Free Republic

After condemning the first openly homosexual presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, for his attack on Vice President Mike Pence’s Christian faith, Rev. Franklin Graham reminded the ultra-left Democrat that God is the One who decides what sin is – not man. “We don’t define sin – God does,” the world-renowned evangelist lectured Buttigieg on Facebook. Graham was referring to public criticism of Pence by the assumed Democratic presidential candidate during a speech for the LGBTQ Victory Fund over the weekend, in which he attacked the vice president’s biblical stance on same-sex "marriage." “That’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of...

Franklin Graham, one of the nation's most prominent Christian leaders, said Wednesday on the Todd Starnes Radio Show that the Trump presidency faces a grave, domestic threat. "I believe we are in a coup d'etat," Graham told Starnes. "There are people in this country who are wanting to destroy the president and take over the government by force." Graham, the president and CEO of Samaritan's Purse, warned that there are forces at work who want to "wrestle control of the government" away from Trump. "They are not going to use bullets. They are using the media – to plant thoughts...

One of the nation’s most prominent Christian leaders said he fears President Trump is facing a grave domestic threat by forces who want to take over the White House. "I believe we are in a coup d'etat," Franklin Graham said Wednesday on the "Todd Starnes Radio Show." "There are people in this country who are wanting to destroy the president and take over the government by force."

It’s hard to think of a single prominent American Christian who better illustrates the collapsing Evangelical public witness than Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son. His commitment to the Christian character of American public officials seems to depend largely on their partisan political identity. Let’s look at the record. In 1998, at the height of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, the younger Graham wrote a powerful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal combating Clinton’s assertion that his affair was a “private” matter. Clinton argued that his misdeeds were “between me, the two people I love the most — my wife and our...

<p>One of the natural consequences of spending your entire professional life opposing abortion and defending religious freedom is that you find yourself on the email list of virtually every Christian conservative group of any size or consequence. Normally, you receive a fount of press releases and petition requests, mainly aimed at Planned Parenthood, Democrats in Congress, or various leftist universities. So imagine my surprise when I received a series of emails from the American Family Association aimed at your humble correspondent.</p>

I go back and forth on Joe Biden’s chances at the Democratic nomination. On the one hand, we’ve seen him run two primary campaigns, and they both ended badly. Moreover, given the hard left turn of the much of the modern Democratic party, he could find himself constantly on the defensive about his long record in Washington. He voted for the Iraq War. His past tough-on-crime past could haunt him. And he’s got that embarrassing sniffing/kissing/hugging habit. But on the other hand, what if the universal, hard left turn by virtually every other candidate opens up a center-left superhighway to...

Before today, legal writers were guessing at the statutes the president would use to justify defying the will of Congress and using the military to build his border wall. Now we know. In his declaration, he’s exclusively using 10 U.S.C. 2808 to reallocate up to $3.6 billion from Department of Defense construction projects — more than double the amount that Congress allocated for wall construction in its border compromise. (He intends to use other funds as well for wall construction, but those aren’t applicable to the emergency declaration.)

I have no sympathy for Domineque Ray. The man was convicted of raping and murdering a 15-year-old girl, an act so heinous that the death penalty is appropriate and just. But Ray, no matter his crimes, still enjoyed the protections of the United States Constitution. Yet last night the state of Alabama and the Supreme Court failed to respect those protections at the most crucial of moments — they denied him access to an imam at the moment of his death. He could receive solace in the execution chamber from a Christian cleric, but his imam had to watch behind...

One striking feature of left-wing hostility to conservative Christianity is its insistence that opposition to secular progressive morality is proof of malign intent. Instead of asking whether progressive intolerance (or the selection of a corrupt Democratic candidate) played any part in the 81 percent white Evangelical opposition to Hillary Clinton, all too many progressives use that level of united opposition as grounds for further hatred. And, yes, there’s also the condescending sympathy: “They’re brainwashed by Fox. They’re voting against their interests.” Last summer I wrote an essay called the Great White Culture War. I argued that a great deal of...

A nation devoid of grace immiserates its people. When you think of the sheer vindictiveness of what happened to Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray, it takes your breath away. On the very night of his greatest career triumph, a reporter dug up his old tweets (composed when he was a young teenager), reported on the most offensive insults, and immediately and irrevocably transformed his online legacy. Now he’s not just “Kyler Murray, gifted quarterback and humble Heisman winner,” but also the man who was forced to apologize for his alleged homophobia. And for what purpose? Which cause did the reporter advance?...

If you like your Republican, you should keep your Republican. Tens of millions of Americans have mailed in their ballots already. Tomorrow, tens of millions more will go to the polls. I’m not confident how they’ll vote, but I am absolutely certain of one thing: Not one of them will see the name “Donald Trump” on the ballot. Instead, they will see different individuals with characters very different from Trump’s. They will see Republicans and Democrats with their own policy positions and their own rhetorical styles. Yet now voices from the left, the center, and what can only be called...

There is entirely insufficient evidence to prove even one of the terrible allegations against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. A very strange thing happened over the weekend: If you follow Twitter closely, you’ll notice that the debate over Brett Kavanaugh moved significantly from the central question of last Thursday’s hearing — did he commit sexual assault? — to a raging debate over whether he lied about high-school slang, college drinking, and inside jokes, and whether he was just too “angry” to be a Supreme Court judge. This torrent of commentary (most of it silly, including competing, furious arguments about how...

Yesterday I wrote a piece that’s gone viral — an extended denunciation of a terrible police shooting in Texas. A white officer went to black man’s apartment, apparently thinking it was her own. When she saw the man in the darkness, she claimed she thought he was a burglar. She shot him and killed him. It’s a horrifying story, and it’s not the only terrible police shooting to shock the American conscience. Whenever I write about police shootings, I get a similar critique. New readers will Google me and find that I’ve been strongly critical of Black Lives Matter. Yet...

Amber Guyger’s killing of Botham Shem Jean is an unspeakable tragedy. It also highlights the need for officers like Guyger to face impartial justice. It is hard to think of a more tragic, more senseless shooting in America than the killing last week of Botham Shem Jean, a young black risk-assurance associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and a member of Dallas West Church of Christ. This is what we know so far. Jean was home alone in his apartment in the South Side Flats complexin Dallas when police officer Amber Guyger entered and shot him dead. The precise chain of events is...

It’s easy to laugh at this weekend’s Unite the Right rally. It was pathetic. Media outnumbered white supremacists, and counterprotesters outnumbered the media. If that’s the alt-right in 2018, then public white supremacy in the United States is reverting back to its pre-2015 norm — when you could always find a couple dozen neo-Nazis to march somewhere, but you’d rarely see the kind of numbers we watched in Charlottesville. But as the alt-right fades (for now), let’s not forget its legacy. And let’s not turn our heads from its malignant influence. Consider what happened between 2015 and yesterday’s pitiful march.

The ad is here. Only after sustained complaint from conservatives has FaceBook relented and admitted, Whoops, look like we jumped the gun and banned another conservative message by "accident." Boy, is our face red. Funny how these mistakes only tend in a single direction. And note that without the social pressure applied against FaceBook, they would have remained firm in their initial decision to censor. And note that David French, Jonah Goldberg, Ben Shapiro et al. all criticize conservatives when they apply such social pressure to reverse the censorial decisions provoked by leftwing social pressure. All these fine defenders of...

Becoming president of the United States is one of the most difficult and consequential achievements for any person, in any place, in the entire world. The climb begins invariably against long odds, the process is grueling — for the candidate, his family, and his allies — and the prize is immense. With victory comes an informal title, the most powerful man in the world. It’s impossible to begin that journey without a measure of faith — in God, sometimes, in your team, sometimes, and in yourself, usually. If you decide to run, there has to be a belief not just...

Another Christian has lost his livelihood for good-faith wrongspeak. This time it was for articulating extremely basic Christian truth that it’s sinful to celebrate sexual immorality. Here’s BuzzFeed with the story: A high-ranking CrossFit employee was fired after tweeting his support for a CrossFit gym’s cancellation of a Pride event, citing his belief that celebrating LGBT pride is a “sin.” Russell Berger was the mega-successful fitness company’s chief knowledge officer, often de facto spokesperson, and a co-author of the Russells, a blog about scientific misconduct that he maintained with colleague Russell Greene. But Berger got into hot water Wednesday afternoon...

The United States is in the grips of a free-speech paradox. At the same time that the law provides more protection to personal expression than at any time in the nation’s history, large numbers of Americans feel less free to speak. The culprit isn’t government censorship but instead corporate, community and peer intimidation. Conservatives can recite the names of the publicly shamed from memory. There was Brendan Eich, hounded out of Mozilla for donating to a California ballot initiative that defined marriage as the union of a man and woman. There was James Damore, abruptly terminated from Google after he...

The demographic-inevitability thesis is less credible than ever. Last week, one of the most powerful men in America, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, endorsed as a “great read” a Medium article entitled “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War.” The article, by Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira, is one entry in a lengthy four-part series called “California Is the Future,” and it posits that there is “no bipartisan path forward for America.” Leyden and Teixeira believe that there are two competing economic systems, classes, and cultures, and that one has to win while the other has to lose....