Free Republic

ONALASKA, Wash. - You can tell Onalaska is old fashioned just by looking. "We're in the country, we're small town, we like it that way,” said parent Kadra Gilliland. But something at the elementary school last week has folks in this quiet town making noise. "What gives this woman the right to come down here and go above our authority, is the way I look at it,” said parent Curt Pannkuk. "I was one pissed off cowboy," said parent James Gilliland. These parents are upset about a sex education class for the fifth graders last week. "She learned oral sex...

BATON ROUGE -- Doctors will be barred from performing abortions 20 weeks after conception under a bill signed into law Monday by Gov. Bobby Jindal.Senate Bill 766 by Senate President John Alario, R-Westwego, prohibits all abortions after 20 weeks, about 22 weeks on the typical 40-week gestational calendar. The previous state law prohibited the procedure after the fetus was viable.Alario's bill, which goes into effect Aug. 1, carries fines and imprisonment for any physician that performs an abortion after the cut-off. The bill does allow for abortions performed to protect the life of the pregnant woman.The bill joins two other...

Rep. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, a candidate for U.S. Senate, defended sex-selective abortions and criticized Senate Republicans for opposing abortions instigated because the fetus is a girl. "To many cultures, particularly the Asian culture, this presented the prospect of a doctor grilling an Asian woman for example," Hirono, a Japanese immigrant, said at the Netroots Nation convention. Hirono made clear that she did not oppose sex-selective abortions. "How can we criminalize a decision that should be up to the woman and her doctor?" she asked. Hirono also maintained that "there really is a war on women in Congress." Although President Obama...

OTTAWA, Ontario, June 11, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Muslims of a traditional bent hope that a lack of funding will force Planned Parenthood Ottawa to cut a program aimed at teaching their Muslim teenage daughters a version of “sexual health” that they say is contrary to their “faith-based values and family values.” “Information and education is always good, but when it comes with a clear message of promoting a certain lifestyle which may be in conflict with both the faith-based values and family values [of Muslims] then I have an issue with it,” Shahina Siddiqui, executive director of the Islamic Social...

Comfort is such a nice word. It’s so easy to live in comfort and never take a chance. Never get in there and try to make a difference. We could live our lives in the comfort zone, never standing up for what is right, never speaking out against what we believe is wrong. But how can we just live our lives like everything is okay while every day, thousands of children are murdered? It’s time for us to get out of the comfort zone and stand up against abortion! It is wrong to distance ourselves from what’s happening in abortion...

It may come as a surprise to some of her fans, but Carrie Underwood has announced her support for gay marriage. The devoutly Christian "Jesus, Take the Wheel" country singer spoke out to The Independent on why she believes marriage should be legal for all. "As a married person myself, I don't know what it's like to be told I can't marry somebody I love, and want to marry," Underwood, 29, explained. "I can't imagine how that must feel. I definitely think we should all have the right to love, and love publicly, the people that we want to love."...

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which reports on how well governments respect and protect children's human rights, is alarmed at the prevalence of the hatches – usually outside a hospital – which allow unwanted newborns to be left in boxes with an alarm or bell to summon a carer. Their proponents draw on the language of the pro-life lobby and claim the baby boxes "protect a child's right to life" and have saved "hundreds of newborns". There are differing opinions on this key social issue across Europe. In France and Holland women have the right to...

Every year he has been in office President Obama has made it a point to cozy up to America’s tiny homosexual activist minority by officially recognizing June as “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month.” This year, of course, was no exception. Having just come out officially in favor of legalizing same-sex “marriage,” the President followed up on June 1 by issuing this year’s proclamation setting aside the entire month to commemorate the valuable contributions that gays, lesbians, transvestites, and an odds-and-ends assortment of sexually- and gender-confused individuals have made to American society. “The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)...

A New York principle has sparked fury among parents, students and teachers after banning a patriotic song from being sung at graduation. Kindergartners at PS 90, the Edna Cohen School in Coney Island will not be allowed to sing ‘God Bless the USA’ at their moving-up ceremony because principle Greta Hawkins has decided it is inappropriate. The lyrics, she says could ‘offend other cultures’ and are ‘too grown-up’ for five-year-olds. Controversially, Hawkins is allowing alternatives including ‘Baby’ by Justin Bieber, with flirty lyrics such as: ‘Are we an item? Girl, quit playing.’ In past years the kids would sing the...

In two short minutes, you can find out even more things than you’ve heard before about what’s wrong with ObamaCare. (And this doesn’t even cover it all, folks.) We knew it was bad – we knew it was really bad – but did we know it was this bad? I mean, seriously, $100-a-day fines for each employee? If this isn’t an extreme violation of personal, constitutional, and conscience rights, I don’t know what is. Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised at all the things that can hide in a nearly 1,000 page law, with even more pages of regulations implementing...

Who’s calling the shots over at the Girl Scouts? And where’s the organization headed?The questions matter for two reasons. First, it’s cookie season. Any day now some cute little girls wearing green sashes and bright smiles will knock on your door and sweetly seek support for their projects, badges, and activities. Do you write the check or not? (Forget your craving for Thin Mints. Think rationally!) Should you support the Girl Scouts? Second, the Girl Scouts organization (GSUSA) is in trouble again. In recent weeks, they’ve drawn scrutiny for promoting biased resources (the left-wing Media Matters) and pressuring an employee...

A former Bangor Area High School teacher who had sex with a 17-year-old student was sent to prison for five months Friday by a Northampton County judge who said he expected her to be unhappy with his sentence. But then Rachel L. Farrell, 26, surprised Judge Emil Giordano, who had just heard her defense attorney arguing for probation.

Just how did the right to an abortion appear in the Constitution? It’s found in the Fifth Amendment, which reads in relevant part, “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” And the Fourteenth Amendment: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” You see it there, right?...

Students at New York City’s Stuyvesant High are unhappy with a dress code that bans girls from wearing Daisy Dukes and tank tops to school along with other such inappropriate clothing. To protest the restriction on their supposed right to wear as little as possible to school, the girls held a so-called “Slutty Wednesday” demonstration this week. They complained that Stuyvesant’s dress code is unfair, particularly to well-endowed girls. Lucy Greider, a Stuyvesant freshman, told the New York Post she’s been sent to the principal’s office 10 times this school year for showing off too much cleavage, midriff or shoulder....

Both the WHO and the CDC say it's time to "sound the alarm" on the increase in drug-resistant gonorrheaFirst, it was the Centers for Disease Control—now, the World Health Organization is warning that Gonorrhea could join herpes and HIV/AIDS as "uncurable" sexually-transmitted diseases. "We're sitting on the edge of a worldwide crisis," says Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, of WHO's department of reproductive health and research. "There's a general complacency around sexually transmitted infections in general, and this doesn't have the same political or social pressure as HIV. That's because gonorrhea has been so easily curable so far, but in the future, that...

The Boy Scouts of America is considering a resolution that calls for ending a 102-year-old policy they’ve grappled with in recent years: banning gay scouts and scout leaders, gay advocates told msnbc.com on Wednesday. Though the organization said it would review the proposal, a spokesman insisted there were no plans to change the policy. The new policy would throw out the national ban and allow local chartering organizations to decide whether or not they would accept gay youth and leaders, said Zach Wahls, an Eagle Scout who has advocated for the change, citing unidentified people who attended the group's national...

Photo taken recently of a woman in Richmond, VA protesting the president's stance on gay marriage.

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – A 15-year-old Coon Rapids student says he wears a rosary as a necklace to feel close to his grandmother, who is suffering from breast cancer. But the Anoka-Hennepin School District told him to take the rosary off – or face the consequences. Jake Balthazor says he prays for his grandmother’s health. “She has breast cancer, and I’m trying to support her for it,” he said. He wears his beliefs proudly. The rosary is one his grandmother gave him, but it’s also what landed him in the principal’s office. “They think it’s like a gang sign,” Balthazor said....

It’s no secret that Barack Obama is proud to be openly supported by the president of Planned Parenthood, America’s abortion giant. On both the Women for Obama campaign site and BarackObama.com, you can find this headline: “Cecile Richards has President Obama’s back.” Another post claims, “NARAL Pro-Choice America has the President’s back.” In the posted video of Ms. Richards, she inaccurately claims that Mitt Romney is putting politics between women and their access to health care. Such claims are typical of abortion advocates. They like to throw around their disproportionate rhetoric that pro-lifers are all about getting the government in...

PHOENIX, June 6, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The third undercover video in a series on sex-selection abortions in America shows two more abortion clinics willing to perform the procedure in Arizona - where abortions targeting baby girls are a class 3 felony. The footage shows two National Abortion Federation (NAF) clinic members, Camelback Family Planning in Phoenix and the Tucson Women’s Center in Tucson, promising to perform a sex-selective abortion and coaching a woman to lie on official paperwork to conceal the reason for the procedure. “Don’t tell us that, because we don’t want to know,” says a counselor named...

WND EXCLUSIVE Dobson to prez: I won't bow to 'wicked' Obamacare 'So come and get me if you must' Dr. James Dobson is taking a defiant stand on Obamacare and issuing a loud and clear message to President Obama: “I WILL NOT pay the surcharge for abortion services. … So come and get me if you must, Mr. President. I will not bow before your wicked regulation.”

June 4, 2012 (Bound4Life.com) - A question I often pose to students as we study literature that takes place during the Holocaust is whether or not every Nazi soldier was a killer at heart or just following the protocol of the organization. It’s so easy for us to make blanket statements that they are all evil, but the fact is, many were passive people who succumbed to groupthink and didn’t actually consider their evil actions. They were absolutely guilty of them, but they hid behind the “orders” given them, the perceived “good” for the nation and the race. It’s hard...

Gay porn star kills and eats lover Homosexual with a story of animal cruelty kills and eats partner’s parts, makes sex with the corpse and sends its foot to Canadian Conservative PartyBy Julio Severo Canada, famous for its aggressive homosexualist laws threatening its population and Christians preaching the Bible view on sodomy, has made international headlines this week for another homosexual reason: gay porn star Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, tortured, killed and dismembered his gay lover Jun Lin, 21. Luka Rocco Magnotta According to the Canadian police, Magnotta tied Jun in a bed while his camera filmed him torturing,...

There are no words. A Chinese couple who managed to avoid authorities long enough to actually birth a second child were fined 1.3 million yuan ($204,000) after family-planning authorities deemed them 'rich in assets', LifeNews.com reports. So far this is the highest fine on record. Even worse is that the amount was compounded because the baby turned out to be a girl. Local family planning authorities worked with commerce, industry and township officials to investigate the couple’s finances. The parents were deemed “rich in assets� and hit with the highest fine on record. The shock of the amount is compounded by the sex of the...

Is JC Penney trying to become GayC Penney, or is it just a smart marketer? Last year, the company announced that Ellen DeGeneres, who is openly gay, would be its latest spokesperson. On Mother’s Day, it featured a lesbian couple in one of its ads. And now, just in time for Father’s Day, the retail chain has issued another print ad, this one with real-life couple Todd Koch and Cooper Smith, and their two young children. The copy reads: “What makes Dad so cool? He’s the swim coach, tent maker, best friend, bike fixer and hug giver — all rolled...

President Barack Obama called on Americans to celebrate evolving attitudes toward the homosexual community as he proclaimed June as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. "This June, let's take some time to celebrate teachers and students who take a stand against bullying, openly gay and lesbian servicemembers, ... families and friends who have seen their own attitudes evolve," he urged. Obama made the proclamation Friday and expressed again his evolved personal belief in "marriage equality for same-sex couples" "because we must treat others the way we want to be treated." He cited the Golden Rule when he first revealed...

May 31, 2012 (Newsbuster.org) - There is nothing more predictable than networks burying negative news about Planned Parenthood. Pro-life organization Live Action recently came out with a disturbing video showing a Planned Parenthood staffer in Texas assisting a Live Action actor to obtain a sex-selection abortion. That practice is where a fetus is aborted if the child is discovered to be of a certain gender (usually female). The broadcast outlets have completely ignored the controversy: ABC, CBS, and NBC have not devoted a single second of their May 29 evening broadcasts and May 30 morning broadcasts to coverage of the...

Two headlines really struck me as sick and sad. They speak to a fascination with death and power and narcissism. They speak to the demise of the weak at the hand of the strong. They reflect a justification for self-preservation over and above things more transcendent. Even though the two headlines address two completely different geopolitical regimes—one being Syria and the other being the United States—they affirm one thing: it must be okay to kill off the defenseless and weak.

June 1, 2012 (AlbertMohler.com) - The Christian worldview must direct all consideration of sexuality to the institution of marriage. Marriage is not merely the arena for sexual activity, it is presented in Scripture as the divinely-designed arena for the display of God’s glory on earth as a man and a wife come together in a one-flesh relationship within the marriage covenant. Rightly understood and rightly ordered, marriage is a picture of God’s own covenantal faithfulness. Marriage is to display God’s glory, reveal God’s good gifts to His creatures, and protect human beings from the inevitable disaster that follows when sexual...

May 29, 2012 (AlbertMohler.com) - The intersection of pornography and marriage is one of the most problematic issues among many couples today–including Christian couples. The pervasive plague of pornography represents one of the greatest moral challenges faced by the Christian church in the postmodern age. With eroticism woven into the very heart of the culture, celebrated in its entertainment, and advertised as a commodity, it is virtually impossible to escape the pervasive influence of pornography in our culture and in our lives. At the same time, the problem of human sinfulness is fundamentally unchanged from the time of the Fall...

As the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition I have had the opportunity to read stories of despair and other stories of hope. The story that I am writing about today is one of the greatest stories of hope. This is the story of Lilliana Dennis, a child who is living with Trisomy 18, a rare genetic condition that many doctors have labelled as "incompatible with life." This is a story of a child who was not supposed to live. A child who has a condition that most doctors would refuse to provide treatment for and let to die,...

May 31, 2012 (HLIWorldWatch.org) - Anyone who is concerned about the influence of the homosexual agenda on reshaping traditional values must become intimately familiar with the major tactics that homophiles commonly employ in order to anticipate them and respond in charity and truth. Homophile strategists are very adept at manipulating public opinion with an arsenal of six tactics that are based upon deceptions and half‑truths: Exploit the “victim” status; Use the sympathetic media; Confuse and neutralize the churches; Slander and stereotype Christians; Bait and switch (hide their true nature); and Intimidation. One reason these tactics have worked so well is...

Local child molester slain in L.A. prison An inmate serving a life sentence stemming from the sexual assault of a child in Oceanside was killed Tuesday in his prison cell in Los Angeles County. Francisco Javier Aguilar, 36, was found dead in his cell at the California State Prison in Lancaster after 1 a.m., authorities said. He had a cable wrapped around his neck, The Los Angeles Times reported. The cause of death has not been released. An autopsy was set for Thursday, according to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. Aguilar’s cellmate, Aaron Alvarez, 42, has been arrested in...

A "serpent-handling" West Virginia pastor died after his rattlesnake bit him during a church ritual, just as the man had apparently watched a snake kill his father years before. Pentecostal pastor Mark Wolford, 44, hosted an outdoor service at the Panther Wildlife Management Area in West Virginia Sunday, which he touted on his Facebook page prior to the event. "I am looking for a great time this Sunday," Wolford wrote May 22, according to the Washington Post. "It is going to be a homecoming like the old days. Good 'ole raised in the holler or mountain ridge running, Holy Ghost-filled...

NEW YORK, May 31, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An employee at the flagship abortion clinic of Planned Parenthood in New York has been caught on tape telling a woman how to be sure of her unborn baby’s female sex in order to abort her in a second undercover video released Thursday morning. The footage shows the undercover investigator, walking past a sign on the wall that reads “WOMEN COUNT,� meeting Planned Parenthood social worker Randi Coun at the Margaret Sanger Center International on Bleecker St. Coun walks the investigator through obtaining a CVS test to determine gender as early as the...

Note: The following comments were adapted from a speech given on May 12, 2012 as part of Italy’s March for Life weekend celebration. In the defense of life, it is absolutely essential that we are committed to the abolition of all laws and judicial decisions that would permit even a single abortion. But we have to look further ahead to protect in an integral way the whole of human life from its biological beginnings until natural death. The same logic of dominion over life that leads to abortion serves as justification for euthanasia, assisted suicide, as well as contraception and...

The federal appeals court in Boston struck down the Defense of Marriage Act on Thursday, ruling that the federal statute violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian married couples to equal treatment under the law. The action by a unanimous three-judge panel of the First US Circuit Court of Appeals sets the stage for a much-anticipated showdown at the US Supreme Court over same-sex marriage. Declaring that tradition alone was not enough to justify disparate treatment of same-sex couples, the appeals court said DOMA failed to pass constitutional muster. “Under current Supreme Court authority, Congress’ denial of federal benefits...

(Rocco Luka Magnotta, 29, is a suspect in the discovery of a man's torso in Montreal.) (CNN) -- The search continued Thursday for a gay porn actor suspected of dismembering his acquaintance, posting the video of the incident online and mailing the severed limbs to different locations in Ottawa, including to a political party's headquarters, according to a source with direct knowledge of the investigation. Authorities are searching for Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, who they allege is responsible for a human torso discovered in Montreal, thought to be linked to a human hand and foot that were separately mailed from...

They look like a picture-perfect young couple kissing in the park. The problem is, she’s his high-school teacher. Stunning global-studies instructor Julie Warning got a bit too worldly with a pupil in the middle of a Greenwich Village park after school — and the makeout session was caught on camera by one of her own stunned students.

(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom—which he described as “the highest civilian honor this country can bestow"--on retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote a Supreme Court opinion arguing that a woman was exercising her right to "liberty" when she hired a doctor to kill her child through the procedure known as partial-birth abortion. "That holding--that the word 'liberty' in the Fourteenth Amendment includes a woman’s right to make this difficult and extremely personal decision--makes it impossible for me to understand how a State has any legitimate interest in requiring a...

ANNAPOLIS — The group leading a petition effort against Maryland’s same-sex marriage law says it has more than twice the number of signatures needed to send the law to referendum one month before the state-mandated deadline. The Maryland Marriage Alliance said Tuesday it has collected more than 113,000 voter signatures seeking a statewide vote on the law, which was passed in February by the General Assembly and is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1. Petitioners have until June 30 to collect 55,736 valid voter signatures to force a statewide vote in November. One-third of those signatures — 18,579 —...

In a surprise move, House Republicans announced this past Friday they would call for a vote on a federal ban against sex-selective abortion, aka the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, H.R. 3541*, tomorrow, May 30. PRENDA will be considered under “suspension of the rules,” meaning no amendments can be added. The bill must be voted on as is, straight up or down, and a two-thirds majority will be needed to pass it.

BBC Radio Four led on the Syrian massacre this morning describing it in graphic terms as the ‘deliberate mass killing of children’ who ’were murdered one by one’. The story was also one of the top three on the BBC website earlier today along with the account of six children dying in a house fire in the north of England. These would have been the top two reports had it not been for Mitt Romney gaining the Republican nomination for the US presidential elections yesterday. There are few things more gut-wrenching than the death of children but these two stories...

Media outlets such as Time Magazine and Reuters have provided extensive coverage to an article recently published as “Original Research” and entitled, “The Comparative Safety of Legal Induced Abortion and Childbirth in the United States,” by Raymond and Grimes in the Feb, 2012 journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. The article concludes by stating: “Legal induced abortion is markedly safer than childbirth. The risk of death associated with childbirth is approximately 14 times higher than that with abortion. Similarly, the overall morbidity associated with childbirth exceeds that with abortion.” Is this the truth? NIFLA doesn’t believe so and recommends that Pregnancy Resource...

Planned Parenthood encourages gender-selective abortions and Medicaid fraud. Watch the video HERE.

It’s always amusing when secularists speak of traditionalists being on the “wrong side of history.” We heard this recently after the vote in North Carolina upholding marriage; liberals said that the state was on the wrong side of history. Now, these people are circling around something that is absolutely true, and it's only charitable to help them understand exactly what it is. What they really mean is that traditionalists are on the wrong side of fashionable trends, and the polls on marriage certainly bear this out. But as G.K. Chesterton said, “A fallacy doesn’t cease to be a fallacy because...

By the time Dr. Spencer Misner had carved away the dead and diseased flesh from Bobby Rice’s right foot last year, little remained other than bones and tendons. “I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t look real. It looked like something out of a movie,” recalled Rice, a Whitfield County resident. Today, the ankle has almost completely healed. It looks like Rice had simply scraped it. And Rice’s foot has largely healed, too. Misner credits cutting-edge stem cell treatments for saving Rice’s foot and leg.

With debate and votes taking place around the state and polls showing a growing acceptance, the issue of same-sex marriage and domestic partner rights will likely be among a host of second tier issues that could determine which presidential candidate takes Florida. In a Quinnipiac University Polling Institute poll released this week, a majority of voters said the candidates’ stance on same-sex marriage would not affect the way they would vote. But a significant minority say the issue is likely to move them away from President Barack Obama and toward his Republican opponent, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. One in...

Joe Darger, from Salt Lake City, Utah, lives in a house with his three wives and their 24 children. His polygamous marriage is illegal in 50 American states - and has resulted in him being excommunicated from the Mormon church. But Joe, a fifth generation polygamist, believes his is the correct way - and says he wants to fight to have his plural marriage officially recognised by society. The fundamentalist Mormon appeared on the breakfast television show alongside his three wives, 42-year-old twins Vicki and Valerie, and their 43-year-old cousin Alina. Vicki and Alina have been married to Joe for...

In my previous column, I reviewed Kira Peikoff’s recently released novel, Living Proof. The heroine of the book, Dr. Arianna Drake, is a geneticist who runs a fertility clinic. Reading through the book, a word from out of the past jumped off the page at me, on page 73. That word was “eugenics.” (That Peikoff even used the word at least shows that she understands pro-lifers are familiar with the term, and use it in their arguments). A century ago, eugenics – the “scientific” engineering of a master race, created both by the commingling of men and women possessing “superior...