Free Republic

Since the violence in Charlottesville, when white supremacists left one young woman dead and 19 others injured, the Southern Poverty Law Center has hit the jackpot. They [are] set to receive millions of dollars in donations from some of the nation’s deepest of pockets. Apple pledged $1 million. JP Morgan Chase & Co.: half a million. George and Amal Clooney even got in on the action, promising to donate another $1 million. But is donating money to the S.P.L.C. the best way to combat this[racist] poison? I think not. If Tim Cook and Jamie Dimon had done their due diligence,...

Responding to this editorial: Protesting the Racist Violence in Charlottesville Which linked to, end endorsed, this extreme anti-Trump view from BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40948812 Hello Consistent Life Friends, This is worth a look: http://hotair.com/archives/2017/08/18/poll-plurality-believes-far-right-groups-not-mostly-blame-violence-charlottesville/ I have to say the CL response to the Charlottesville Violence did not display your usual careful, disciplined sense of accuracy and justice. It seems strange to me that when the alt-right guy's car plowed into the crowd, causing horrible injury and death, it took a nanosecond for the media to determine that it was deliberate and motivated by race-hatred, an instant judgment apparently accepted by CL as...

Well this is fishy. His name is Jason Kessler. He is the one cited as the organizer of the now infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The thing is, Mr. Kessler’s arrival on the “alt right” and/or “White Nationalist” scene didn’t occur until November 2016. That’s right – Kessler didn’t start his white nationalist activism until after Donald Trump won the White House. Prior to that it appears he participated in the far left/socialist Occupy Wall Street movement as noted by the far-left, George Soros-funded Southern Poverty Law Center Rumors abound on white nationalist forums that Kessler’s ideological...

With a harsh denunciation of American conservatism, published in the semi-official Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica, the Vatican has plunged headlong into a partisan debate in a society that it clearly does not understand, potentially alienating (or should I say, further alienating) the Americans most inclined to favor the influence of the Church. Why? Why this bitter attack on the natural allies of traditional Catholic teachings? Is it because the most influential figures at the Vatican today actually want to move away from those traditional teachings, and form a new alliance with modernity? The authors of the essay claim to embrace...

Speaking to workers and business people in Italy’s port city of Genoa Saturday, Pope Francis surprised his hearers by praising entrepreneurship and touting the importance of healthy businesses for the economy. “There can’t be a good economy without good businessmen, without their capacity to create and to produce,” he said, shattering his reputation as an enemy of the free market economy. The Pope recognized that the essential value of work and employment is only possible when companies are sound and successful. Without denouncing unemployment benefits, Francis insisted that state intervention wasn’t a real solution. “A monthly check from the state...

The archbishop of the Archdiocese of St. Louis in Missouri is putting his foot down in defiance of a city ordinance that criminalizes “discrimination” against advocates of abortion. Archbishop Carlson said the Archdiocese of St. Louis and its affiliated agencies will not comply with Ordinance 70459. Facebook/Archdiocese of St. Louis The archbishop of the Archdiocese of St. Louis in Missouri is putting his foot down in defiance of a city ordinance that criminalizes "discrimination" against advocates of abortion. The Most Reverend Robert J. Carlson stated the church and other entities affiliated with it will not abide by the ordinance. "Let...

DUBLIN — As the Gestapo surrounds the palace of an Italian anti-Fascist aristocrat, an Irish priest dashes to the cellar. He is wanted by the Nazis for his role in the daring rescues of Jews, POWs and refugees, but this time it seems there is no escape. Miraculously, a coal delivery being made to the palace offers the perfect cover — the cleric blackens his face, hides his cassock and slips away to freedom through the narrow cobbled streets of Rome. This dramatic scene, recreated in the 1983 movie “The Scarlet and the Black” starring Gregory Peck as Monsignor...

For those of you wondering why I’m writing another column about the alt-right, the reason is simple: Every time I do, people comment to explain why I’m wrong. Those people, some of whom I used to know, are starting to buy what the alt-right is peddling. Some of them are brazen enough to inform me that I, as an active social conservative, should be “smart enough” to realize that “the Jews,” whom they somehow believe to be a homogenous and monolithic group, are responsible for all of the evils Western civilization faces. One of these people even wrote that Richard...

Was “ Easter” actually borrowed or rather usurped from a pagan celebration? The argument largely rests on the supposed pagan names for the celebration in English and German (“Easter”, “Ostern”). Note, however, that in most other European languages, the celebration’s name is derived from Pascha (Greek), from Pesach, (Hebrew), Passover. Easter is the Christian Passover. [large snips here and throughout] The usual argument for the pagan origins of Easter is based on Venerable Bede (673-735), an English monk who wrote: “ … Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month" and which was once called after a goddess...

[Excerpt: cut from 50 to 13] A few of the most notable converts over the last century: The dazzling variety is a microcosm of the many different people who enter the Church every year —[for] no past, however dark and troubled, makes us unwelcome to God’s loving embrace of mercy and forgiveness. Francis Beckwith (b. 1960): Philosopher /theologian; elected president of the Evangelical Theological Society; converted to Catholicism 2007. Robert Bork (1927-2012): Conservative American judge known for the vicious political fight blocking his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987. Converted to Catholicism in 2003. Dave Brubeck (1920-2012): Renowned...

<p>Washington (AFP) - A New Jersey teen pleaded guilty Monday to a plot allegedly inspired by the Islamic State group to kill Pope Francis during his 2015 visit to the United States.</p> <p>The US Justice Department said Santos Colon, 15 years old at the time, sought to recruit a sniper to shoot the pope as he celebrated mass in Philadelphia on September 27, 2015. Colon also allegedly planned to set off explosives.</p>

The first and only internationally certified contraceptive app is now awaiting approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. If approved, Natural Cycles would provide Americans a government-approved drug-free and therefore side-effect-free alternative in a market saturated with hormonal and abortive birth control. It all started when 32-year-old nuclear physicist Elina Berglund Scherwitzl, who was on the Nobel Prize-winning team that discovered the Higgs-Boson particle, “was looking for a hormone-free alternative contraception and we weren’t happy with what we found on the market,” said Dr. Raoul Scherwitzl, Berglund’s husband, in an e-mail interview. “Elina…decided to apply her mathematics expertise to...

Steve Bannon in his natural plumage: no Magna Cappa Everyone loves a conspiracy theory, and of late English-language media have been giddy with speculation that Trump mastermind Steve Bannon and American Cardinal Raymond Burke, seen as a leading traditionalist critic of Pope Francis, have formed a pact to “legitimize extremist forces that want to bring down Western liberal democracy,” in the words of the Washington Post. (What the specific aim of this alliance may be isn’t terribly clear, since nobody seriously believes a Trump-backed Vatican palace coup is in the offing. Presumably, the idea is to encourage and embolden...

Congratulations to Secretary DeVos....It is time to resuscitate the Constitution of the United States vis-à-vis the responsibility for education. [huge snip] In 1866, Congressman Andrew J. Rogers, a Democrat representing New Jersey's 4th Congressional District, spoke eloquently against a bill to establish a federal Department of Education. Mr. Rogers declared that the bill: ... proposes to put under the supervision of a bureau established at Washington all the schools and educational institutions of the different States of the Union by collecting such facts and statistics as will warrant them by amendments hereafter to the law now attempted to be passed,...

On 9 February, the Washington Post ran a disgraceful and bizarre opinion piece designed to join the burgeoning propaganda efforts to link Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke to U.S. presidential adviser Stephen Bannon and President Donald Trump’s White House. From that alliance, the story goes, Bannon, through Burke, is plotting to bring the Trump administration into a conflict with Pope Francis. The Post opinion piece is linked here. There there have been several other similar “news” stories run over the last several days at major outlets, including on the NPR website. The point of this obviously coordinated campaign is entirely unclear....

I haven’t had time to weigh in yet on the Gorsuch nomination to the Supreme Court, so it is time to catch up. In addition to having a law degree from Harvard, it is notable that Gorsuch also took a leave from his lucrative law practice to attend Oxford University to earn a Ph.D under the direction of John Finnis. Never heard of John Finnis? I predict you will in the confirmation hearings. And the likelihood is that Democrats will make fools of themselves, or at the very least unwittingly reveal their essential contempt for the American Founding, and the...

Back in the days of intense Harry Potter warfare, I wrote an "On Religion" column in which a very articulate mother explained why she was seriously considering homeschooling her child. First of all, she said it was clear that her local public schools didn't take religion all that seriously. A kind of watered-down faith was OK, but she was sure that her family's intense religious beliefs and traditions would clash with the culture in nearby schools. She didn't want to have to compromise her family's beliefs in order to fit in. Then there those omnipresent books about a certain young...

If you’re baffled by a women’s march that excluded thousands of women and was run by an extremist Muslim, well then you “literally just can’t even,” which is basically, like, WHATEVER! This was not a women’s march with any kind of logic behind it. It was an anti-women march, and women participated because they fell for a steaming-hot pile of platitudes. These useful idiots were duped by Islamist Linda Sarsour, who is determined to normalize her extremist culture. It was one of the stupidest marches in the history of modern politics, and it says a lot about where we are...

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was strongly in favor of legalizing abortion. The bumper sticker on my car read, “Don’t labor under a misconception; legalize abortion.” The first issue of Off Our Backs after the Roe decision included one of my movie reviews, and also an essay by another member of the collective criticizing the...

Forget the war on babies. The abortion industry has a new enemy: ultrasounds. In a bizarre and rambling 2,600-word feature piece published on Tuesday, The Atlantic writer Moira Weigel took a sledgehammer to basic science and then did her best to vacuum its brains out before anyone could figure out what just happened. The article’s headline is bad enough—”How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Fetus Is a Person”—but its subhed is the real work of art: “The technology has been used to create an ‘imaginary’ heartbeat and sped-up videos that falsely depict a response to stimulus.” There...