Free Republic

The deconstruction of marriage continues. It didn’t begin with gays asking for marriage, but with the heterosexual world rejecting marriage itself.It was only a matter of time, really. Britain, the country of my birth and my home for the first 28 years of my life, has legalized same-sex marriage. The Conservative government had not in any way campaigned for it during the election, and Prime Minister David Cameron had effectively said he would not pursue it, as had the gay lobby and its political champions. The United Kingdom, you see, had introduced civil partnerships for homosexuals in 2004, and one...

When Pope Benedict XVI resigns from the papacy at the end of this month, the Vatican would lose one of its most stylish men. He is credited to have brought back fashion that has been unseen for decades, often mixing it with his personal style sense. In 2007, Esquire magazine awarded him the title "Accessorizer of the year," for his ornate papal habit that the Pope usually pairs with red leather loafers. The magazine pointed out that the pope earned this title after making a pair of simple shoes his signature accessory. "The point is: Have a signature. It could...

MICHELLE MEYER: Don't Get All Excited About Today's Huge Home Sales Report Mamta BadkarFebruary 26, 2013 This morning we saw two huge housing data points. Home prices posted their biggest gain since July 2006, while new home sales surged 15.6 percent month-over-month. However, the already tight housing supply is getting even tighter. Bank of America economist Michelle Meyer tells us that while we are seeing an improvement in new home sales, today's data could be revised in coming months and that monthly data should be interpreted with caution since it can be very volatile. She also says that housing supply...

What does Hollywood have against the British? Once again on Oscar night, Tinsel Town gave warmly with one hand — while cynically taking away with the other. The good news is that at least nine Britons will fly back across the Atlantic with coveted golden statues. But the bad news is that Argo — the movie that won Best Film — is yet another piece of Hollywood’s Brit-bashing junk history that casts the British in a poor light.

a b s t r a c t The New Family Structures Study (NFSS) is a social-science data-collection project that fielded a survey to a large, random sample of American young adults (ages 18–39) who were raised in different types of family arrangements. In this debut article of the NFSS, I compare how the young-adult children of a parent who has had a same-sex romantic relationship fare on 40 different social, emotional, and relational outcome variables when compared with six other family-of-origin types. The results reveal numerous, consistent differences, especially between the children of women who have had a lesbian...

KALAMAZOO, MI -- When Jenn Amaya's mother left for a trip to her home in Mexico in 2009, Jenn didn't think it would be the last time she would see her mom. Amaya's mother, a Mexican citizen, was working out the details of filing for residency in the United States, when she was informed during her trip to Mexico that she couldn't return to her family in the U.S. "I have a torn family due to a broken immigration system," Amaya said to a group of more than 300 people from across southwest Michigan who gathered at St. Joseph Catholic...

Sequester Looming: On Tuesday, with just days left until a set of deep, across-the-board budget cuts are set to take effect, President Obama discussed what’s at stake for our country’s economy, security and future and pushed lawmakers to work out a deal for the American people. “So these cuts are not smart. They are not fair. They will hurt our economy. They will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls,” said President Obama, as emergency respondents stood behind him. “This is not an abstraction -- people will lose their jobs. The unemployment rate might tick up again.”...

The federal government released groups of illegal immigrants from custody across the country Monday at the same time the White House was making its case that impending budget cuts would harm efforts to protect the border and enforce federal immigration laws. Advocates reported “waves” of illegal immigrants being released from at least three detention centers in Texas, Florida and Louisiana. U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement confirmed the release of some illegal immigrants Monday night but would not say how many or from which detention centers. Sure, it’s not as if we have the right to know this stuff. Welcome to...

D.C.: Cut the Drama. Do Your Job. Americans are sick and tired of yet another ginned-up crisis. D.C. needs to grow up, get to work, and live within its means. The real economic Armageddon looming before us is our runaway debt, not the sequester, which the President advocated for and signed into law and is now running around denouncing because he never had any genuine intention of reining in his reckless spending. Remember that this sequestration deal came about because of the long debt ceiling standoff in the summer of 2011. It wasn’t the ideal outcome for anyone, but it...

Jim Albertini will be able to speak at Hilo High School after all. The anti-war activist said that Principal Bob Dircks notified his attorney on Friday that he will be allowed to speak to students, reversing a decision made two days prior to cancel the event due to a backlash over his outspoken views of the military. The previous day, Honolulu attorney Eric Seitz[ACLU] representing Albertini, threatened the school with a lawsuit over alleged civil liberties violations if his presentation wasn’t allowed.

One year after Toronto subway fare collector William Anderson was shot and badly wounded in a botched robbery at the downtown Dupont station, a $25,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the masked gunman - or gunwoman - was renewed Tuesday, with a fresh appeal for tips. Now 53, Mr. Anderson remains off the job, still recovering from being shot in the neck and shoulder by his balaclava-clad assailant, who’s believed to have targeted that same station twice before. The description of that person, glimpsed on video, has been revised and the perpetrator may be male or female,...

To hear President Obama and the Cabinet officials he has been steadily trotting out like show ponies tell it, the sequester cuts cannot, must not happen, because we’ll subsequently be hit with all kinds of disasters just short of a plague of locusts. Come on, White House, get it together --- I don't know that the sequester is the best specific way to get this done either, and maybe defense-related spending is getting the short end of the stick, but not even the Department of Interior can manage their devastating, draconian budget cuts, really? It's almost like you're trying to...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: John Kerry, the secretary of state, is in Berlin, ladies and gentlemen. And while he's there he's probably reminiscing about the good old days of the Cold War wishing that there were an East Berlin that he could visit. You know, hang around with the buddies. You know, go to East Berlin and say, "Hey, you know me? I'm the guy that threw the fake metals from my Vietnam War service over the White House fence. Remember me?" There is no more divided Berlin, but that didn't stop John Kerry. He was speaking with students in Berlin...

Obama: 'You Can't Do Things By Yourself' Daniel Halper February 26, 2013 2:36 PM President Obama said that "you can't do things by yourself" at a speech today in Virginia: "You know, the one thing about being president is, after four years, you get pretty humble. You'd think maybe you wouldn't but actually you become more humble--you realize what you don't know," Obama said. "You realize all the mistakes you made. But you also realize you can't do things by yourself. That's not how our system works. You've got to have the help and the goodwill of Congress, and what...

I told you the yays would be closer to 70 than to 60. Final tally: 71-27. You didn't seriously think these losers would go to the mat to block a nominee just because he's manifestly unqualified, did you?Eighteen Republicans voted yes, according to Fox's Chad Pergram. The roll of glory: R's voting to end debate on Hagel: Alexander, Ayotte, Blunt, Burr, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Collins, Corker, Flake, Graham, Hatch ...— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) February 26, 2013 R’s voting to end debate on Hagel (con’t): Johanns, McCain, Murkowski, Sessions, Shelby and Thune.— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) February 26, 2013 Remember, Maverick has...

Have you ever noticed the Pope’s shoes? How could you not? They’re red. Not ox blood, Tuscan or wine red, but radiantly Dorothy-in-Oz red. There’s a lot of information in those shoes. For a while, a story circulated that the Milanese fashion house Prada was supplying the Pope’s footwear. L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s daily bugle, set this matter right back in 2007, thereby quashing the already tired Devil Wears Prada jokes. The Pope’s shoes are handmade by one Adriano Stefanelli, a custom cobbler in northwestern Italy, and they’re pretty spiffy. Apparently, papal infallibility extends to this pope’s unerring fashion sense....

A young woman went to her Grandmother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it and wanted to give up. She was tired of fighting and struggling. Her Grandmother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water. In the first she placed carrots, in the second she placed eggs, and in the last she placed ground coffee beans. She let them sit and boil without saying a word. In about twenty minutes she turned off the burners. She fished the...

The sequester is officially still three days away, but the Obama administration already is making the first cuts, with officials confirming that the (Homeland Security Department) already has released several hundred illegal immigrants from detention in order to save money. The move is proving controversial. Immigrant-rights groups say it shows the administration was detaining folks it never should have gone after in the first place, while Republicans questioned the decision-making.[snip] While being released from detention, the illegal immigrants are still subject to supervision — either by electronic device or by being required to check in with ICE by phone or...

Barack Obama apparently hoped that a private meeting with GOP governors would help push House Republicans to compromise on the sequester. The meeting backfired in that regard, at least partially. The private meeting so incensed Nikki Haley that she could barely contain herself afterward at the US Chamber of Commerce afterward, and while she expressed frustration with both sides, she delivered a withering shot at Obama for refusing to make even slight cuts in federal spending: “I could not be more frustrated than I am right now,” Haley told reporters after the meeting. She said that when she asked Obama...

Then there is the recent news that Big Labor may now be feeling buyer’s remorse regarding the very bill that they were most responsible for inflicting on the innocent public: ObamaCare! So what are unions now going to push for? Perhaps for repealing this stupid law and replacing it with something more sensible? Quit dreaming! No, the unions are now pushing to get their lower-paid workers covered by the subsidies the law intended for just those who have no health care insurance at all. In other words, the unions are once again trying to rip off the taxpayer to cover...