Free Republic

I’ve never really written about my views on gay marriage, in part because I’m squishy on the issue and vacillate between lukewarm opposition and benign indifference. I know this will annoy some of my colleagues — and a good number of readers — but I think gay marriage, or something functionally equivalent to it is 1) inevitable 2) not the end of the world. If the institution of marriage underwritten by the State were the same as the one underwritten by God, I might be able to get my blood up over it. But as it stands, I endorse Kevin...

Jeb Bush has expressed concerns about the state of the republican party, stating that Ronald Reagan would have a hard time getting the nomination from today's GOP. "I would concur with his assessment, I think we have to be mindful of Reagan's ethos of the big tent theory," said George P Bush. "The Republican party in order to be successful has to include people from all backgrounds, namely the Hispanic community." Mitt Romney took a tough line on immigration in the republican primaries, but George P Bush says to win over the Hispanic vote, the presumptive nominee needs to focus...

Waving signs with slogans like "I love my boyfriend just as much as you love your spouse," supporters of same-sex unions protested Friday at select metro Atlanta Chick-fil-A stores. _______________ "I don't care about their personal views, I care about how they spend their money," Atlantan Benjamin Cobb said as he protested with about 30 others outside the East Trinity Place Chick-fil-A in Decatur. "What they are saying is you're welcome in our restaurant and your money is welcome, but we're going to turn it around and use it against you," said protester Tascha Madaffari, whose children, Dominic, William and...

After hundreds of thousands of people ate dinner at his restaurants on Wednesday for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, one Georgia family, a same-sex couple and their two daughters, has invited Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy to have dinner at their house. But the dinner invitation from Marci Alt and wife Marlysa, who live near Chick-fil-A’s Atlanta headquarters, is no paltry piece of paper, it is backed by an online petition sponsored by Change.org, an online organizing platforms for activists, and GLAAD, a gay rights advocacy group. “I hope Mr. Cathy will join my family for dinner, where we can share a...

If Chick-fil-A needed any proof that metro Atlantans would "eat mor chikin" — even in the face of what arguably can be called a public relations nightmare for the company — it need only check its Wednesday receipts. Fans from Gwinnett County's Hamilton Mill to Fayetteville inundated the chain's metro stores, with lines snaking onto sidewaks and drive-through traffic backing into roadways. The turnout came two weeks after Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy's comments supporting biblical marriage touched off a firestorm on same-sex unions. But many said the real issue that drew them Wednesday was freedom of speech. Daniel Jordan of...

Chick-fil-A restaurants around the country on Wednesday faced long lines of customers and packs of protesters — all of them responding, in one way or another, to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s call for an “appreciation day” for the chicken chain that opposes same-sex marriage. More than 630,000 Facebook users have RSVP’d on Huckabee’s event page, where he writes about being “incensed at the vitriolic assaults” on the company ever since CEO Dan Cathy told Baptist Press that Chick-fil-A is “guilty as charged” in support of “the biblical definition of the family unit.” ****** The opposition to Chick-fil-A — waged...

Though Stonecrest Mall in Lithonia had not yet opened, Martha Hyde, Betty Moses, Sylvia Parish and Ann Whitley wanted to be among the first Wednesday to demonstrate their "appreciation" for the facility's Chick-fil-A location. "We just love Chick-fil-A, the food and the workers," the group, which meets daily to mall walk, said as they sat in the food court dining on Chick-fil-A biscuits, coffee and breakfast platters. Today is Chick-fil-A "Appreciation Day," the brainchild of former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Huckabee last week asked fans of the Atlanta-based company to come out today to show their support...

Democrats moved to make same-sex marriage a part of their party platform, placing language that would declare a right for gay men and lesbians to marry on track for approval by the party’s leadership. Party officials met over the weekend in Minneapolis and approved the first step in the platform-amending process. In two weeks, the entire platform committee will vote on the matter at a meeting scheduled in Detroit. Then, if approved as expected, it would move on to convention delegates in Charlotte, N.C., for final approval in September. According to Democrats who were briefed on the vote in Minneapolis,...

NEW YORK — A long-serving Air Force chaplain has left the Southern Baptist Convention after the conservative denomination publicly questioned his attendance at a same-sex civil union ceremony at his base in New Jersey. The chaplain, Col. Timothy Wagoner, is remaining on active duty and has affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which holds more moderate views on homosexuality and some other issues than the Southern Baptists. "I find very little that is more important and nothing that is more exhilarating than providing for the religious freedoms and spiritual care of all service members and their families — and will...

Navy Senior Chief Dwayne Beebe, center, embraces Jonathan Franqui, right, after proposing to him during the gay pride parade Saturday, July 21, 2012, in San Diego. SAN DIEGO (AP) — Some of the loudest cheers Saturday at San Diego's gay pride parade were for active-duty troops marching in military dress, the first time that U.S. service members participated in such an event while in full uniform. Dozens of soldiers, sailors, and Marines marched alongside an old Army truck decorated with a "Freedom to Serve" banner and a rainbow flag. They were joined by dozens more military personnel in civilian...

A Colorado teenager who survived the mass shooting at a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" in Aurora this morning helped keep a young mother, her young child and her 4-month-old infant safe even though he was injured himself. Jarell Brooks, 19, has been released from Denver General Hospital and is now recovering at home after he suffered a gunshot wound to the leg after James Holmes, once a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado, allegedly set off smoke bombs and opened fire on the unsuspecting audience, killing 12 people and injuring at least 50 in the attack....

JACKSON, Miss. — A lesbian who sued her school district in 2010 after she was left out of the high school yearbook for wearing a tuxedo is demanding the Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Museum permit a commitment ceremony for her and her partner. The Southern Poverty Law Center sent a letter to the museum on Thursday on behalf of Ceara Sturgis, 20, and threatened to sue if the facility doesn’t allow Sturgis and her partner, 19-year-old Emily Key, to hold the ceremony there on Aug. 11. The letter said Sturgis and her mother, Veronica Rodriguez, are both from Jackson and...

(Reuters) - Los Angeles County voters will decide in November whether to require porn actors to use condoms during film shoots, in a ballot measure that marks a new front for an AIDS group that has long targeted the adult entertainment industry. The ballot initiative is the latest salvo against the industry, after the city of Los Angeles passed a similar requirement in January that has yet to be enforced. Backers of the initiative submitted about 370,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot, well over the 232,000 required, said Ged Kenslea, a spokesman for the group AIDS Healthcare Foundation which...

Quick parenting note: If your malnourished 14-year-old son does tons of drugs, don't let your trailer catch fire. The cops will find out about it, and get, like, so mad. That's what happened Tuesday, when 47-year-old Darin MacDannald was arrested in Deerfield Beach on child cruelty charges. Police say his son, who weighed 85 pounds, was examined at Coral Springs Medical Center and found to have "unexplained red blotches" on his legs and "had pinpointed pupils and was ... under the influence of some type of drug or drugs. A drug screen of [his] blood and urine tested positive for...

Col. Timothy Wagoner has been an Air Force chaplain for 20 years, serving a denomination — the Southern Baptists — that rejects same-sex relationships. Yet here he was at the chapel he oversees, watching supportively as an airman and his male partner celebrated a civil union ceremony. “I wouldn’t miss it,” Wagoner said at the McGuire Air Force Base chapel, days later. “I don’t feel I’m compromising my beliefs … I’m supporting the community.” Wagoner didn’t officiate at the ceremony — he couldn’t go quite that far. But his very presence at the gathering was a marker of how things...

ELIZABETHTOWN, Ky. — It’s on his to-do list, but U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says the odds are against repealing the health care law championed by President Barack Obama. The Kentucky Republican said Monday it’s hard to unravel something of the magnitude of the 2,700-page health care law, WHAS-TV (http://bit.ly/LSUtqX ) reports. “If you thought it was a good idea for the federal government to go in this direction, I’d say the odds are still on your side,” McConnell said. “Because it’s a lot harder to undo something than it is to stop it in the first place.”

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans are sharply divided over Thursday's Supreme Court decision on the 2010 healthcare law, with 46% agreeing and 46% disagreeing with the high court's ruling that the law is constitutional. Democrats widely hail the ruling, most Republicans pan it, and independents are closely divided. ***** When asked what they want Congress to do now that the high court has upheld the 2010 law, 31% say they would repeal the law entirely and 21% would keep the law in place but repeal parts of it. A quarter of Americans swing in the other direction, saying they would like...

Since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Obama health law on Thursday, I have received a number of messages from listeners and readers arguing that because the Justices found the individual mandate was a tax, it was unconstitutional, as that plan didn't start in the House. "Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution states that 'All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House,'" is what the Constitution says, these readers argue. They go on to say that since the mandate was added in the Senate, and not in the House, the entire plan should have been found unconstitutional....

I’ve read all the arguments, some ingenious, for why the Roberts majority opinion is actually “good” in the long run. I don’t buy that at all, and worry that rationalizing defeats is no way to learn from them. From now on, the precedent has been established that U.S. citizens can be forced to buy a product that government deems necessary — period. Who cares what a particular president on occasion deems to call it — tax, mandate, whatever — at any given expedient time, or what a justice does to finesse that definition to protect implementation of the law? The...

I think there is a lot of whistling past the graveyard going on among conservatives who think that Obamacare is really in the political crosshairs now, and indeed, could lead to the defeat of the president’s reelection effort. I worry that the opposite is true. Sure, opponents who care a lot about the constitutionality and policy propriety of the ACA are very upset and motivated to defeat the president. But they already were. For the relatively uninvolved, the message of the Roberts ruling, despite the justice’s protests to the contrary, is that Obamacare is A-okay. That will increase the law’s...