Free Republic

It’s become popular to claim that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was something other than homosexuality. What does the Bible say? Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason responds.

NEW YORK — An advocacy group for young religious LGBTQ Jews has launched a project to provide mental health guidance tailored to the community on social media, in the first initiative of its kind, as surveys show that such youth in the US are at a higher risk for emotional issues and harassment. The “TikTok therapy” video series will offer advice on topics such as how to discuss dating someone from the same gender with Orthodox parents, or navigating LGBTQ issues that come up in conversation at Shabbat dinners, said Jewish Queer Youth (JQY), a New York-based group that focuses...

Barclays Bank – one of the top 20 in the world – has paid more than $25,000 in compensation to Dr. Mike Davidson, an executive of a Christian trust, after arbitrarily closing the charity’s bank accounts due to pressure from LGBTQ+ activists. Activists claimed the Core Issues Trust and the International Federation for Therapeutic and Counseling Choice were pushing “conversion therapy” onto people who voluntarily seek to change their sexual preferences or gender identities. Barclays – a leading sponsor of London’s gay pride parade – succumbed to the pressure and sent a letter to Davidson, notifying him of the bank’s...

Street preacher Matthew Meinecke’s Bible was torn to shreds after he read its contents aloud at Seattle Pride on Sunday, according to footage from the event. Meinecke who is also known was the “The Seattle Preacher” was barked at and taunted by attendees who waved transgender Pride flags in his face as he attempted to read the Bible, video showed. Other attendees at Seattle Pride included naked men riding bikes, furries and nude adults standing in fountains in front of children. (RELATED: Nude Cyclists Bike Through Seattle Pride Parade As Children Look On) “Have fun doing this at a Pride...

Dear Senator … I strongly urge you and your State Senate colleagues to vociferously condemn and refuse to participate in the California Senate’s plan to “honor” the bigoted anti-Catholic minstrel performers known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. These so called performers hearken back to the dark days of the Jim Crow Era minstrel shows that routinely demeaned and caricatured Black Americans, all in the name of performance art. If anything, a strong case could be made that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is a de facto hate group, and should be reported to Governor Gavin Newsom’s recently launched website...

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)