Free Republic

Christians in the U.S. military are being told they must forfeit their First Amendment rights. Bible verses are being erased from cadets’ personal dorm-room white boards, and military lawyers claim that legal protections for religion only pertain to matters such as clothing and growing beards but do not extend to any religious expression such as talking about one's faith or posting a Bible verse. Last year Breitbart News broke the story of a campaign by anti-Christian extremists to suppress traditional Christian expression within the U.S. military. There were conflicting stories regarding the possible court martial of service members who share...

US wants to combat anti-homosexuality movement worldwide By Julio Severo The Associated Press reported on February 26 that the United States, “troubled” by an anti-homosexuality movement in Uganda and across much of the world, is launching a new effort to combat what Secretary of State John Kerry described as a “threat to human rights.” Comparing a Ugandan anti-homosexuality law to oppressive government crackdowns on German Jews in the 1930s, Kerry said that according to the AP report, he was going to direct American ambassadors to look at “how we deal with this human rights challenge on a global basis.”...

Patricia Gamboa arrived at a government-run supermarket in western Venezuela at 2:00 am, six hours before doors opened, to be first in line and buy whatever she could get her hands on. As dawn broke, about 200 people stood behind her outside the Bicentenario shop in San Cristobal, with numbers written on their wrists with green markers to avoid arguments over who came first. What was she hoping to buy, then? "Whatever they have," she said, echoing the sentiment of everybody else reading, sipping coffee or sitting on the sidewalk to pass the time. Residents can only shop at Bicentenario...

If I had told you ten years ago that a family seeking asylum from religious persecution would be turned away from the US, you would have thought I was nuts. But, it’s finally happened—and no surprise to a Christian family. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike came to the United States in 2008 seeking political asylum. They fled their German homeland in the face of religious persecution for homeschooling their children. They wanted to live in a country where they could raise their children in accordance with their Christian beliefs. Too bad they picked the United States, huh? I expected this sort...

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer was right to veto SB1062, which would have amended the Arizona Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The bill, per most interpretations I’ve read, would have given broad discretion to business owners, because of their religious convictions, to refuse to do business with anyone associated with homosexual lifestyles. Religious freedom is about protection of your right to practice your religion and not being forced to violate it. However, the right to religious freedom does not mean the right to write-off and marginalize into non-existence a whole class of citizens whom you don’t like or agree with. Under Jim...

Troops based at the Kadena Air Base in Japan know how to party. On Saturday, six gay and straight service members applied some of their finest makeup and lip synced to "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" in what is believed to be first drag queen and king show on an American military base. The show was thrown in support for the base's recently formed OutServe-SLDN chapter, a nonprofit advocacy group for the army's LGBT community.

Media Research Center Pres. Brent Bozell today denounced the CPAC conference, saying “no conservative should have anything to do with this conference” because it is giving voice to groups, such as American Atheists, that attack conservative principles. […] “American Atheists is an organization devoted to the hatred of God. How on earth could CPAC, or the ACU and its board of directors, and Al Cardenas condone such an atrocity?” …

Attorney General Eric Holder is taking the lawless attitude of the Obama administration and passing it down to state attorneys general. Yesterday during an interview with The New York Times, Holder said state attorneys general do not have to enforce laws they disagree with, specifically when it comes to the issue of gay marriage. It is highly unusual for the United States attorney general to advise his state counterparts on how and when to refuse to defend state laws. But Mr. Holder said when laws touch on core constitutional issues like equal protection, an attorney general should apply the highest...

I am a hard man to shock.I’ve seen and heard a lot of things. I’ve known people who have been through practically every imaginable kind of suffering. And I’ve been slugging it out in the culture war since I was just a kid. But every now and then I get caught by surprise.What was it that left me so stunned? A commentary by Will Saletan at Slate entitled, “After-birth Abortion: The Pro-Choice Case for Infanticide.”That an argument in favor of infanticide is an entirely logical consequence of the widespread public support for abortion is undeniable. Still, the detachment with which...

A conservative LGBT organization will be part of this year's Conservative Political Action Conference event in Washington, DC after long being banned from the event. GOProud, a pro-gay group that holds several politically conservative views, will participate in CPAC next month as a guest organization. CPAC is an annual gathering of conservative groups held at the nation's Capital and organized by the American Conservative Union. The ACU provided The Christian Post with a statement by their executive director, Dan Schneider, regarding the matter. "We had a constructive meeting with GOProud's leadership last week. The directors have a new vision for...

When First Baptist's Robert Jeffress proclaimed a couple of weeks back that President Obama is "paving the way for the antichrist," we dismissed it as a publicity stunt designed to sell copies of his new book on the end times. Not everyone was so quick to call Jeffress' claim empty bombast. Take this Christian Post piece from over the weekend in which a reporter, apparently keeping a straight face, asks two Baptist biblical scholars -- or rather as the headline suggests "experts" on the Obama-antichrist link -- to weigh in on the controversy. Darrell Bock, a professor at Dallas Theological...

A revealing reminder of the provincial, bubbled leftists that run our media can be found in an NBC News piece profiling Olympic gold medal skier David Wise. NBC informs us in its headline that what led Wise to Olympic gold was his "alternative lifestyle." NBC was apparently surprised to learn that, at 23-years-old, Wise is already a husband and father. At such a young age, Wise has the lifestyle of an adult. He wears a Baby Bjorn baby carrier around the house. He also attends church regularly and says he could see himself becoming a pastor a little later down...

On the heels of a public university censoring a pro-life club comes word of a public high school attempting the same. Intervention by pro-life attorneys helped the University of Alabama quickly see the error of its ways. I expect the same will prompt Wilson High School in Tacoma, Washington, to come to its senses as well. Wilson Students for Life has been having trouble with censorship ever since its founding last year. But when school administrators rejected two Students for Life of America posters WSFL chose to promote its club last fall, the group turned to the Thomas More Society...

Just read this and weep for our future. David Wise is at the top of his sport. He’s always smiling among his friends and competitors, however, he’s not like the rest of the field. He is mature. Not to say the rest of the freestyle skiers of halfpipe are not mature, but Wise is mature far beyond his years. At only twenty-three years old, he has a wife, Alexander, who was waiting patiently in the crowd, and together they have a two-year-old daughter waiting for them to return to their home in Reno, Nevada.At such a young age, Wise has...

A San Diego council member has become the first openly gay Republican to include his same-sex partner in a campaign advertisement. Carl DeMaio, who is currently attempting to win the Republican primary, and challenge Democrat Rep. Scott Peters, has featured footage of his partner, Johnathan Hale, and himself at a pride parade in 2012 in a campaign spot that was released on Thursday. GOP campaign officials and Elizabeth Wilner, who tracks campaign ads for the nonpartisan firm Kantar Media, told The Wall Street Journal that to their knowledge this was the first political advertisement from either party which included a...

North Carolina's anti-abortion license plate is unconstitutional because the state doesn't provide the same forum for motorists on the other side of the contentious issue, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. A three-judge panel of the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a federal judge's ruling that the "Choose Life" license plate is unconstitutional. Lawmakers approved the anti-abortion plates in 2011 and rejected proposals to offer plates with messages "Trust Women" and "Respect Choice." That constitutes "blatant viewpoint discrimination squarely at odds with the First Amendment," wrote appeals court Judge James A. Wynn, who is from North...

Restrictions, harassment, and intimidation towards people who practice their religion increased in every major region of the world in 2012 except the Americas, with Christians the major target, says a new report by the Pew Research Center. “Muslims and Jews experienced six-year highs in the number of countries in which they were harassed by national, provincial or local governments,” the study found, but Christians continue to be the world’s most oppressed religious group, with persecution against them reported in 110 countries. A recent report by the Christian group Open Doors noted that “North Korea remains the world’s most restrictive nation...

"The children belong to all of us," Paul Reville, an education professor at Harvard and former Massachusetts secretary of Education, said Friday in explaining why states should adopt the Common Core State Standards Initiative. "What we're doing at the national level ... is what a lot of our states thought made sense individually. Why should some towns in cities or states have no standards or low standards and others have extremely high standards when the children belong to all of us and would move. And the same logic applies to the nation," he said, making the case for national standards....

The data breach that struck our company spotlighted the sophistication of criminal hacker networks operating across the globe. We know the attack created significant concerns for millions of customers. We will learn from this incident and we will work to make Target, and the wider business community, more secure in the future. One step American businesses could now take that would dramatically improve the security of all credit and debit cards: adoption of chip-enabled smartcards. The technology is already widely used throughout the world. For many reasons, the United States has been slow to embrace the technology at home. We...

HOLLYWOOD, CA, January 30, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Hollywood loves an underdog – unless, it seems, that underdog is a Christian. That's the reaction of one Christian film expert to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' decision to strip the family-friendly motion picture Alone Yet Not Alone of its Oscar nomination for best song. “It's hazing,” Dr. Ted Baehr, the founder and publisher of the pro-family Movieguide and chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, told LifeSiteNews.com. Alone Yet Not Alone is based on a true story about how a family's Christian faith helped them survive after being...