Free Republic

BLOOMSBURG — Leaders in Bloomsburg have decided against going ahead with plans for a controversial law at a meeting Monday night. With a narrow vote of four to three, Bloomsburg town officials voted not to draft an ordinance that would make it illegal for businesses to discriminate against people based on sexual orientation. Council met with a packed room and heard hours of input on whether the town needed such an ordinance. “Lacks constitutional weight both federally and at a state level, being carried along more by emotion than reason,” said one speaker who opposed the ordinance. “Many members of...

A vote December 2 by the Washington, D.C., City Council could compel private religious schools and universities in the nation’s capital to allow groups that oppose the schools’ moral values access to their campuses, programs, and funds. The council voted to eliminate faith-based schools’ 25-year-old legal protections from discrimination lawsuits as part of a “human rights amendment.” Barring an act of Congress, D.C.’s religious schools will likely have to go against their religious values when it comes to permitting use to their campuses or programs. The city’s rules hold that it’s “unlawful discriminatory practice” to limit any use of facilities,...

A county legislator from downstate New York is charged with sexual abuse for allegedly touching two teen-age boys in the Cranberry Lake area last summer. Michael Kelsey, 36, of Pleasant Valley, NY, was arrested by state police in Wappingers Falls Monday night.

A federal appeals court has overturned a ruling ordering Massachusetts prison officials to provide taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgery for an inmate convicted of murder. Michelle Kosilek, born Robert Kosilek, has waged a protracted legal battle for the surgery she says is needed to relieve the mental anguish caused by gender-identity disorder. In 2012, a federal judge ruled that prison officials must provide the surgery. That decision was upheld by a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but prison officials appealed and won a rehearing before the full appeals court.

Brian Casey told Nova Scotia Supreme Court that the provincial regulator overstepped its bounds when it decided in April it would ban graduates from Trinity Western University from the province's bar admission program unless the school dropped a requirement that students abstain from sex outside heterosexual marriage. The requirement, spelled out in a pledge that all students sign, has been criticized as discriminatory against gays and lesbians. Casey said the court should overturn the law society's regulation on the grounds that it infringes on the future students' charter rights of freedom of religion, freedom of expression and freedom of association...

In an earlier column, I looked at the role the abortion issue would play in the 2016 election -- not very much, I concluded -- and promised another column on other cultural issues. Here goes. On anyone's list of cultural issues that have been debated over the last decade, same-sex marriage ranks just behind abortion. And unlike abortion, opinion on same-sex marriage has changed dramatically in recent years. Not long ago, it wasn't a political issue at all. The gifted writers Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch were making an intellectually serious, and interestingly conservative, case for same-sex marriage. But the...

Homosexual activists will be the first ones to scoff and laugh at our faces if you bring up the term “homosexual agenda.” They’ll howl with laughter as they dismiss you as a homophobe Neanderthal that just isn’t keeping up with the modern times. The way the mainstream media distorts it, you’d think that every other person was as flaming as the candles on your great grandma’s birthday cake. Growing up in the 1970s, we were already being indoctrinated into the “gay agenda” with music superstars like the androgynous David Bowie and glam rockers the New York Dolls and Lou Reed....

A federal appeals court has overturned a ruling ordering Massachusetts prison officials to provide taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgery for an inmate convicted of murder. Michelle Kosilek, born Robert Kosilek, has waged a protracted legal battle for the surgery she says is needed to relieve the mental anguish caused by gender-identity disorder. …

Dozens of congressional Democrats asked federal health officials Monday to take extra steps to protect gay illegal immigrant children from abuse while they’re in custody, including ensuring that transgender children are housed with the sex they identify as. Saying reports of mistreatment “continue to emerge” from federal facilities, the lawmakers asked the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement to improve care for the tens of thousands of illegal immigrant children who streamed across the border over the last year, and who are still coming, though in smaller numbers. “We request ORR to work with providers to ensure...

The Allied War Veterans Council of South Boston voted last night to allow a gay veterans group to march in the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade, according to Brian Mahoney, the group’s commander. “It’s awesome. It’s outstanding,” said Bryan Bishop, founder of OUTVETS, the first openly gay group to be allowed to march in the parade after a two-decade-long controversy. Bishop was credited by Mahoney as having swayed the board. Bishop told the Herald that when he spoke to the nine-member council last night and gave his pitch, he didn’t think it could have gone worse and was shocked when...

A former USC professor once on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted fugitives list was sentenced to five years in federal prison Monday for flying to the Philippines and sexually assaulting underage boys he had met online. In addition to the sentence, Walter Lee Williams, 66, of Palm Springs, will be required upon release to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life and will be on 10 years of supervision Williams, previously known as a well-respected academic, had pleaded guilty and admitted engaging in illegal sexual contact with minors in foreign places. As part of a plea...

Some with Same-Sex Attraction Choose Celibacy – A Reflection on an Article in the Washington Post By: Msgr. Charles PopeA little over a year ago, I wrote an article asking and answering this question: What Does the Catholic Church Offer for those with Same-Sex Attraction? And the answer is, “the truth.” It is the same gift we offer anyone who will give us the gift of attention and presence. The truth, as revealed by God, is what we offer and celebrate along with the Sacraments, the communal life, and prayer.Of course the truth we offer in terms of human sexuality...

Men and women who want to use the opposite sex’s bathrooms and changing facilities will no longer be able to do so in Fayetteville, Arkansas, after voters overturned a controversial ordinance – with a little help from the Duggar family of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting. Ordinance 119, passed by the city council in August, barred the city, employers, property owners, and business owners from discriminating based on a range of categories, controversially including “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” and “gender expression.” The section of the law that sparked the repeal movement was the section making it a crime to “deny,...

CAIRO — Egypt’s government has aggressively cracked down on Islamist and liberal opponents over the past year. Now officials are increasingly targeting another group: gay people. Police raided a public bathhouse in Cairo this month and arrested at least two dozen men, parading them half-naked in front of television cameras before hauling them off to prison. It was the latest in a series of police busts at suspected meeting places of homosexuals across the country. Arrests of gay people have been on the rise since President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi seized power in a military coup in 2013, but in recent...

Will, who once taught political philosophy at Michigan State, said he is “still a Spartan who takes equal pleasure from good MSU football seasons and dismal ones in Ann Arbor,” referring to the University of Michigan. Connie Rzemien, whose daughter, Katie, was among those graduating, told The Detroit News she thought Will was not the right choice. “I believe it is contradictory to what they are doing here to have somebody with such an insensitive view of rape to speak today,” she said. “I think it’s insulting to young women.” The U.S. Education Department this year revealed a list of...

George Will gave a surprisingly isolationist view on Fox News Sunday this morning when he said that if Iraq’s neighbors can’t take out ISIS with all their military might, then we shouldn’t either. Watch below: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO...

In the mid-1990s, when the collapse of the Mexican economy produced a wave of illegal immigration to Arizona, I did volunteer work at a Phoenix school that was struggling to meet the needs of a few hundred Mexican children who spoke only Spanish. Even as I sought to help ease the transition for both sides, I thought it would be better for everyone if the influx subsided. That explains my contradictory reactions of appreciation for and disagreement with George Will' s open-arms pronouncement on "Fox New Sunday" regarding Central Americans streaming across the Mexican border into Texas. It is burning...

On Fox News Sunday, Republican writer George Will said that America should let all of the illegal immigrant juveniles from Central America remain and ensure they are allowed to "go to school and get a job." "My view is that we have to say to these children, 'Welcome to America. You're going to go to school and get a job and become Americans,'" Will declared. "We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can't assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous." Will was asked to respond to Republicans...

George Will isn’t backing down, even as critics are “calling for [his] head.” Will’s Washington Post column on sexual assault stirred up a great deal of controversy, as he acknowledged in an interview with C-SPAN published Friday. “Today, for some reason … indignation is the default position of certain people in civic discourse,” he said. “They go from a standing start to fury in about 30 seconds.” The internet has “erased the barriers of entry to public discourse,” Will said, which is good because more people can be involved in conversations, but it’s bad because a lot of those people...

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Page Editor Tony Messenger writes that readers — both liberal and conservative ones — have lobbied the paper to change its lineup of conservative columnists. But apparently a bit of a push was necessary. That came from a recent controversial piece by Washington Post columnist George Will — the one about the “supposed campus epidemic of rape” and the way in which “victimhood” serves as a “coveted status that confers privileges.”