Free Republic

A federal agency cannot force a Texas-based conservative Christian business to comply with policies barring discrimination against LGBTQ+ employees or job applicants, a federal appeals court has ruled. The decision by a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity cannot deny Braidwood Management an exemption from anti-discrimination policies designed to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act. Braidwood is entitled to the exemption under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, the ruling said. “Being forced to employ someone to represent the company who behaves...

A Texas state agency is actively discriminating against white and Asian Texans, refusing them monoclonal antibody treatments because of their ethnicity. Discrimination is at work in Texas’ Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as overseen by Gov. Greg Abbott. The potentially life-saving monoclonal antibody treatment for those affected with COVID-19 has demonstrated effectiveness if received early enough, yet it is being denied to some patients on the basis of race. News broke over the weekend that the criteria for receiving the monoclonal antibody treatment excludes those of white or Asian descent who are younger than 65 and reasonably healthy,...

Watching a story of a mobster from NY who became one of the first informants. Story turned somewhat when this informant kidnapped a person with knowledge of the three deaths in Mississippi. The show had the mobster torturing the man with knowledge of the three murders to get info as to where the bodies were located, Is this common knowledge? Can info from torture be used in court? Bobby Kennedy involved, Bio.com, Season 4, episode 31 For over thirty years, Gregory Scarpa lived a charmed triple life: mafia hit man, loving father and husband, and secret FBI informant--until a fatal...

Facebook has updated its hate speech algorithm, reversing years of neutrality to prioritize anti-black comments while making anti-white slurs the lowest priority. The tech giant’s new system for detecting hate speech, known internally as the WoW Project, will automatically delete hateful language directed at the LGBTQ community, Jews, Muslims and African Americans — which has been dubbed by Facebook engineers as the “worst of the worst,” the Washington Post reported. The company will now begin scoring hate speech and offensive posts, and remarks about “men,” “whites” and “Americans” will be marked “low sensitivity,” the report said.

Facebook is embarking on a major overhaul of its algorithms that detect hate speech, according to internal documents, reversing years of so-called “race-blind” practices. Those practices resulted in the company being more vigilant about removing slurs lobbed against White users while flagging and deleting innocuous posts by people of color on the platform. The overhaul, which is known as the WoW Project and is in its early stages, involves re-engineering Facebook’s automated moderation systems to get better at detecting and automatically deleting hateful language that is considered “the worst of the worst,” according to internal documents describing the project obtained...

This story is almost too good to be true. The federal Department of Education notified Princeton University today that it was placing the school under a civil rights-related investigation. The hilarious reason for the investigation is due to virtue-signaling remarks made during the Democrat-sponsored summer of rioting by the University’s own President. I kid you not. As reported by the Washington Examiner today, Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber published an open letter earlier this month claiming that “[r]acism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton” and that “racist assumptions” are “embedded in structures of the...

Some thoughts on the real problem behind SCOTUS's transgender expansion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In a shocking U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch voted with the axis of evil—that is, with Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, the axis of evil decided that in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the word “sex” includes “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”—both subjectively constituted conditions. As a result, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment based on “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin,” now prohibits employers from firing employees who self-identify...

Christopher Caldwell is not a household name. But for the relatively small set of people who care deeply about political writing, he is a towering figure. His prose — full of wit and irony, enlivened by an eye for paradox and the telling detail, informed by a polyglot and polymathic erudition — is second to none in the world of conservative journalism and exceeds nine-tenths of what is published in the press at large. In a review of Caldwell’s previous book, 2008’s immigration-skeptic Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson, himself one of the most learned...

The past 24 hours provided a clear and painful picture of the momentous challenges American Jews face these days. The day began with news that President Trump has issued an executive order designed, the White House said, to fight anti-Semitism. Reporting on the order, The New York Times stressed that it will “effectively interpret Judaism as a race or nationality, not just a religion,” and that it “could be used to stifle free speech and legitimate opposition to Israel’s policies toward Palestinians in the name of fighting anti-Semitism.” Leftist NGOs echoed the same talking point, and a phalanx of pundits...

On Saturday they would appear before the convention’s Credentials Committee and ask to be seated as the official Mississippi state delegation... Shortly after he signed the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson told his aide Joseph Califano, "I think we’ve delivered the South to the Republican party for your lifetime and mine." Maybe so, but he was determined to hold onto the region long enough to ensure his own re-election; the opinion polls might show him leading the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, by an enormous margin, but he was desperate not to stoke the fires of sectional conflict. Only one...

"...we come to celebrate and give thanks for the remarkable life of J. William Fulbright, a life that changed our country and our world forever, and for the better. In the work he did, the words he spoke and the life he lived, Bill Fulbright stood against the 20th century's most destructive forces and fought to advance its brightest hopes."

A federal appeals court in Chicago on Tuesday ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act also protects LGBT employees from workplace discrimination, the first time a federal appellate court has come to that conclusion. The decision by the full 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago comes just three weeks after a three-judge panel in Atlanta ruled the opposite, saying employers aren’t prohibited from discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation. It also comes as President Donald Trump’s administration has begun setting its own policies on LGBT rights. Late in January, the White House declared Trump would enforce an...

DENVER (CBS4)– Federal authorities told the Colorado Department of Transportation and opponents of the planned Interstate 70 expansion this week that it would open an investigation into claims the project violates the Civil Rights Act.The pending investigation comes in response to a federal complaint filed with the U.S Department of Transportation by Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, and neighborhood groups impacted by the project, including the Cross Community Coalition, Colorado Latino Forum and Elyria-Swansea Neighborhood Association. Filed last month, the complaint alleges CDOT’s plan will result in “disparate and severe environmental and economic impacts” on the predominantly Latino communities.Candi CdeBaca,...

A rare full-court session of a U.S. appeals court in Chicago heard arguments Wednesday on whether protections under a 1964 Civil Rights Act should be expanded to cover workplace discrimination against LGBT employees, as hopes dim among some gay rights activists that the question will be resolved in their favor following Republican election victories. Several of the 11 judges at the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals signaled they are ready to enter what would be a historic ruling broadening the scope the 52-year-old landmark law, with the court directing the toughest questions during the hourlong hearing at a lawyer...

Ahh, how to begin a story about “transgender accommodations” and the government? Well, one could simply look at the issue of “transgender accommodations” as a political economist, and see that the conflict over new rules and laws teaches us something incredibly important about the nature of politics. Let’s take two breaking news items as examples. First, on Aug. 15, Dominic Holden of BuzzFeed reported that the federal General Services Administration (GSA) will post new rules this week commanding 9,200 properties run by the federal government to open their bathrooms to folks according to their “gender identities.” GSA spokesperson Ashley Nash-Hahn told BuzzFeed: This includes all kinds...

Bob Jones III Apologizes For Saying Gays Should Be Stoned By Ed Payne, CNN March 23, 2015 (CNN)Three and a half decades after calling for homosexuals to be stoned, former Bob Jones University President Bob Jones III has apologized. "I take personal ownership of this inflammatory rhetoric," Jones said. "This reckless statement was made in the heat of a political controversy 35 years ago." The weekend apology came days after the conservative Christian school in South Carolina received a petition asking for an apology for a statement Jones made to the Associated Press in 1980 at the White House. "I'm...

elma: After ignoring the battle that ended slavery under the first Republican president, President Obama at the 50th anniversary of Democrats' blocking the Selma bridge says, "We're the slaves that built the White House." The parts of American history that this president chooses to commemorate and what he says about them speaks volumes about his view of America and American history. His America is not only unexceptional, it is perpetually and deeply racist, an overbearing world bully with no right to lecture the world about morality, democracy or freedom. He reminded us over the weekend that despite any progress since...

WASHINGTON (AP) — For President Barack Obama, it's a week to invoke America's civil rights struggles from past to present. The nation's first black president plans a speech Saturday from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, the site of one of the movement's stirring moments, and will refocus on last year's fatal shooting by a white police officer of a black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri.

On the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act that granted blacks the same basic rights that whites had, equality of a sort has finally arrived. Quinnipiac University released a recent survey today that names Barack Obama the worst president in history, without regard to race, creed or color. Finally, some people are getting the content of character thing that Dr. Martin Luther King spoke so eloquently about, rather than just the color of the skin thing that the Democrats have relied so heavily on. “President Barack Obama is the worst president since World War II, 33 percent of American...