Free Republic

LORAIN, Ohio — It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage. Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data....

Dear friend, Right now Virginia Republicans want make our Commonwealth a place where a woman who makes the agonizing and deeply personal decision to terminate a pregnancy must endure an invasive transvaginal ultrasound whether her doctor thinks she needs it or not. Republicans want to make Virginia a place where cracking down on imaginary "voter fraud" is sufficient justification for making seniors, African Americans and any of the thousands of people without government-issued identification jump through burdensome hoops just to exercise their right to vote. Republicans want Virginia to be a place where women don't know if they will continue...

New Rule Excludes Religious Workers from Benefits Offered to Others. Another Example of Hostile Secularism in the Federal GovernmentBy: Msgr. Charles Pope As the recent battle for a proper understanding of religious liberty shows, our culture and many of our government leaders and organizations are becoming increasingly secularized and hostile to religion and religious practice.Yet another example of this is a recent rule change in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF). According to this program, a person who has been engaged in Public Service employment for ten years, can have the remainder of their Student Loan form the government...

PHOENIX - An Iraqi family living in the valley claim it is part of their culture, but police say it’s a crime. Police have re-arrested Yusra Farhan, an Iraqi woman taken into custody last week. Farhan was accused of beating her 19-year-old daughter for talking to a boy, but detectives have found that wasn't the first time. Back in November, Farhan allegedly burned the victim's face and chest with a hot spoon, because she did not agree to an arranged marriage with a 38-year-old man. Also arrested were Farhan's husband and 18-year-old daughter. 45-year-old Mohammed Altameemi is facing one count...

Flags will be lowered in New Jersey Saturday, the day of Whitney Houston’s funeral. But a Marine mom in Arlington says it’s an honor Houston doesn’t deserve. When Phyllis McGeath heard Gov. Chris Christie had ordered flags lowered to half-staff for Houston, she said she felt a pain deep inside her. “I was hurt and offended. Disappointed. Saddened,” she said. “I felt like the honor that was given to my son was tarnished.” McGeath had three sons who were active duty Marines. Her oldest, Philip, was killed by a suicide bomber just four weeks ago in Afghanistan. He was 25....

Our offspring and culture is the most successful feature of the History of Mankind. Ancient Rome and Greece have nothing on Scandinavia of today, nor what we did some centuries after Rome came down. No, I'm not a Racist - and I furthermore am more than a true friend of Italy and Greece. But I do not believe there's a point in denying the fact that Viking Culture has played a major role in shaping the World of today. Have a look at it. Britain, North America, Scandinavia, Germany, etc. in one way or another, all were formed by the...

Did you know that “bin Laden” is the vice president of the United States, or that the Civil War led to America’s independence? How about that Canada’s a state? Well, that’s what some local students at (what appears to be) a Washington state high school think. In a video that’s probably a few hours from going viral, a young man decided to question classmates for a video called “Lunch Scholars.” It is anything but scholarly.

It has been 40 years since the "The Godfather" drew fans into the iconic saga of the Corleone family, reinventing the mob-movie genre and embedding the phrase "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse" in the American idiom. But the blockbuster film and its two sequels, with more than $1 billion in revenues, are about far more than crime and punishment to Tom Santopietro, the author of "The Godfather Effect." Mr. Santopietro, a theater manager who has written books on Frank Sinatra, Doris Day and Barbra Streisand, saw "The Godfather: Part II" (1974) as a college sophomore, and it...

“You look like you need to learn to shoot,” a helpful receptionist advised Amanda Fortini as she sat waiting to see her doctor. Evidently her discomfort and worry showed. “What the hell? What did she see? Perhaps, I thought, she was referring to the fact that I’m not physically prepossessing—delicately built, with bird-bone wrists and arms. Or maybe she’d fixated on my all-black, un-Montana wardrobe and determined I needed some toughening up. I must have been emitting pheromones of unease, I concluded, the way some people signal fear to dogs. I didn’t want to be perceived as a human orchid....

LAREDO — A former hit man for the Zetas cartel calmly related to jurors his role in killings on both sides of the border, testifying Monday in the drug conspiracy trial of a man prosecutors say was also a hired killer. From the witness stand in U.S. District Judge Micaela Alvarez's courtroom here, Rosalio Reta pointed to Gerardo Castillo Chavez, 25, and identified him as a fellow Zeta. Pressing his fingertips together and speaking in a slow, soft voice, Reta, 22, told jurors that he had been in a team of hit men headed by Gabriel Cardona, an admitted Zeta...

Wisdom Cries out in the streets… (Proverbs 1)God’s wisdom is always crying out to every generation, whether it be through the scriptures, the church, or Israel, there is always a Divine witness to truth trying to get people’s attention as life pushes them on to their final destination. I believe that one of the ways God’s wisdom cries out to this generation, is in certain current events. It is true that for the most part the real message is lost on most people, due to the cacaphony of other incidents, or the urgency of the mundane. Many of these events...

No-child #2 turned 19 years old today. Noman remembers his birth vividly. No-family had moved the prior fall to Barcelona for Noman to take a faculty position at a Spanish University. It was explained that while Spain had socialized medicine, nobody who could avoid it used the public system. We promptly purchased private insurance and began seeing a highly recommended MD. No-wife's pregnancy was a preexisting condition. So, while pre-partem visits were covered, the delivery would not be. No problem, as our MD, like all doctors in Spain, worked in the public system during part of the day or week,...

NEW DELHI: The foreign ministry has asked its missions in central Asian nations such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as well as in Ukraine and Russia to re-examine visa applications of women between 15 and 40 years on the grounds of a spike in the number of sex workers from these regions reaching India. The advice has been issued just ahead of assembly elections and although there may be no connection, apart from larger volumes of unaccounted money sloshing around during the poll season, Indian officials have been asked to rigorously interview female visa applicants. The move is likely to kick...

Greek disabled groups are angry at a government decision to expand a list of state-recognized disability categories to include pedophiles, exhibitionists and kleptomaniacs. But the Labor Ministry on Monday said categories added to the expanded list — that also includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists — were included for purposes of medical assessment and used as a gauge for allocating financial assistance.

What is Project Anti-Cosmo? Cosmopolitan is emblematic of what’s wrong with our culture today. The content of the magazine is predominantly (and often explicitly) about sex. The articles you’ll typically find in its pages advise “hookups” without a hint of emotional connection. Yet, unlike “R” rated movies, there’s no “age limit” for anyone to access it, so young teen girls are reading, absorbing, and acting on its destructive message. Indeed, the increasing focus on sex sex sex encourages the magazine’s impressionable readers to make the most shallow choices imaginable. Because of its popularity (it’s in every supermarket, at the nail...

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