Free Republic

The ACLU and its friends are close to admitting that there weren't enough examples of real "torture" for them to complain about. Having sued to get images from evidence files of military legal cases, the ACLU finally got 198 images involving soldiers accused of mistreating prisoners. There were about 2,000 photos, but most are withheld because, quite understandably, the military doesn't want to provoke the the jihadists. The ACLU doesn't care if it provokes more violence. They want to see all the photos no matter who gets hurt. But this wasn't interrogation, either by the military or the CIA. It...

Kentucky clerk Kim Davis has obeyed orders to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the months since she spent five nights in jail for refusing to do so, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. United States District Judge David Bunning denied the American Civil Liberties Union's request to order Davis to reissue licenses she had altered to remove her name and title or face the possibility of further punishment. He found that Davis has allowed her deputies to issue licenses to anyone eligible since September and that the altered licenses are likely valid under Kentucky law. ...

ROWAN COUNTY, Kentucky, February 9, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) - A federal judge has turned down the ACLU's attempt to force Kim Davis to violate her conscience while issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Although Governor Matt Bevin granted a religious accommodation for the county clerk to issue altered marriage licenses to homosexuals, the ACLU brought a lawsuit seeking to force Davis to issue the old forms with her full name on them. "There is absolutely no reason that this case went so far without reasonable people respecting and accommodating Kim Davis' First Amendment rights," said Mat Staver, the founder and chairman...

A proposal allowing Utah to execute someone convicted of human trafficking even if the criminal didn't actually kill the person would be unjust, costly and likely unconstitutional, opponents of the death penalty argued Tuesday. The bill from Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clearfield, would make human trafficking a capital crime in Utah if the victim dies. Under current state law, someone convicted of trafficking that results in a victim's death faces five years to life in prison. Ray said trafficking is a terrible crime, and the state has to do something to try and deter it. [...] The American Civil Liberties Union...

A federal appeals court wrestled on Wednesday with whether local government leaders in North Carolina are violating the Constitution by holding exclusively Christian prayers at their meetings - the first time a court at that level has addressed the issue since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a town government's favor in a similar case in 2014. An attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union urged a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the lower court's ruling that the Rowan County Commissioner's practice of opening their meetings with prayers that almost always referred to...

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." In George Orwell's dystopic novel 1984, the totalitarian Big Brother regime issues perverse edicts reflecting the opposite of what is said. Likewise, in the American Civil Liberties Union's dystopic world, "silence is freedom of speech." The latest example unfolded recently in the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville, Pennsylvania, where the ACLU bullied the city council, which had been considering allowing faith leaders to give rotating prayers before the meetings. The Council had long been opening with recitations of the Lord's Prayer, and after a complaint from a single, disappointed petitioner morphed into...

On Friday evening, the United States District Court issued a preliminary injunction in the 'Free the Nipple' lawsuit. The injunction on the case Free the Nipple , et al., v. City of Springfield stops Springfield from enforcing a discriminatory provision in the City's indecent exposure law that made it illegal for women to show any portion of their breasts beneath the areola as an act of protest. The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri filed the suit on Oct. 26 following the plaintiffs’ August protest in which they appeared at Park Central Square without shirts, but with their nipples covered.

The New York Police Department has been directed by a U.S. court to remove from its online records an investigation pertaining to the rise of Islamic extremists in the West and the threats these individuals pose to American safety, according to legal documents. As part of a settlement agreement reached earlier this month with Muslim community advocates in U.S. District Court, the NYPD will purge from its website an extensive report that experts say has been critical to the department's understanding of radical Islam and its efforts to police the threat. The court settlement also stipulates that the NYPD make...

Glenview Elementary School in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, was already far along the safe road to political correctness. The suburban Philadelphia-area school's annual Christmas concert, held on Dec. 23, was called the Holiday Concert, and Christmas break had become Winter Break. Its website has a link to the 79-page, state-issued, anti-bullying guidelines. So far, so good. But the school had not bent entirely to PC fashion. After each recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, the pupils recited the words, "God bless America." Although this was not a required action, the school had been doing it to honor fallen first responders...

OLYMPIA, Washington, January 8, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Washington State will now require public buildings, including schools, to allow individuals to use bathrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex. Having taken effect on December 26, the transgender bathroom rule was created by the State Human Rights Commission and has been in the works since 2012. It eliminates a previous separate standard for schools, which allowed them to look at locker room use for transgender students on a case-by-case basis. Human Rights Commission executive director Sharon Ortiz, along with ACLU staff attorney Margaret Chen, said the rule clarifies law that previously...

NYC Settles Lawsuits Over Muslim Surveillance by Police By tom hays, associated press NEW YORK -- Jan 7, 2016 The New York Police Department will strengthen safeguards against illegal surveillance of Muslims in investigations of terror threats and install a civilian representative on an advisory committee that reviews the probes under the terms of a settlement of two high-profile civil rights lawsuits, lawyers said Thursday. The announcement of a deal following months of negotiations formally ended litigation over accusations that the nation's largest police department cast a shadow over Muslim communities with a covert campaign of religious profiling and illegal...

For more than a decade boys and girls at Glenview Elementary School would start the day by gathering on the playground to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The children of Haddon Heights, New Jersey would conclude their patriotic service by saying "God bless America." It was a tradition birthed by two kindergarten teachers in the aftermath of the Muslim terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 - a way to honor those who lost their lives on that terrible day. But that tradition ended Monday - thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey. The school's principal sent a...

Students at a Haddon Heights Elementary School are getting a real-life lesson in Constitutional law. Staffers at Glenview Elementary School say it became a daily ritual for students to say "God bless America" after the morning recital of the Pledge of Allegiance.

The deputy director of the ACLU of Michigan said in an op-ed Monday that she refuses to condemn radical Islamic terrorism in order to prove her allegiance to the United States. Rana Elmir wrote that she’s “consistently and aggressively asked” to condemn Islamic terrorism, and is tired of having her religious views linked to atrocities like the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and in Paris and San Bernardino this year. “I emphatically refuse,” she wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. The op-ed was titled: “Stop asking me to condemn terrorists just because I’m Muslim.”

The deputy director of the ACLU of Michigan said in an op-ed Monday that she refuses to condemn radical Islamic terrorism in order to prove her allegiance to the United States. Rana Elmir wrote that she's "consistently and aggressively asked" to condemn Islamic terrorism, and is tired of having her religious views linked to atrocities like the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and in Paris and San Bernardino this year. "I emphatically refuse," she wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. The op-ed was titled: "Stop asking me to condemn terrorists just because I'm Muslim."

Rana Elmir, an American Muslim and deputy director of the ACLU of Michigan, says that she “emphatically” refuses to condemn jihadist terrorists “just because I’m Muslim.” In her provocative article in Monday’s Washington Post, Elmir claims that she is often asked to condemn Islamic terrorism, to which she replies: “I emphatically refuse.” She then goes on to compare the systematic slaughters wrought under the name of Islamic terrorism with “the terror advanced by mostly white men at the alarming rate of one mass killing every two weeks in this country.” Elmir draws a parallel between the Islamic State and “Dylann...

It wasn't until last week that I realized the ACLU opposed gun control. The co-chair of the Colorado ACLU announced his support for use of guns in self-defense on Facebook. Unfortunately, in the resulting furor he was forced to resign. Indicating that he owned a firearm apparently was too much for his colleagues to bear. Of course, Loring Wirbel's original endorsement was a bit unusual. He wrote: "we have to really reach out to those who might consider voting for Trump and say, 'This is Goebbels. This is the final solution. If you are voting for him I will have...

Yes, we conservatives are the hate-filled bigots because we still use terms like "illegal immigrants," "Islamic terrorists" and oh yeah, "Merry Christmas." Yes, very hateful - and you know the American Civil Liberties Union would be first in line to point that out, except... What happens when one of their OWN squeaks out a little bona fide hate speech? His rant was accompanied by a USA Today article calling Trump a ‘fear monger in chief.’ The original post, which has been taken down, read, ‘The thing is, we have to really reach out to those who might consider voting for...

When I was a press secretary in the U.S. Senate, my boss instilled in me an important lesson: Don't put anything in an email you don't want to see on the front page of the Washington Post the next day. It was an obvious lesson once you thought about it, but it was one many people never seem to learn. I worked in the Senate in 2006, before Facebook and Twitter. But the lesson should be even more true for social media. I don't understand why some people don't get this, but it happened again last week. I broke a...

Police in Colorado Springs, Colorado have decided against investigating a board member of the state's American Civil Liberties Union after a post appeared on his Facebook page about shooting supporters of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. "There is not an investigation underway as the contents of the threat do not address a specific individual who could be considered a victim," Lt. Mark Comte of the Colorado Springs Police Department said in an email to The Daily Caller. As The Daily Caller reported, the Facebook page of a man named Loring Wirbel, the co-chair of the ACLU's Colorado Springs chapter, recently included...