Free Republic

April DeBoer never intended to be a legal pioneer, much less a public face of perhaps the most significant civil rights challenge to reach the Supreme Court in years. She and her partner just wanted to be able to adopt children as a couple. But when their lawsuit challenging Michigan’s adoption code came to a federal district court in 2012, the judge shocked DeBoer and her partner, Jayne Rowse, telling them they should instead be contesting the state’s same-sex marriage ban. After much anguished discussion, the couple agreed, DeBoer recounted. “By no means did we set out to be...

If evangelical Christianity is famous for anything in contemporary American politics, it is for its complete opposition to gay marriage. Now, slowly yet undeniably, evangelicals are changing their minds. Every day, evangelical communities across the country are arriving at new crossroads over marriage. My magazine story for TIME this week, “A Change of Heart,” is a deep dive into the changing allegiances and divides in evangelical churches and communities over homosexuality. In public, so many churches and pastors are afraid to talk about the generational and societal shifts happening. But behind the scenes, it’s a whole different game. Support for...

Kevin Hart says he won’t play a gay character. The topic came up on Friday when the hosts of radio show, The Breakfast Club, asked the 35-year-old if he had any roles that he regretted missing. “The one role I regret—Tropic Thunder,” the Wedding Ringer star responded before admitting he had turned down the part because it was “real flagrant”. According to Kevin, he could have played the role of rapper-turned-actor Alpa Chino in the 2008 comedy, but he passed because the character, on script, was “real flagrant.” “I was like, ‘I can’t. I can’t do this,’” Kevin said of...

Yes! Unfortunately pornography has a foothold in both the Islamic and non-islamic worlds. Western society is well known for its blatant promotion of the pornographical industry, and it has never hidden the rampant pornography consumption that is prevalent within its developed countries. But the consumption of pornography in Islamic countries has seemingly flown under the radar, with the Islamic community leaders either unaware of, or turning a blind eye to the issue. Many experts are of the opinion that the pornography addiction topic is well known by the Imams in western countries, but it is an area they dare not...

After failing probation, Charlie Rogers didn’t show up for her 90-day jail sentence Thursday. Rogers, 36, was sentenced to a week in jail and two years’ probation in April 2013 for faking an anti-gay hate crime that stunned Lincoln and captured the country’s attention the summer before. Rogers, a lesbian and former Nebraska basketball star, lied to police when she told them three men broke into her house on July 22, 2012, tied her up, carved anti-gay slurs into her skin and tried to light the house on fire. Lancaster County Court Judge Gale Pokorny, who has since retired, made...

This city on the border with California has for a fourth time blocked a gay couple from marrying in defiance of an order from Mexico’s Supreme Court, the men’s lawyer said Friday. Attorney José Luis Márquez Saavedra said he has filed a complaint against Mexicali’s mayor and other officials seeking to force them to let Victor Fernando Urias Amparo and Victor Manuel Aguirre Espinoza wed. He accused the city of using procedural technicalities to keep them from tying the knot. Mayor Jaime Rafael Díaz Ochoa, a member of the conservative National Action Party, which has historic ties to the Roman...

During his breaking news coverage of the Supreme Court’s decision to hear four different cases challenging same-sex marriage bans in four different states this term — Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee — Fox News’ Shepard Smith compared the remaining resistance to marriage equality in this country to those who wanted to keep segregation intact during the Civil Rights Movement. “Not in every case, but in most cases, the same states which were fighting integration are fighting this as well,” Smith said. “Those states which always seem to be behind the curve for reasons which are explainable and understandable. Those are...

Pope Francis took the opportunity during an address to families in the Philippines to praise Blessed Pope Paul VI’s encyclical opposing contraception and affirming Church teaching on sexuality and human life. The Pope spoke Friday to families gathered at the Mall of Asia Arena in Manila during his Jan. 15-19 visit to the Philippines. After discussing various threats to the family, including “a lack of openness to life,” he deviated briefly from his prepared remarks, transitioning from English to his native Spanish in order to speak from the heart about the subject. “I think of Blessed Paul VI,” he said....

The former Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton, New Brunswick — closed since July — has received a name change and a new director and will reopen shortly for business as usual as a “family practice” that offers a “full-scope of reproductive care, including abortions.” Clinic 554’s new director is Dr. Adrian Edgar, a “transguy” who specializes not only in the killing of pre-born children in their mother’s womb, but also in offering people who identify as LGBTQ “primary care services.” On top of abortion and offering a full range of contraceptive services, the clinic is “excited” to offer “transgender, gender variant,...

After failing probation, Charlie Rogers didn’t show up for her 90-day jail sentence Thursday. Rogers, 36, was sentenced to a week in jail and two years’ probation in April 2013 for faking an anti-gay hate crime that stunned Lincoln and captured the country’s attention the summer before. Rogers, a lesbian and former Nebraska basketball star, lied to police when she told them three men broke into her house on July 22, 2012, tied her up, carved anti-gay slurs into her skin and tried to light the house on fire.

Decision Later This Year Could Extend Gay Marriage to All 50 States or Cloud Existing Unions WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Friday said it would decide whether the U.S. Constitution gives same-sex couples the right to marry, signaling what could be the final chapter of a push by advocates to extend gay unions nationwide. The court accepted challenges to same-sex marriage bans in four states—Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee—that a federal appeals court upheld in November 2014. The ruling by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati departed from recent decisions by other appeals courts that found same-sex couples...

Breaking: The US Supreme Court has agreed to take up the issue of same-sex marriage.

Word is now circulating around the Catholic world that conservative hero Gary Sinise, along with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, both publicly professed faithful Catholics, cancelled their appearances at a Legatus Summit at the last minute under pressure from the LGBT crowd. Legatus is the organization of Catholic CEOs founded by pizza billionaire Tom Monaghan to advance the spirituality of Catholic men and women in the higher echelons of American business. The primary work of Legatus and its members is the increased holiness of the members and spreading the gospel within corporate America. Certainly there is a conservative tinge to...

A recent piece in The Federalist by Stella Morabito captures some of the political and statistical realities surrounding transgenderism.  The ease with which societal elites in academia, medicine, and Hollywood sanction a child's war against his own body and call it healthy, normal, or something to celebrate has its foundation in the contraceptive revolution of our culture.  Women were told that the very thing that most marks them as a woman, their wondrous reproductive systems, their fertility, is their enemy.  If only they can break free from the tyranny of their own bodies, they will be free.  But we cannot break free from our bodies...

Good riddance! Yet... Since the 1990s, students from Mount Holyoke College, an all-women's school in Massachusetts, have staged an annual production of The Vagina Monologues. Not this year. The college is retiring the ritual over concerns that the play—penned by Eve Ensler in 1996 as a way to "celebrate the vagina" and women's sexuality—is not inclusive enough. In a school-wide email from Mount Holyoke's student-theater board, relayed by Campus Reform, student Erin Murphy explained that "at its core, the show offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman ... Gender is a wide and varied...

When the Golden Globe awards telecast was over, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation proclaimed, "It was a great night for LGBT-inclusive television." They could have added: "We run the joint." Gay actor Matt Bomer thanked his "husband" and his surrogate sons when he won an award for HBO's Reagan-bashing AIDS drama "The Normal Heart." But the bigger celebration came with a best actor award to Jeffrey Tambor, who plays Mort, a 70-year-old father of three who decides he's a woman named Maura in a show called "Transparent," or literally, "Trans Parent," since his three adult children have to...

In points he’s made before in other settings, Pope Francis on Friday criticized what he called the “ideological colonization of the family,” language that many took as a reference to gay marriage, and also defended a previous pope who upheld the Church’s ban on contraception. “The family is threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life,” Francis said. A Vatican spokesman confirmed Friday evening that, at least in part, the pope had gay marriage in mind. The...

FOX News Channel's chief political anchor, Bret Baier, has shown himself to have a thinner skin than might be guessed from his on-air persona. Baier has caved in to pressure from the homosexual activist group ‘Good as You’ to back out of a speaking engagement at a mainstream Catholic conference. Also backing out for the same reason was Hollywood actor Gary Sinise of Forrest Gump and CSI: NY fame. The gay activist complaint is a repeat of last year when actor Bob Newhart was successfully bullied into backing out of his speaking engagement at the Legatus Summit. Legatus, which was...

Kelvin Cochran is a decorated firefighter. He is also a devout Christian. He’s a deacon at a Baptist church and also teaches Sunday school. By all accounts – he is a decent and honorable man. And now – he is unemployed. Cochran, who served seven years as the chief of the Atlanta Fire Departmant lost his job over a book he wrote about biblical morality titled, “Who Told You That You Were Naked?” A small portion of the book contained what critics called homophobic language. .... hundreds of Christians were expected to gather at the Georgia capitol to protest the...

Duke University is one of the most politically correct campuses in the nation, a title for which there is abundant competition.  Chick-fil-A’s outlet on campus closed in 2013, after its contract expired in the wake of concerns expressed by the LGBT Center. But now comes news that the Muslim call to prayer, the adhan, will echo from the bell tower of the Duke chapel – Duke’s most iconic structure – every Friday, electronically amplified. CNN: Starting Friday, the Duke Muslim Students Association will chant the call, or adhan, from the Duke Chapel bell tower. The adhan signals the beginning...