Free Republic

Commentators at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times may decry the Episcopal Church as a place offering pet funerals but nothing for the faithful or failing to provide anything one cannot get from purely secular liberalism. These traditionalists appear to bemoan the loss of a 1950s-era church that promoted an Eisenhower-era civil religion replete with the cross draped in the American flag. While they wax nostalgia over a past that largely existed only in TV Land,.the Episcopal Church made history at its 77th triennial General Convention by passing two gender nondiscrimination resolutions. Led by a grassroots coalition...

A Buhler USD 313 teacher/coach has caused a stir by writing on his Facebook page last week that homosexuality is a sin and ranks in God's eyes the same as the sin of murder. The Kansas Equality Coalition criticized what Prairie Hills Middle School social studies teacher/Buhler High School assistant freshman women's basketball coach Jack Conkling wrote. It also urged USD 313 to review its policy on social media and bullying, whether by students or teachers. ----------advertisement----------- Jon Powell, chairman of the Hutchinson chapter of the Kansas Equality Coalition, said Conkling's "inflammatory statements" could make students think it's OK to...

Can the president kill an American simply because the person is dangerous and his arrest would be impractical? Can the president be judge, jury and executioner of an American in a foreign country because he believes that would keep America safe? Can Congress authorize the president to do this? Earlier this week, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder attempted to justify presidential killing in a speech at Northwestern University law school. In it, he recognized the requirement of the Fifth Amendment for due process. He argued that the president may substitute the traditionally understood due process -- a public jury trial...

SAN BERNARDINO - Army Spec. Christopher Sullivan survived a suicide bombing while serving a tour in Afghanistan for the U.S. Army last December. Now his family is on pins and needles again, after a gunman shot Sullivan during his welcome-home party Friday in San Bernardino. "My son didn't deserve this. He served his country," said his mother, Suzanne Sullivan, a San Bernardino resident. Sullivan, 22, a 2008 San Bernardino High School graduate who was stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky., was taken to a hospital for treatment of gunshot wounds. His condition was not known, but family members described him as...

Her (INS Agent Mill's) instructions: Locate Elian, get him safely into a waiting van, and stay with him and allay his fears until federal agents reunited him with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.After Elian was found in a closet, Mills told him in Spanish: ``I know this seems frightening to you now, but it will all be over very soon,'' said Russ Bergeron, director of media relations for the INS. ``She told him: `We're not going to take you to Cuba. We're not going to put you on a raft. We're taking you...

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will give remarks at the Department’s first-ever Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) youth summit at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, June 7, at the Washington Court Hotel in Washington, D.C. The two-day summit, “Creating and Maintaining Safe and Supportive Environments for LGBT Youth,” will take place Monday-Tuesday, June 6-7. Duncan will highlight the administration’s commitment to ensuring equal access to education for LGBT students as it does for all students. He also will discuss the Department’s Office for Civil Rights recently released guidance on the protection against harassment in an education setting based on gender,...

After decades of debate, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on Tuesday struck down a barrier to ordaining gays, ratifying a proposal that removes the celibacy requirement for unmarried clergy, in the latest mainline Protestant move toward accepting gay relationships... Differences over the Bible and homosexuality have split Protestant groups nationally and worldwide for years. Within the Presbyterian Church, about 100 of the 11,000 congregations had already broken away ahead of the vote, but a group of large theologically conservative congregations, which calls itself Fellowship, has decided to remain in the denomination for now. Top Presbyterian executives issued a statement to the...

Where would we be without labor unions? We would be much better off. Americans do not understand what "labor unions" mean. Nothing prevents a group of workers at a plant or office from getting together, signing an agreement which delegates power to negotiate contracts to certain representatives, and then proceeding with collective bargaining by those workers who chose to sign the agreement. That is not unionism; it is simply a business arrangement, much like when an athlete has an agent or a client has a lawyer. The problem with unionism is that those who do not feel such an agreement...

Joy Behar ripped the House of Representatives on her program on Monday for their recent defunding of Planned Parenthood. Behar, focusing on the organization's birth control services, criticized the move as "illogical...because if you are not going to help people with birth control, you're going to have more abortions. So, besides being evil and immoral and unethical, they're also stupid". The liberal host led her 10 pm program by playing clips from Democratic Congresswoman Gwen Moore's Thursday speech on the floor of the House, where she argued that funding Planned Parenthood was better than having "to

Sluthood wasn't always considered a virtue. Most normal, rational people look at sleeping around as something sad and wrong. It's not healthy, physically or mentally, it can be damaging to a young girl's reputation, and it can also be incredibly dangerous. Women that sleep around oftentimes end up feeling used and regret their choices when they get older and decide to settle down. Other women end up contracting STDs, which may or may not be treatable. For these reasons and more, being a slut is understandably looked down upon -- it can be genuinely harmful. Today's pseudo-feminists, however, have...

ELCA Presiding Bishop Tells ELCA Leaders it's Time to Move Forward 10-261-JB CHICAGO (ELCA) -- In a report to leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, ELCA presiding bishop, said it is time for the church to move forward and get over being "timid" about mission and ministry. "In the name of Jesus Christ our days of timidity are over," Hanson told the ELCA Conference of Bishops, ELCA synod vice presidents and ELCA seminary presidents Oct. 2. "I just think we have to say it. And we have to say it with the...

To claim that by opposing the gay agenda the Church is acting in an unloving manner is patently untrue. It is considered negligent to allow or actively support action, drug abuse for example, that you know is both dangerous and destructive. Imagine being accused of bigotry after forbidding such action in one of your children. Yet Church opposition of the homosexual agenda draws angry criticism from those who claim her stance on homosexuality is based solely on religious bigotry against homosexuals. [...] To make the issue and argument solely about what the Bible or Catechism says is to deliberately misconstrue...

There’s big money in this. A patient will die without the organ. TI promises the organ. There then are middlemen and doctors and hospitals and airflights and all that sort of network set up to see it through. Just be patient. That is, let the patient be patient. Before the patient dies, hopefully he will receive that organ from China.

Mecklenburg Co. Commissioner Bill James referred to another commissioner’s son as a ‘homo’ during a meeting Tuesday. What should happen to James after this incident?

Mary Landrieu needs to be harassed for every day for the rest of her term about this. They ought to try to recall her if it's possible in Louisiana to do so. For the whole series of Zero-Themed artwork, go here: " Flickr Archive of Zero-Themed Artwork"

Germany is traditionally tolerant of nudity, but a plan to give naked ramblers their own wilderness path is still some way from the sunny uplands. ... A sign has been put up warning those averse to naturism that they might prefer to go elsewhere. "If you don't want to see people with nothing on then you should refrain from moving on," it reads.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi accused health insurance companies of making "immoral profits" on PBS' "Newshour." "They're making billions of dollars in profits while they're cutting off people for benefits," she added."

The announcement that the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA, has chosen a lesbian, pro-abortion president to lead the seminary has sent shock waves around the Anglican Communion. The appointment of Katherine Hancock Ragsdale highlights a week that also saw TEC bishop-elect Kevin Thew Forrester replace a reading from the New Testament with a reading from the Quran at St. Paul's Marquette, Michigan. One wonders what Episcopal boundaries and barriers have yet to be crossed that the dying embers of historic Christianity could possibly fan into life. That the Diocese of Massachusetts has a functioning transgendered priest complete with a...

GOP Leader Blasts Media Bias in House Floor Speech @ 3:20 pm by Michael O'Brien An alleged liberal bias by journalists covering recent scandals was enough "breaking news" to House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who took to the floor of the House yesterday to complain. "The national media spells scandal without the 'D,'" Smith alleged during one-minute speeches by members on the House floor Monday. "Two weeks ago the Governor of Illinois was removed from office," he added. "All three television networks ran full reports on the story the same night and again the following morning. Not...

Why not just give everyone a check and let the public spend our way out of this. Kind of like a mega tax cut. Why bail out the greedy risk takers?