Free Republic

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner criticizes conservatives in an editorial in the September issue, accusing them of continuing “to assault the right of gays.” “The fight for gay marriage is, in reality, a fight for all of our rights. Without it, we will turn back the sexual revolution and return to an earlier, puritanical time,” he writes. “Today, in every instance of sexual rights falling under attack, you’ll find legislation forced into place by people who practice discrimination disguised as religious freedom. Their goal is to dehumanize everyone’s sexuality and reduce us to using sex for the sole purpose of perpetuating...

An “unforgiving, puritan Anglo-Saxon” attitude to adultery is damaging married life in Britain, driving couples to divorce rather than strengthening the family, according to an outspoken French academic. -- Dr Catherine Hakim, a sociologist and bestselling author, argues that a “sour and rigid English view” of infidelity is condemning millions of people to live frustrated “celibate” lives with their spouses. In a book bound to provoke controversy, she likens faithful husbands and wives to “caged animals” and argues that they should be free to explore their “wild side” with lovers without the threat of divorce. Meeting a secret lover for...

Former Amalgamated Transit Union local 689 president Mike Golash, now an “Occupy” movement organizer, was caught on tape Sunday revealing his political goals: overthrowing capitalism in the United States and instituting a communist government. “Progressive labor is a revolutionary communist organization,” Golash said during an Occupy DC “People’s Assembly” on August 19. “Its objective,” he added, “is to make revolution in the United States, overthrow the capitalist system and build communism.” Golash said he and his comrades are “trying to learn something from the historical revolutions of the past: the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution, the revolutions in Cuba and...

Pictures, If You Can Stand It. Health officials say they're worried that one day there will be no more antibiotics left to treat gonorrhea. There's some disturbing news out today about a disease we don't hear about much these days: gonorrhea. Federal health officials announced that the sexually transmitted infection is getting dangerously close to being untreatable. As a result, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines for how doctors should treat gonorrhea. The guidelines are designed to keep one of the remaining effective antibiotics useful for as long as possible by restricting the use of...

Northridge, Calif., Aug 12, 2012 / 03:15 pm (CNA).- A professor raised by two women has defended sociologist Mark Regnerus, who is under investigation for academic “misconduct” following an activist's complaint about his work on same-sex parenting. “The children of same-sex couples have a tough road ahead of them – I know, because I have been there,” wrote Robert Oscar Lopez, who teaches English at California State University--Northridge, in his Aug. 6 Public Discourse essay “Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View.” The essay was published by the Witherspoon Institute, which was involved in funding the Regnerus study....

WASHINGTON — When the jubilant couple were wed in June, they exchanged personalized vows and titanium rings, cheered the heartfelt toasts and danced themselves breathless. Then, as the evening was winding down, unexpected questions started popping up. One after another, their guests began asking: Are you going to have kids? When are you going to have kids? Tom Lotito and Matt Hay, both 26, could not help but feel moved. They never imagined as teenagers that they would ever get married, much less that friends and family members would pester them about having children. “It’s another way that I feel...

20 Years Later, It Turns Out Dan Quayle Was Right About Murphy Brown And Unmarried Moms Isabel Sawhill May 25. On May 19, 1992, as the presidential campaign season was heating up, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered a family-values speech that came to define him nearly as much as his spelling talents. Speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California, he chided Murphy Brown — the fictional 40-something, divorced news anchor played by Candice Bergen on a CBS sitcom — for her decision to have a child outside of marriage. “Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong,” the vice president said. “Failing...

I came of age when the word “drive-by” entered the American lexicon. By high school graduation, I lost one cousin to gun violence and another was incarcerated for a gun crime. I know many harmed by guns and even more who feared the possibility. I always wonder if, but for the Second Amendment, there would be a more radical commitment to compromise and peacefully working through easy and difficult issues. In writing the Second Amendment, the Framers didn't envision the kind of gun toting that is permitted across this country today.... I am not naïve enough to believe that doing...

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked that, "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." I've always liked that quote, but I think it misleads. That two plus two equals four is not a conservative truth or a liberal truth. It's simply the truth. (Moynihan himself recognized this when he even more famously said that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.) Regardless, it's true that...

Americans spend $80 billion each year financing food stamps for the poor, but the country has no idea where or how the money is spent. Food stamps can be spent on goods ranging from candy to steak and are accepted at retailers from gas stations that primarily sell potato chips to fried-chicken restaurants. And as the amount spent on food stamps has more than doubled in recent years, the amount of food stamps laundered into cash has increased dramatically, government statistics show. As a result, fraud is hard to track and the efficacy of the massive program is impossible to...

“The vast majority of current programs are focused on making poverty more comfortable … rather than giving people the tools that will help them escape poverty.” (CNSNews.com) – The federal government is not making much headway reducing poverty despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars, according to a study by the libertarian Cato Institute. Despite an unprecedented increase in federal anti-poverty spending, the national poverty rate has not declined, the study finds. “[S]ince President Obama took office [in January 2009], federal welfare spending has increased by 41 percent, more than $193 billion per year,” the study says. Federal welfare spending...

The EU should "do its best to undermine" the "homogeneity" of its member states, the UN's special representative for migration has said. Peter Sutherland told peers the future prosperity of many EU states depended on them becoming multicultural. He also suggested the UK government's immigration policy had no basis in international law. He was being quizzed by the Lords EU home affairs sub-committee which is investigating global migration. Mr Sutherland, who is non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former chairman of oil giant BP, heads the Global Forum on Migration and Development, which brings together representatives of 160...

I often hear that minorities abort their babies at higher rates than whites. It is interesting that Democrats support the aborting of people who vote for them. If Republicans pro-lifers have their way, they will be contributing to the increase of Democratic party voters. Life can be ironic, at times.

Forget the stagnant American economy, our severe debt crisis and the rapidly mounting financial troubles in Greece and Spain, at least for a moment. Consider what’s driving American headlines these days" Pornography – The #1, #2 and #3 books on the New York Times fiction best-seller list, and on the USA Today best-seller list, and on Amazon for the last few weeks have been the "Fifty Shades of Grey," erotic novels by E.L. James that are being widely described as “Mommy Porn.”

There must be something in the water in Oslo: Nobel laureates, from our president to Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, all agree that high levels of inequality are a serious problem, if not the problem, facing our weak economy. According to this liberal thesis, either the 2008 financial crisis and its attendant recession, or the sluggish recovery — and maybe both — can be attributed in large part to the high level of economic inequality in the United States. Further, in this view, inequality is an economic malady on its own, even in times of prosperity. Liberal commentators, of course,...

Since 2005, when the American Psychological Association (APA) issued an official brief on lesbian and gay parenting, political correctness has demanded that all agree with the spurious assessment that children of homosexual parents do fine. The APA declared, "A growing body of scientific literature demonstrates that children who grow up with one or two gay and/or lesbian parents fare as well in emotional, cognitive, social, and sexual functioning as do children whose parents are heterosexual. Children's optimal development seems to be influenced more by the nature of the relationships and interactions within the family unit than by the particular structural...

While Erica Howard-Potter manages her job as a high-powered tax attorney, her husband Jake Howard-Potter manages the house, the chores and the couple's very active 2-year-old daughter, Skyler. Jake, who is a sculptor by trade, is the epitome of the so-called "trophy dad." The 37-year-old stays at home and stays fit, completing triathlons one day and expertly negotiating naptime and tea parties the next. And he is not alone. "I had a dad say to me 'that skirt is really cute' and I thought who would have imagined that two dads would be sitting at swim class saying that a...

On Wednesday, June 13, members of the Occupy movement protested against a conference dedicated to combatting child sex trafficking — thus, the Occupiers in essence were coming out in favor of one of society’s most loathsome moral crimes. The protesters mostly were members of Occupy Oakland Patriarchy, a group within the overall Occupy movement tasked with overthrowing our civilization’s “patriarchy.” The conference which so infuriated them was called HEAT Watch, short for the National Human Exploitation And Trafficking Watch Conference. If there’s one issue that unites Americans of all political stripes, it’s the sexual enslavement of children. Whatever our opinions...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: We have a couple of stories about women here, folks. And the first one was by Elizabeth Wurtzel. It's in the Atlantic: "1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism and Make the War on Women Possible." This is a story attacking the wives in the 1%. And the subhead of this story: "Being a mother isn't a real job -- and the men who run the world know it." That's what it says here. This is Elizabeth Wurtzel. She's a lawyer with Boies, Schiller & Flexner in New York and the author of Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed...

Two peer-reviewed articles published Sunday in a scholarly journal cast doubt on a core assumption used to advance same-sex marriage. A number of studies and articles have suggested that research shows no difference in outcomes between children whose parents have same-sex relationships and their peers raised by heterosexual parents. For example, the American Psychological Association (APA) stated in 2005 that “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.” Yesterday the academic journal Social Science Research published a detailed methodological review of the research...