Free Republic

Water torture of babies is one way some members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day instil fear of authority, a former member testified Wednesday. "It's quite common," Carolyn Blackmore Jessop told the constitutional reference case to determine whether Canada's polygamy law is valid. "They spank the baby and when it cries, they hold the baby face up under the tap with running water. When they stop crying, they spank it again and the cycle is repeated until they are exhausted." It's typically done by fathers and it's called "breaking in," she said. Ms. Jessop, who is...

Jones and his family were under marshals' protection in December. In the days after U.S. Judge John E. Jones III issued his decision in Dover's intelligent design case, outraged people sent threatening e-mails to his office. Jones won't discuss details of the e-mails, or where they might have come from, but he said they concerned the U.S. Marshals Service. So, in the week before Christmas, marshals kept watch over Jones and his family. While no single e-mail may have reached the level of a direct threat, Jones said, the overall tone was so strident, marshals "simply determined the tenor was...

In case you're still not sure just how destructive the Bush administration has become to this country, you need to read Michael Specter's piece in the March 13 issue of the New Yorker magazine. It's enough to give you the willies. Specter documents how the Bush people have stacked the Food and Drug Administration with fanatics who regularly trump science to advance their own religious beliefs. It reads like a modern-day Galileo being persecuted by the Catholic Church because he maintained Earth was round. Although Specter cites several examples of religious beliefs thwarting scientific advances by key appointees to the...

<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>