Free Republic

Massachusetts will no longer require prospective foster parents to affirm the sexual orientation and gender identity of the children they foster, following legal challenges and criticism from religious groups. The change comes after the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a federal lawsuit in September on behalf of two Massachusetts families, who claimed the requirement conflicted with their religious beliefs, according to a Fox News report. One couple had its foster care license revoked, while the other was threatened with revocation.

A U.S. House Republican leader pressed Chicago Public Schools for answers about its anti-discrimination policies this week after a Christian college recently accused the employer of religious discrimination against its student teachers. In the letter, an advanced copy of which was provided exclusively to The College Fix, U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg raised concerns about the public school system compelling Moody Bible Institute “to abandon its Biblically-based doctrinal positions” on human sexuality. “Specifically, the governing board of CPS – the Board of Education of the City of Chicago – appears to be excluding Moody and its...

Left-wing Canadian lawmakers are working to introduce a new bill that would end existing protections for people of faith against prosecution under national “hate speech” laws. Canada’s Criminal Code, which bans what the government deems “hatred against any identifiable group,” contains a so-called religious exemption that protects Canadians who “in good faith” cite religious texts or beliefs. But the left-wing Liberal and Bloc Québécois parties are currently negotiating new legislation, Bill C-9, with an amendment that would remove this exemption.

The City Club of Cleveland is defying LGBTQ+ activist pressure to cancel or substantially alter an event featuring a conservative Christian leader next month, and Ohio’s attorney general is standing with the venue. “We’re not canceling, and we have never had any intention of canceling this,” Dan Moulthrop, the City Club’s CEO, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. “We’re gonna continue to do what we always do, and have done for 113 years, which is convene conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive and do that with the leadership of relevant organizations who are shaping our communities.” Moulthrop...

Several Colorado parents are suing their local school district after an overnight school trip allegedly tried to place a transgender-identifying male student in a hotel room — and ultimately the same bed — with an 11-year-old girl. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative legal organization that advocates for religious liberty, filed its opening brief Wednesday in "Wailes v. Jefferson County Public Schools" with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit on behalf of four families. The lawsuit alleges that the district, located near Denver, allows biologically male students to share overnight accommodations with girls based solely on gender...

Major corporate giving platforms use the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to vet charities, effectively blocking donations to many conservative and faith-based nonprofits wrongly labeled as “hate groups.” Benevity, a platform used by hundreds of corporations to manage workplace donations, says it has processed more than $18.5 billion in transactions. Company materials show that the platform relies on the SPLC list to help determine which organizations employees are allowed to select for donations.... The SPLC has labeled right-leaning groups such as Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) as “hate groups,” listing them alongside the Ku Klux Klan...

Despite its penurious name, the Southern Poverty Law Center has an endowment of more than $700 million, compensates leadership handsomely, and possesses more than $30 million in offshore accounts—likely in the Cayman Islands, its most recent IRS filing reveals. “It’s very odd and frankly raises suspicion that a nonprofit organization would have accounts in places like the Cayman Islands, or as they reported $30 million in Central America,” Mat Staver, founder and chairman of the law firm Liberty Counsel, told The Daily Signal on Tuesday.

Over the past four years President Trump has established himself as a man of his word – promises made, promises kept. And that’s especially true among Evangelical Christians. President Trump has been more of a friend to people of faith than any other president dating back to President Reagan.He is without a doubt the most pro-life president in American history. He has nominated constitutionalists to the federal courts. And he is also a rock-solid defender of the Second Amendment.Promises made, promises kept.So you can imagine the consternation among social conservatives and Evangelical Christians when the Trump campaign erased those significant...

hDonald Trump, Sen. Mitch McConnell and other speakers are set to address the 2016 Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington, D.C. The conference is one of the largest events for religious conservative groups in the country. Trump’s speech marks an appeal to the evangelical voter base, whose support for Trump has taken some analysts by surprise. “Mr. Trump won a plurality of evangelical votes in the Republican primaries on his path to the nomination, and we welcome him to once again address members of Faith and Freedom and to express his views on the many issues of importance to...

It would be an ignominious defeat worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy if abortion ends up being the issue that derails Trumpas the Tank Engine. By claiming that there would have to be “some form of punishment” levied against any woman who would dare get an abortion in Donald Trump’s Great-Again America, the poor bastard walked right into Chris Matthews’ well-crafted trap. In fact, he eagerly took bait that those he considers his lessers have been wise enough to pass up for years. All Republican presidential candidates in recent history—the “dummies,” the “failures,” the “disasters,” the ones who “got captured” in...

Leaders of the Christian right have found their man: Ted Cruz. In the past two weeks, the Texas senator has wracked up a string of high-profile endorsements from influential evangelical leaders, including Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown, and Family Leader chief Bob Vander Plaats. According to the National Review, many more are on the way.

On Oct. 12, the Sunday edition of The Washington Post reported their "Election Lab" estimate that the Republicans will win six more seats in the House and eight more Senate seats, and projected it was 95 percent certain that Democrats will lose the Senate. But on NBC's "Meet the Press" that morning, newly installed host Chuck Todd stubbornly persisted in the usual Republicans-in-deep-trouble narrative. Based on the judicial failure to take up gay marriage cases, Todd previewed the program by asking, "Is it time for conservatives to surrender in the culture wars?" Later, Todd underlined his point: "Whether it's on...

"The party can’t become the opposite of what it is," the libertarian-leaning senator said. "If you tell people from Alabama, Mississippi or Georgia, 'You know what, guys, we’ve been wrong, and we’re gonna be the pro-gay-marriage party,' they’re either gonna stay home or -- I mean, many of these people joined the Republican Party because of these social issues." "So I don’t think we can completely flip. But can we become, to use the overused term, a bigger tent?" he added. "I think we can and can agree to disagree on a lot of these issues. I think the party...

The question is not, “Is America falling?” but, rather, “Why is America falling?” I’m currently writing from CPAC 2014, the nation’s largest gathering of conservative political junkies. The event is being held at the beautiful Gaylord National hotel, adjacent the scenic shoreline of the historic Potomac River. We’re just a few short miles from Washington, D.C., which, at least for now, remains the modern-day equivalent of the Roman Empire. I say “at least for now” because America finds itself skipping along the primrose path to Rome’s ill-fated finale. I needn’t trouble you with evidence to that effect as this tragic...

Regular readers of my column know that I usually don’t use the words “conservative” and “liberal.” Why is that? Because those words in today’s lingo—like the words “love” and “democracy”—can mean almost anything you want. Unlike past times when precision in meanings was important, we have now produced a generation that no longer understands the historic or political meaning of those words. Within the population of the confused, however, my greatest disappointment is held for those who describe themselves as economically conservative, but socially liberal. But do they even know what that means? On the economics side, this is what...

For the last 10 days, we’ve had something of a running debate among GOP columnists on the question of whether Republicans should de-emphasize social issues as part of a broader political strategy to appeal to more voters. It began when Roger L. Simon penned a column titled “How Social Conservatives are Saving Liberalism (Barely).” Simon believes that social issues, specifically gay marriage, may keep Republicans from victory …

On the question whether the Republican Party ought to de-emphasize social issues, I find myself more in the Bryan Preston camp than in Roger Simon’s. That’s ironic because, though I’m drawn to the logic of Bryan’s “Where do the surrenders end?” argument, the brute fact is: the political divide in the country has almost nothing to do with logic. It is, instead, about “us versus them.” Roger thus gets closer to the heart of the matter when he contends that “fairly or not,” opposition to gay marriage – today’s hotly contested social issue – is used “to paint the right...

In a characteristically superb column yesterday, Ross Douthat described our contemporary political situation in terms of the “court party” and “country party” — terms drawn from 17th-and 18th-century British politics that refer to a party that wields power for the benefit of elite players and institutions and an opposition that seeks more dispersed power for the benefit of a larger public. No historical analogy is ever perfectly apt, but this one is powerfully clarifying. Particularly as laid out by its foremost intellectual leader, Henry St. John (the Viscount Bolingbroke), the country party’s idea of an organized political opposition as well...

For some years now, we have been told about a major division within American conservatism: fiscal conservatives vs. social conservatives. This division is hurting conservatism and hurting America -- because the survival of American values depends on both fiscal and social conservatism. Furthermore, the division is logically and morally untenable. A conservative conserves all American values, not just economic ones. By "social conservatism," I am referring to the second and third components of what I call the American Trinity -- liberty, "In God We Trust" and "E Pluribus Unum." It is worth noting that a similar bifurcation does not exist...

A review of The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism, by Jeffrey Bell By Ramesh Ponnuru Posted November 5, 2012 Jeffrey Bell, a longtime conservative activist and former president of the Manhattan Institute, has written a book that attempts a novel reinterpretation of American social conservatism and of American exceptionalism. His thesis is that what distinguishes the U.S. from Europe, socially and politically, is the social conservative movement, a claim in which this movement's friends and foes alike may find merit. The distinctive characteristic of this movement, according to Bell, is literal belief in the most-quoted sentence of the...