Free Republic

CNN anchor Don Lemon went after Trump voters yet again following the president's speech at the Republican National Convention Thursday, saying they must suffer from "cognitive dissonance" to support someone Lemon described as a "bad person." Lemon's colleague Chris Cuomo had told him that the president's supporters had concluded that despite Trump's flaws, "Joe Biden will be worse" for the country. Cuomo theorized that Trump's voters are willing to "forgive" Trump's wrongdoings rather than vote for the Democrat. "I think you're letting them off easy," Lemon responded. "I don't believe that it's just because they think Joe Biden would be...

An openly gay Texas judge says she refuses to conduct marriage ceremonies for straight couples. No one tried to put her in jail. No federal judges tried to condemn her. The Dallas County Judge Tonya Parker explained her decision at a monthly meeting for the Stonewall Democrats of Dallas. “I do not perform them because it is not an equal application of the law. Period,” she said, according to the Dallas Voice, a newspaper for the gay community. Parker is believed to be the first openly “gay” African-American elected official in the history of the state, according to NY Daily...

W. C. Harris is a radical gay activist and Professor of Queer Studies and Early American Literature. He says that homosexuals are still cruelly oppressed in America, even though some of them may end up with very comfortable jobs as university professors.... He is particularly angry with the Christian right for oppressing him.... So he would like to abolish Christianity altogether....and replace it with that he wittily calls “Gaytheism,” i.e., homosexual atheism. Unlike beastly old Christianity, this new religion will meet our spiritual needs with “new forms of community that do not harass and malign gay and lesbian Americans or...

To most ears, it probably sounds inoffensive. A little outdated and clinical, perhaps, but innocuous enough: homosexual. But that five-syllable word has never been more loaded, more deliberately used and, to the ears of many gays and lesbians, more pejorative. “ ‘Homosexual’ has the ring of ‘colored’ now, in the way your grandmother might have used that term, except that it hasn’t been recuperated in the same way,” said George Chauncey, a Yale professor of history and an author who studies gay and lesbian culture. Consider the following phrases: homosexual community, homosexual activist, homosexual marriage. Substitute the word “gay” in...

Thomas Bayard, a former senator and secretary of state, became the first American diplomat to be given the title “ambassador” when he was sent to London in 1893. Since then a few thousand people have had that honor. But only three of them have been openly gay. That is about to change. Last month, President Obama put forward the names of five openly gay nominees for ambassadorial posts. It’s a remarkable step, though possibly less revolutionary than it appears. For while the nominations reflect the change in public attitudes toward the LGBT community, they also show the importance of domestic...