defending Israel Folau and his freedom to express his Christian convictions. Singer writes: [Folau’s] post no more expresses hatred toward homosexuals than cigarette warnings express hatred toward smokers. The only rational reason that anyone would get so upset about Folau’s post is if you actually believe that he is speaking the truth about heaven and hell. Singer continues: [Folau’s beliefs] do not trouble me, because there is, in my view, no god, no afterlife, and no hell. Nor do I differentiate, ethically,...

In honor of her 79th birthday today, this playlist is Anita Bryant's 1968 album of classic hymns.

Next month marks the 40th anniversary of two landmark events of American popular culture: the assassination of pioneering gay politician Harvey Milk, and the mass suicide of 900 members of the Peoples Temple cult. If you remember anything about the mass suicide, it’s probably that cult leader Jim Jones was a fundamentalist Christian demon whose Bible-thumping berated brainwashed followers into drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Harvey Milk, by contrast, is a folk hero. The San Francisco supervisor became a gay-rights saint because he was martyred by a right-wing fanatic. That’s the received history in both cases. But according to author Daniel Flynn,...

LONDON, September 12, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A homosexual student group at Goldsmiths, University of London, is under fire for a series of tweets defending the idea of sending dissenters to “gulags” for forced re-education. The exchange began during a Twitter debate over “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs), feminists who refuse to recognize men who “identify” as female to be "women." The group LGBTQ+ Goldsmiths had called for targeting feminist academics they considered to be TERFs, the Daily Telegraph reports. “The ideas of TERFS and anti-trans bigots literally *kill* and must be eradicated through re-education,” LGBTQ+ Goldsmiths claimed, then threatened to “arrange...

Some of you reading this may remember a time when the word “ethics” was a meaningful term and “ethicists” were people who sought to discover and define right and wrong. In these modern times, however, our society lurches back and forth with breakneck speed from moral relativism to progressive totalitarianism—everything is moral, except for telling someone that their behavior is immoral. In this post-modern society, the task of ethicists is now to find ways to justify nearly everything. They are explorers without compasses or maps—because we no longer have any objective authority on what is right or wrong in the...

BOSTON, July 19, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) -- By a 136-9 margin, the Massachusetts House has voted to repeal the state’s old, unenforced bans on abortion and contraception that predate Roe v. Wade. The Negating Archaic Statutes Targeting Young (NASTY) Women Act, named after a campaign trail insult President Donald Trump leveled at his Democrat opponent Hillary Clinton which feminists embraced as a rallying cry, is meant to ensure that abortion remains legal in Massachusetts even if a more conservative Supreme Court repeals Roe in the near future. "Today, nasty women and their nasty men are here to say we're not going...

In honor of Independence Day, this is the conservative Christian singer's rendition of the National Anthem from her Columbia Records 1966 patriotic album "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory". Happy 4th of July to all!

How Legalizing Abortion Undermines The Basis For A Free Society Ireland’s abortion legalization erodes the very foundations of human dignity upon which self-government depends. Ireland voted to repeal its long-standing abortion ban on Friday, overturning a constitutional amendment that protected “the right to life of the unborn,” requiring legislators to consider the inherent worth of the fetus in all legislative decisions. In the span of just 35 years, Ireland’s overwhelmingly Catholic population has drifted, in public attitudes and votes, from entrenching the rights of the unborn to laying the foundation for stripping them away. Newspapers around the world are hailing...