Free Republic

A federal judge says the Saucon Valley School District must allow the After School Satan Club to meet in one of its schools. The club will be allowed to meet at the middle school on the dates previously approved by the school district. Those dates were the second Wednesday of March, April and May. U.S. District Judge John Gallagher on Monday granted the After School Satan Club’s preliminary injunction request to meet in the schools as its full lawsuit plays out in court. The judge will make a final ruling later. The school district revoked permission for the club to...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday invalidated a ruling by a lower court on a Pennsylvania case that involved the counting of undated mail-in ballots, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.The Supreme Court ruled on a decision that the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made in May in a case involving the 2021 election of Judge Zachary Cohen, ordering the state to count 257 mail-in ballots that lacked a necessary date on the return envelope.The lower court ruled that the date requirement was "immaterial" and said there was no reason to exclude the ballots that had previously been set aside due...

Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) warned us about Kristen Clarke. Cruz called the radical lawyer “completely unfit to serve,” but serve she does as the Biden Administration’s chief of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice (DOJ). Her department is where equal justice now goes to die. Clarke considers her calling in Biden’s Justice Department one of score-settling for past decisions, holding contemporaries responsible for historical injustices, and chasing ghosts of the past. She greenlit the federal case against Mark Houck, a Pennsylvania Catholic pro-life author, whose seven children screamed for mercy...

New information confirms that a massive FBI raid on the home of a pro-life family in Pennsylvania and the arrest of a father of seven children was based on a bogus charge that a court had already dismissed. As LifeNews reported, Joe Biden’s FBI has raided the home of a well-known pro-life advocate and arrested him in front of his crying children on a bogus charge that had already been thrown out of court. Biden’s administration is coming under fire for weaponizing the FBI and Department of Justice to target pro-life conservatives. Mark Houck, a father of seven, is frequently...

On reading about the Saturday arrest of pro-life activist Mark Houck, I thought the author at this alternative site had to be exaggerating. It struck me as beyond belief that two dozen or so armed FBI agents would swarm the house of a Catholic father of seven, rifles drawn, and arrest him in front of his weeping children for anything short of murder. I have had to recalibrate my belief system. The “crime” fell quite a bit short of murder. On October 13, 2021, Houck brought his 12-year-old son with him for his weekly sidewalk counseling outside of a Planned...

Amos Miller, an Amish farmer who runs a holistically managed small farm in Bird-In-Hand, Pennsylvania, grows and prepares food in tune with nature, the way he believes God intended. This seems like a sound idea to the approximately 4,000 customers who purchase Miller’s meat, eggs and dairy products from his private, members-only food club. The federal government, however, appears to disagree. A federal judge recently ordered Miller to cease and desist all meat sales, Our Organic Wellness reported. U.S. marshals were deployed to search Miller’s property. They inventoried his stock to assure he doesn’t sell or slaughter more animals. In...

A U.S. District judge in Pennsylvania has ruled that the First Amendment does not guarantee the right to record police unless the video is meant to be used as evidence. Judge Mark Kearney made the ruling against Philadelphians Richard Fields and Amanda Geraci, whose cameras were confiscated by police while the two were recording the officers breaking up a house party. The Third Circuit judge ruled that unless police are recorded with the "stated purpose of being critical of the government," any such video isn't protected speech.

Dear President Trump, It was my great honor to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in your Administration. You asked me to prioritize public safety, and that is exactly what I did. While Larry Krasner, the radical leftist Philadelphia District Attorney, was letting violent criminals go and refusing to prosecute rioters, looters, and arsonists, our Office was putting them in jail and standing up for law-abiding citizens. In the spring of 2020, I prosecuted and won an election fraud case against a Judge of Elections in South Philadelphia who was stuffing the ballot box. I also...

In an ironic twist of events, the Pound Cake speech in which Bill Cosby famously (or, perhaps, infamously) criticized the black family and black neighborhood for what he deemed unsavory behavior was used to open the comedian to public scrutiny surrounding sexual assault allegations against him.

Catholic League President Bill Donohue praised Thursday’s Supreme Court’s ruling in Fulton v. Philadelphia, calling it a “huge victory for religious liberty.” In its decision, the U.S. Supreme Court said that Catholic foster care agencies can reject gay couples when placing children for adoption. “This is a huge victory for religious liberty and a resounding defeat for LGBTQ activists,” Donohue said in his essay. The original case against Catholic foster care, in fact, did not stem from any complaints of discrimination but was the result of gay activists who “launched a contrived assault on the rights of Catholic social service...

The Supreme Court unanimously overturned a lower court ruling that allowed the City of Philadelphia to ban Catholic Social Services from participating in the city's foster care program, saying the city violated the organization's First Amendment rights.

By now, it’s well-established that most of the arguments put forward by President Trump’s reelection campaign in its challenge of the results of the 2020 election are baseless and highly speculative. Even Trump allies, as The Washington Post reported late Tuesday, acknowledge the apparent futility of the effort. Others have reasoned that there’s no harm in going through the motions, with one anonymous GOP official asking, “What’s the downside for humoring him” for a little while? .... The most famous scene came in Pennsylvania, where a Trump lawyer strained to avoid acknowledging that their people were, in fact, allowed to...

A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Wednesday weighed arguments by Republicans seeking to stop a suburban Philadelphia county from counting mail-in and absentee ballots that voters had been permitted to correct. U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage in Philadelphia appeared skeptical of arguments by the plaintiffs’ lawyer, which lawyers for Montgomery County election officials and the Democratic National Committee said could disenfranchise voters. The Pennsylvania lawsuit had been filed by Kathy Barnette, a conservative political commentator projected to lose her race for a House seat in the state’s 4th Congressional district, and Clay Breece, chairman of the Republican Committee in Berks...

South Philadelphia residents are outraged after a federal judge cleared the way for a safe injection site in the city. The planned site is not where it was originally proposed and some of the neighbors from the new location are not happy. Councilman Mark Squilla says the site will be at Constitution Health Plaza, near Broad and McKean Streets, in South Philadelphia. During Wednesday’s contentious press conference, promised facts about the forthcoming opening of the city’s first injection site were overshadowed by a lot of back and forth between angry community members and the heads of nonprofit agency Safehouse, which...