Free Republic

Despite all the predictions of huge success for the gay cowboy film, Brokeback Mountain, it was the rather less-hyped Crash - a comment on race relations in the United States - which picked up the most significant Oscar, best movie. The 78th Academy Awards at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre featured the usual array of 'A' list stars in designer outfits along with 300 fans who'd won tickets for a place along the red carpet. McCarthy witch-hunts George Clooney was expected to be one of the biggest winners, after his film Good Night and Good Luck was nominated for six Oscars. The...

Mickey Kaus at Kausfiles.com says that the gay-cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain has the same marketing strategy as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Both, he says, have been hyped as blue-state movies that are reaching and changing minds in the cities of red America. He calls this the "Heartland Breakout Meme”. ("Meme" refers to a cultural copying unit that hops from brain to brain without much thought or any at all). What Kaus means is that the mainstream media keep reinforcing ideas liberals want to believe, whether they are true or not. But the alleged breakout of Fahrenheit appears to be myth,...

Alyn Libman won a $15,000-a-year scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley with a resume that showed more than just Libman's athletic achievement and academic potential. It also showed years of ridicule, beatings and threats, along with Libman's decision to become a boy in 11th grade. "It felt amazing to actually be embraced by someone who didn't just dismiss me for being different," said Libman, a 19-year-old aspiring civil rights lawyer and the first transgendered person to win a scholarship from The Point Foundation, a Chicago nonprofit organization that has awarded more than $1 million to college-bound gays since...