Free Republic

President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine to be his assistant secretary of health, leaving her poised to become the first transgender federal official to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. A pediatrician and former Pennsylvania physician general, Levine was appointed to her current post by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf in 2017, making her one of the few transgender people serving in elected or appointed positions nationwide. She won past confirmation by the Republican-majority Pennsylvania Senate and has emerged as the public face of the state's response to the coronavirus pandemic. “Dr. Rachel Levine will bring the...

The Biden unity train leaves on Wednesday at noon. The theme is unity and coming together. Unfortunately, the Biden team is planning to bring us together by tearing us apart. This is from the AP: "Transgender athletes are getting an ally in the White House next week as they seek to participate as their identified gender in high school and college sports -- although state legislatures, Congress and the courts are all expected to have their say this year, too. Attorneys on both sides say they expect president-elect Joe Biden’s Department of Education will switch sides in two key legal...

We are not yet three weeks into 2021, President-elect Joe Biden has yet to be inaugurated and already powerful forces on the right have made clear what will be the next front in their so-called culture war. This time, they’ve chosen transgender youth as their target, seeking to capitalize on insidious stereotypes about trans people, preposterous pseudoscience and a divisive cadre of supposed women’s rights campaigners who believe the only way to achieve gender equality is to oppress other people. These efforts to attack trans young people are driven by the same fundamental goals as previous attempts to restrict all...

California Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, on Thursday proposed a bill that would allow transgender and nonbinary public college students to use their preferred names instead of their birth names on diplomas. According to Chiu, recently introduced Assembly Bill 245 will ensure that diplomas don't mistakenly use a graduate's birth name, if they prefer to use a chosen name. Chu said the bill is especially important since transgender and nonbinary people face higher rates of discrimination in the workplace. Not having their preferred name on their diploma can create even more challenges, especially if the individual chooses not to openly...

Life Under Liberalism’s Lies Even as liberals deny the most basic biological realities, they hold themselves out as champions of “science.” The transgenderism to which they subscribe rests on an obvious repudiation of science. Calling men women and women men represents the triumph of a reality-defying subjectivism in our public life. During the Trump years, we heard a lot from Democrats about the importance of “norms.” But most of their energy is devoted to blowing them up, particularly moral norms.For all of his talk of restoring “truth,” “facts,” and “science” to the White House, Joe Biden peddles that fantasy more...

In early December, Netflix dropped its highly anticipated musical comedy “The Prom,” starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Andrew Rannells and James Corden asfading Broadway stars who set out to help a lesbian teen take her girlfriend to the prom. The film, helmed by out director Ryan Murphy, got mixed reviews, but some lambasted it as “homophobic” and “offensive” because of the casting of Corden, a straight actor, in what they saw as an “aggressively flamboyant” caricature of a gay man. Erik Anderson, who runs the film site Awards Watch, called “The Prom” a “gorgeous and vibrant production” but tweeted that...

The unrelenting COVID-19 crisis has pushed Americans already on the financial brink to face impossible choices, and already vulnerable groups with the slimmest safety nets are suffering much of the fallout. And though no amount of data will ever fully grasp the full human toll from this past year, a new report underscores how the underlying difficulties experienced by the LGBTQ community are exacerbated by the virus. “COVID has revealed and exacerbated disparities that existed way before the pandemic started,” Logan Casey, co-author of the report and policy researcher at MAP, said. Now, a community already targeted by hate speech,...

[Catholic Caucus] Beloved TX Priest Stripped of Faculties'No room for conservative priests in San Antonio'SAN ANTONIO (ChurchMilitant.com) - A beloved Texas priest has been officially stripped of his faculties after his defense of Catholic Church teaching on homosexuality landed him in hot water with his bishop.Father Clay Hunt was notified the day before Thanksgiving that his faculties were being removed immediately. The move came five months after the San Antonio Family Association (SAFA) had warned, "Fr. Clay has been and is being targeted and attacked. There is an attempt by certain people in the hierarchy of the archdiocese of San...

Priest who gave Sen. Ted Kennedy’s funeral homily charged in sex assault caseA Catholic priest who delivered the funeral homily for Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 2009 has been indicted on charges alleging rape and indecent assault of a minor.A Barnstable Superior Court grand jury on Friday indicted the Rev. Mark R. Hession, 62, on two counts of rape, one count of indecent assault and battery of a person under 14, and one count of witness intimidation, court records show.An arraignment date will be set in January, a spokesperson for the Cape and Islands district attorney’s office said. It...

"Disgusting Vice": Francis Keeps Supporting Transsexual ProstitutionFrancis supported again the about 30 male transvestite prostitutes” of Torvaianica, Rome, whom the Italian Francis media call coyly with the English term "sex workers."Francis sent a Vatican ambulance to provide the prostitutes with free Covid-19 tests and free flu vaccinations.This initiative was initiated by the local parish-priest, Father Andrea Conocchia who complained with the papal almoner, Cardinal Krajewski, that the prostitutes could "no longer work" and were living in fear because they didn't know whether the "few remaining customers" were healthy.In August 2016, Francis wrote in a prologue of a book by Father...

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court declined Monday to take up an appeal from parents in Oregon who want to prevent transgender students from using locker rooms and bathrooms of the gender with which they identify, rather than their sex assigned at birth. The case came from a school district near Salem, Oregon’s capital city. The federal appeals court in San Francisco had upheld a Dallas, Oregon, school district policy that allows transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity. Parents sued over the policy in 2017, saying it caused embarrassment and stress. A lower...

Biden is making sweeping promises to LGBTQ activists, proposing to carry out virtually every major proposal on their wish lists. Among them: Lifting the Trump administration’s near-total ban on military service for transgender people, barring federal contractors from anti-LGBTQ job discrimination, and creating high-level LGBTQ-rights positions at the State Department, the National Security Council and other federal agencies. Biden says his top legislative priority for LGBTQ issues is the Equality Act, passed by the House of Representatives last year but stalled in the Senate. It would extend to all 50 states the comprehensive anti-bias protections already afforded to LGBTQ people...

Joe Biden uses 37 violent American transgender deaths to advance agendaThe former vice president wants to ‘ensure that every transgender … has the opportunity to live authentically, earn a living wage, and be treated with dignity and respect.’November 21, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― Former Vice President Joe Biden used this year’s 37 violent deaths of men and women who say they are members of the opposite sex as an opportunity to advance the transgender agenda.In an official statement, the leader of the Democratic party stated that 2020 was “the most violent year on record” for “the transgender and gender-conforming communities.”Biden did...

Two Father Martins and the Sensus Fidei Revolting against the teachings of the Church On Oct. 31, 1517 — 503 years ago — a German monk, priest, and university professor named Martin Luther began a revolt against the Catholic Church which resulted in a terrible cleaving of Christian unity. He denied or completely refuted dozens of essential and long-held Church teachings.Fr. James Martin, S.J. Luther's revolt has resulted in an uncountable number of doctrinally independent denominations. Today there are roughly 600 million Christians who have followed the man-made traditions that Luther developed and are now formally separated from the Church...

The stakes are high for transgender voters ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and one major problem looming is the difficulty of securing appropriate identification. A UCLA study estimates that more than 965,000 transgender people will be eligible to vote, but out of the 45 states that conduct elections strictly in person, 42% of eligible transgender voters don't have the correct identification. Noah Grey Rosenzweig, a 22-year-old trans man from Washington, D.C., told CBS News that when he goes to the polls, he has to bring an ID, which has the wrong name and gender marker. "It's a day of...

Georgette Gomez, president of the San Diego City Council, was born and raised in the city she now serves, just 15 miles from the Mexican border that her parents, Eusebia and Miguel Ángel Gomez, crossed without documents in 1973. Her parents worked multiple jobs to make ends meet and instilled in their daughter a dual sense of industriousness and hope. “I don't take that for granted that they left their own country, their own language, their culture, their family, just to create a better path for us, and when they came here it wasn't easy,” said Gomez, 43, the youngest...

Here’s a fascinating article from New York magazine on the massive gender gap between Trump and Biden supporters. It contains this eye-popping claim, buried deep down: Neither the societal shift away from traditional gender roles nor the downstream cultural consequences of that shift are anywhere near complete. As Rebecca Traister has incisively argued, the growing prevalence of singledom among America’s rising generation of women is one of the most potent forces in contemporary politics. In 2009, for the first time in history, there were more unmarried women in the United States than married ones. And today, young women in the...

ROME — In a documentary that premiered Wednesday in Rome, Pope Francis called for the passage of civil union laws for same-sex couples, departing from the position of the Vatican’s doctrinal office and the pope’s predecessors on the issue. The remarks came amid a portion of the documentary that reflected on pastoral care for those who identify as LGBT. “Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it,” Pope Francis said in the film, of...

Elisabeth Moss has found her next role, and it’s one which is sure to cause a stir. The “Handmaid’s Tale” star has signed on to play former Congresswoman Katie Hill in a streaming film adaptation of her forthcoming book “She Will Rise: Becoming a Warrior in the Battle for True Equality.”

Justice Samuel Alito had a straightforward question, but the lawyer arguing on behalf of the petitioners in Obergefell v. Hodges did not have a coherent answer. Her central argument in the case: The 14th Amendment's command that the states shall not "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" protected a "right" for people of the same sex to marry each other. Alito did not buy it. "Suppose we rule in your favor in this case and then after that, a...