Free Republic

Gardaí had to be called to remove controversial priest Fr Seán Sheehy and a group of protesters from the constituency office of Education Minister Norma Foley at a recent rally in Tralee. The online video shows the priest, who denounced homosexuality during a sermon in a Kerry church in November 2022, and a group of around 20 people part of a rally against sex education in schools. The group initially gathered outside the Tralee office before eventually going inside to confront the staff. One member of staff said she was assured that a peaceful protest would be held outside the...

When we were children my mother would bring me and my sister to our local library every Saturday. We were allowed to take out two books of our own choosing (usually The Baby-sitters Club which my mother thought was cute, or one of the Sweet Valley High series, which she said was trash) and then the third book had to be what she deemed a classic: The Secret Garden, Tom’s Midnight Garden, A Little Princess and so on. When I turned 12 she took me down the steps from the children’s section of the library to the adult section and...

Father David Wilton C.P.M. of the Fathers of Mercy at the Chapel of Divine Mercy in Auburn, Kentucky laid out in a homily how “wokeness is as old as the Bible itself” while also detailing the remedy on how to fight it. Father Wilton began, “If we knew our history we would know that wokeness is as old as the Bible itself as portrayed in today’s first reading, a reading from the Book of Genesis. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah had become so depraved that they looked upon depravity as good and traditional, virtuous behavior as bad. Sounds kind...

How far is this madness going to go? It started with the increasingly common assumption that newborn babies are “assigned” a gender at birth, as if doing so were an arbitrary bureaucratic process that could often be erroneous. Now the Pennsylvania state Office of Child Development and Early Learning is going even farther, requiring social workers to report on the gender identity of newborns: forms now ask whether the baby is Male, Female, or “Gender Non-Binary.” How on God’s weary earth is a social worker supposed to be able to tell whether or not a tiny just-born baby is a...

Liberal and tolerant Public Health™ experts seem to have finally sussed out, based on hard clinical research, the true sources of LGBTQ+++™ youth suicidality.Via Forbes:In its second annual National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, The Trevor Project uncovered some alarming information about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and other gender nonconforming young Americans: 48% of this group said that in the last 12 months, they engaged in self-harm; that number rose to 60% for trans and nonbinary youth. Even more worrisome, 40% of those surveyed reported having seriously considered attempting suicide during that period; Of the young people who identified...

EIN GEDI, Israel — Five miles out, nearly to the center of the Dead Sea, an international team of scientists has been drilling beneath the seabed to extract a record of climate change and earthquake history stretching back half a million years. The preliminary evidence and clues found halfway through the 40-day project are more than the team could have hoped for. The scientists did not expect to pull up a wood fragment that was roughly 400,000 years old. Nor did they expect to come across a layer of gravel from a mere 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. That finding...

More than 3,200 years ago, life was abuzz in and around what is now this modern-day Israeli metropolis on the shimmering Mediterranean shore. To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all. Yet...

An int'l research team at urging of TAU, Hebrew U. professors will drill half a kilometer to study year-by-year climate change from 500,000 years ago... The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program chose the Dead Sea as the site of its next drilling at the urging of Tel Aviv University's Prof. Zvi Ben-Avraham and the Israel Geological Survey's Dr. Mordechai Stein... sponsored by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities... "We will be taking out a vertical piece about half a kilometer long which will allow us to get a picture of climate change on a year-by-year basis going back 500,000...

A large crack that has suddenly appeared in Kenya’s Rift Valley is evidence that Africa will eventually break apart. The crack already stretches several miles and continues to grow, but it does not go all the way across the surface. If it does, it will split the continent into two. The crack has caused part of the Nairobi-Narok highway to collapse and also accelerating seismic activity in the area, leading researchers to believe that something dramatic could happen in the future. “The Great Rift splits Africa into two plates. With what is happening we have established one plate which is...

Mummy tar in ancient Egypt For millennia, ancient Egyptians used oil tar to preserve bodies. New geologic research shows that the tar came from several sources, shedding light on how trade routes of old compare to those of today. New research suggests that ancient Egyptians used oil tar from Gebel Zeit in Egypt, shown here, and from the Dead Sea to preserve mummies. Image courtesy of James Harrell. All tar sands — crude oils, asphalts and bitumen — contain source-specific compounds, known as biomarkers, which have unique chemical signatures that are closely related to the biological precursors of the oil....

Paleobotanists exploring a site near the Dead Sea have unearthed a startling connection between today's conifer forests in the Southern Hemisphere and an unimaginably distant time torn apart by a global cataclysm. Exquisitely preserved plant fossils show the podocarps, a group of ancient evergreens that includes the massive yellowwood of South Africa and the red pine of New Zealand, thrived in the Permian period, more than 250 million years ago. That's tens of millions of years earlier than thought, and it shows that early podocarps survived the "great dying" at the end of the Permian, the worst mass extinction the...

The level of the Dead Sea is currently dropping by more than a meter every year. But this is not new, according to German and Israeli researchers who maintain that the level of the salty lake also dropped millennia ago. At the end of the last ice age, for example, the water level dropped by 250 meters within a few thousand years...Dr. Daniela Müller and Prof. Achim Brauer from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam, together with Dr. Yoav Ben Dor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studied 15,000-year-old sediments from the Dead Sea and the surrounding...

ORLANDO, FL—In a bold statement against Florida's recently passed bill which prohibits teachers from discussing inappropriate sexual topics with kindergarteners, Disney World has unveiled its latest attraction: "Sodom & Gomorrah." "We here at Disney stand proudly with those who seek to indoctrinate small children in gender ideology," said CEO Bob Chapek. "That's why we've decided to unveil this exciting new thrill ride—and allow kids of all ages to ride it!" While waiting in line, small children and their parents will be educated by a voice recording about masturbation, the gender unicorn, safe kink, abortion, and BDSM. Once they board the...

Sen. Mitt Romney (R.-Utah), who was the losing Republican presidential nominee in 2012, voted on Wednesday to move forward to a final vote in the Senate on the “Respect for Marriage Act,” which would recognize same-sex marriages in federal law. “While I believe in traditional marriage, Obergefell is and has been the law of the land upon which LGBTQ individuals have relied,” said Romney. “This legislation provides certainty to many LGBTQ Americans, and it signals that Congress—and I—esteem and love all of our fellow Americans equally.” “This legislation provides important protections for religious liberty—measures which are particularly important to protect...

Maura Healey is going from the basketball court to the Massachusetts governor's house, with a little under 30 years in between. The current Attorney General of Massachusetts is projected to defeat Republican Geoff Diehl, flipping the office back to Democrats after two terms under Charlie Baker. Not only is Healey the first woman to be elected to the office, she's also the first open lesbian to be elected governor in U.S. history.(Emphasis Mine)

In a romantic tale full of twists but a happy ending, a Rajasthan woman changed her gender to marry another woman who she had been dating for a few years. Now known as Aarav Kuntal, the teacher married his student Kalpana recently. Their marriage although unconventional was wholeheartedly accepted by their parents. Aarav who was previously known as Meera used to teach Kabaddi in the government school where Kalpana used to study as per media reports. In 2016, a friendship blossomed between Meera (Aarav) and Kalpana. They remained close friends for 2 years. Later, in 2018, Meera (Aarav) proposed to...

A father-of-two who called a lesbian policewoman a 'tattooed fat d***' has been convicted for the hate crime after a judge accused him of 'living in the Stone Ages.' Louis Risley, 43, was said to have smirked as he verbally abused PC Shelley Quince-Black about her sexuality as she helped arrest him for loitering in someone else's garden on April 12. Back at the police station, PC Quince-Black relayed the homophobic insult as she gave Risley's details to a senior colleague only for the suspect from Warrington, Cheshire, to retort: 'Well you are though, aren't you?' The officer from Cheshire...

More than 1100 licensed priests in the Church of England have indicated that they are willing to conduct same-sex marriages if they become legal. The survey was conducted by the Campaign for Equal Marriage in the Church of England over the course of the last month. In a statement announcing the results, the chairman of the organisation, the Revd Nigel Pietroni, said: “It is clear from the feedback after Living in Love and Faith that the majority want the current situation to change.” The list of signatories is being kept private, but the names were cross-checked against clergy databases, and...

Less than four years ago, preborn children were protected from abortion in Ireland. Now, those ministering to women in need and working to save the lives of these children are facing a possible threat of jail time. It’s hard to call abortion a woman’s “choice,” if she is prohibited from hearing any alternatives and those who can help her make her decision are forbidden to speak. Irish lawmakers are considering a bill that would implement buffer zones outside abortion facilities, as the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) is calling for the legislature to act on the bill “without...

Actor Billy Eichner has spent years smearing conservatives and Republicans, attacking Christianity, and lashing out at just about anybody who disagrees with him politically. The star of Disney’s The Lion King just watched his $22 million LGBTQ romantic comedy make an abysmal $4 million in its Box Office debut over the weekend. In response to the film’s poor performance, an angry Eichner appears to blame (at least) two things: homophobia and “straight people in a certain parts of the country.” The film, trumpeted as Hollywood’s first major gay romcom, initially received enthusiastic acclaim from critics but has been largely ignored...