Free Republic

BASEL, August 25, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Kindergarten children in Basel, Switzerland will be presented this year with fabric models of human genitalia in a “sex box” to teach them that “contacting body parts can be pleasurable.” The kit for teachers to give sex-education lessons to primary school children uses models and recommends having children massage each other or to rub themselves with warm sand bags, accompanied by soft music, according to The Local, a Swiss newspaper in English. “Children should be encouraged to develop and experience their sexuality in a pleasurable way,” Daniel Schneider, a deputy kindergarten rector for Basel...

Neil Postman was right, even if it makes me sound like a snob to say it. That's the obvious, if painful, conclusion I reached after watching some of the television news coverage of evacuees from Lebanon last week. Especially the first few boatloads. As Postman warned more than 20 years ago, it wasn't George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four Big- Brother nightmare that was dangerous to Western societies. It was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World-type scenario, in which people come "to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think," against which we should have guarded. In the foreword to his seminal...

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Thanks to the "intelligent design" movement, Charles Darwin's birthday is evolving into everything from a badminton party to church sermons this weekend. Defenders of Darwin's theory of natural selection are planning hundreds of events around the world Sunday, the 197th anniversary of his birth, saying recent challenges to the teaching of evolution have re-emphasized the need to promote his work. "The people who believe in evolution ... really just sort of need to stand up and be counted," said Richard Leventhal, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. "Evolution is the model that...