Free Republic

While there are many threats to religious liberty, few are more consequential over the long term than the state’s ever-expanding role in private life. If the government is able to vacuum up tax dollars, create programs large and small for public benefit, and then exclude religious individuals or institutions from those programs, it has functionally created two tiers of citizenship. Secular individuals and institutions enjoy full access to the government they fund, while religious individuals and institutions find themselves funding a government that overtly discriminates against them. That’s the issue the Supreme Court addressed today in Trinity Lutheran Church...

An atheist group that is known for targeting supposed violations of the separation between church and state recently protested a Holocaust memorial because the monument plans to feature a Star of David.The Freedom From Religion Foundation, or FFRF, has stated its opposition to the proposed Ohio Statehouse Holocaust memorial because its leaders believe that including the religious symbol would create "legal precedent."The co-presidents of the FFRF, Don Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, wrote a letter to Richard Finan, chair of the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board about the proposed memorial, The Blaze reported.“Permitting one permanent sectarian and exclusionary religious...

Lana Del Rey has joined a nationwide occult effort that seeks to remove President Donald Trump from office through the power of witchcraft. On Thursday, Del Rey mysteriously tweeted, "At the stroke of midnight Feb 24, March 26, April 24, May 23. Ingredients can b found online." While early speculation wondered whether the tweet had something to do with her upcoming LP, those four dates aligned with the lunar calendar's "waning crescent moon ritual dates." Occultists noted that, on those four dates, practitioners of witchcraft would congregate for a mass ritual that would with the hope that their efforts resulted...

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray wants to know exactly what President Donald Trump has planned for cities like Seattle that vow to resist federal immigration enforcement actions. Murray, in his final State of the City address delivered Tuesday from a mosque, said Seattle was filing public records requests with the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies seeking information about the Trump administration's definition of "sanctuary cities" and what "enforcement actions the federal government may take against us." Seattle has vowed to protect immigrants and refugees and to not help federal authorities. Murray has instructed city departments to rework budgets...

A Philadelphia-area college is offering a religion class to its students titled “Is God a White Supremacist?” According to Swarthmore College’s course catalog, the course “will focus on representations of race in religious discourses and social practice.” […] Tariq al-Jamil, the head of the school’s religion department, will be teaching the course. …

We are the most religious democracy in the world, and our Judeo-Christian ethic demands that we take care of the downtrodden. But we are also the only advanced democracy without universal health coverage. Are we confused . . . or just hypocrites? My bet is that we are very confused. The public’s reaction to Obamacare (also known as the Affordable Care Act, or ACA) is a prime example of our confusion. Most Americans are preoccupied with making a living and raising a family, and rightly so. They have no time to fully examine health care policy issues. Surveys show that...

The story of the Obama administration sending $770,000,000 in taxpayer money to rebuild and even expand mosques in foreign countries broke in October and enraged taxpayers everywhere. The question coming from taxpayers who were flipping the bill for foreign mosques but often struggling to pay their own bills was, ‘How could we afford to send such sensational, fairy-tale sized money to a foreign country while our infrastructure crumbles, our veterans starve, our job participation rate is at one of the lowest levels ever, and while our national debt stands at never before seen, record levels?’ READ THE REST AT http://resistancefeed.com/2016/11/18/obama-paid-770000000-taxpayer-money-to-foreign-mosques/

Jordan, a Kansas City psychology professor and mother of two, spent a euphoric Election Day believing the country was electing its first female president. She voted, visited the grave of local suffragette Sarah Chandler Coates and turned on Spotify to dance with her mom to Nick Lowe’s “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass.” Then she watched the returns come in, only to see Hillary Clinton lose to Donald Trump. “I felt like somebody had died,” she said. “Not just that someone had died. But that someone was going to just keep dying every day.” She stayed up all night...

Bill Donohue comments on Hillary Clinton’s speech at an African American church in Philadelphia yesterday: Hillary Clinton took her campaign to Mount Airy Church of God in Christ yesterday afternoon. According to one report, “she urged parishioners of a black church in Philadelphia’s West Oak Lane neighborhood to choose ‘hope over fear’ and vote to send her to the White House.” Another story described how she stood “at a wooden lectern in the center of a purple-carpeted altar,” making her pitch to the faithful. There has been no complaint from the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State,...

New York City kicked off a social media advertising campaign on Monday to combat negative perceptions of Muslims and counteract increasing instances of threats and violence, officials said. Showing an array of photographs of Muslim men and women, the campaign reads “I am Muslim. I am NYC”, according to the New York City Commission on Human Rights. The campaign is aimed at addressing negative depictions and rhetoric, officials said.

ROME — Imagine a five-star general, under assault, with no weapons of defense — except faith. Think of an Old Testament prophet living today, describing the evil destroying his community — but few listen. That general or prophet is the fierce and noble leader of the Syriac Catholic Church of Antioch, Patriarch Ignatius Youssef III Younan, age 71, whose Church comprises some 200,000 souls worldwide. snip According to the patriarch, fundamental errors in Syria came from Western politicians insisting that democracy can be exported, when it can’t; from Western media describing an “Arab Spring” style opposition movement and the existence...

Legions of blank-faced workers marching in lockstep, a bare-breasted woman dressed as a fallen angel suspended from the ceiling, dancers in their underwear simulating homosexual acts on a metal cart, robed Satanist-type figures bearing goat skulls, dancers in grass costumes worshipping a goat-headed man who "dies" and is resurrected. Is this some sort of bizarre witches' sabbat out in the woods? A Satanic black mass in the depths of an abandoned cemetery? No, it's the opening ceremony of the historic Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland, attended by some of the most powerful leaders in Europe, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of...

Fifth-grader turned part-time gardener Emma Leyson is showing off her greens on Muse School’s campus. “This is the strawberry plant I planted,” Leyson told CBS2’s Stephanie Simmons. Thought to be the first of its kind in the country, the school recently adopted an all-vegan lunch menu. As part of their curriculum, the students learn how to create food from seed to table. --snip-- Paul Hudak, who runs the program at Muse, works closely with the school’s master chef to prepare a variety of vegan choices for the kids. --snip-- Before rolling out the new menu this school year, the staff...

During Wednesday's House floor debate on a reconciliation bill that would repeal Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood, Rep. Steve Cohen (D.-Tenn.) argued that Jesus and Moses would oppose what the House was seeking to do. "We just came through Hanukkah and Christmas, and we ought to think a little bit about what Hanukkah and Christmas were about and what Moses and Jesus would be about," said Cohen. "I think they would be about saving lives and about giving everybody an opportunity to live, not patient-centric health care, but people living and getting health care like every other civilized, industrialized country...

Tell us again how you love Jesus and support abortion. That’s what Reverend Harry Knox, leader of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) does on a regular basis. The head of the religious group that supports and promotes Planned Parenthood, and does so in the name of God, wants to be sure that in the season that Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus, his group of religious leaders would have supported the right to abort the Christ-child. In a letter to the RCRC’s email list this month, Knox wrote: Thank God for abortion providers. Thank God for all the...

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – President Obama says he backs "The Equality Act," which would add gender identity and sexual orientation to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "Upon that review it is now clear that the administration strongly supports the Equality Act,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest announced on Tuesday. “That bill is historic legislation that would advance the cause of equality for millions of Americans. “We look forward to working with Congress to ensure that the legislative process produces a result that balances both the bedrock principles of civil rights...with the religious liberty that we hold...

Two daycare workers have been fired for refusing to go along with the center’s transgender agenda. Madeline Kirksey, one of the workers who is an author of a Christian book, says her religious liberty rights have been violated. The two were fired after refusing to call a little girl a boy. The two male parents of a six-year-old little girl told employees at the school to refer to their daughter as a boy, and to call her by a new masculine name. The little girl’s hair had also been cut like a boy’s. Kirksey told Breitbart Texas in an interview,...

White House officials pushed to ban conversion therapy for LGBT youths, pointing to new findings that debunk the therapy. A ban on the conversion therapy for minors was introduced in Congress on Thursday, following a report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. "The science rebukes this so-called practice and so do we," White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett told reporters on a call Thursday. The report from the administration includes a consensus from an expert panel held by the American Psychological Association earlier this summer.The panel found that variations in "sexual orientation and gender identity are normal,...

Once a solid, vibrant Lutheran stronghold, Scandinavia today is probably the most secularized region of the Western world. Spiritually, Scandinavians have become “the people that dwell in darkness.” Scandinavia is filled with large, beautiful, empty churches. This has not happened by accident. . . It is probably the case today that a randomly selected African has a better chance than a randomly selected Scandinavian of hearing the Gospel clearly preached.  There was a time when every Swede was Lutheran from birth by law, and no other denomination was permitted. The Church of Sweden took to calling itself Den Svenska...

Cardinal Francis George, head of the Catholic archdiocese of Chicago, said the levers of power in government, education, entertainment, and media are enforcing a “public creed,” a “fake church” that requires all citizens to approve of gay marriage and related sexual anomalies or be punished by the State, just “as Christians and Jews are fined for their religion in countries governed by Sharia law.” Cardinal George, who was president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in 2007-10, made his remarks in his Sept. 7 column for the archdiocesean newspaper. In his commentary, the cardinal explains that America, despite...