Free Republic

Thousands of problem gamblers in have launched a $3.5 billion class action lawsuit in Ontario, saying they were allowed into provincially run casinos despite signing up for a program that should have denied them entry. According to the CBC's website, the suit was filed earlier this week in Toronto, claiming the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. did not fully enforce a "self exclusion" program that allows problem gamblers to ban themselves from casinos. Those who sign up for the program are photographed and their personal information is stored in binders at all of the province's casinos. If program members are...

The Decalogue, dangerous? The commandments certainly are regarded as hazardous by the Irritable-American community, which successfully petitions the courts to banish them from public life. At least these stalwart secularists give the Decalogue its due; most of us admire the Ten Commandments just enough to avoid taking them seriously. If we grasped how radical they truly are, we'd find them an offensive stumbling block to us middle-class moderns, who live in a rebellious age characterized by sociologist Daniel Bell as "the rejection of a revealed order, or natural order, and the substitution of the ego, the self, as the lodestar...

What if hospitals could put a sign over their doors stating, “We reserve the right to refuse life-sustaining care?” People would be outraged. Yet that is precisely what Texas law explicitly grants to hospitals — namely, to say no to wanted life-sustaining treatment, on the basis of subjective judgments about the quality of the patient’s life. It is an example of a bioethical concept known as Futile Care Theory, a.k.a. medical futility. How did Texas, of all places, become ground zero for futile-care impositions? Back in 1996, a group of Houston hospitals adopted internal administrative protocols, called the Collaborative...

Homosexual acts are a moral aberration, yet the drive to have them accepted as normal by society continues full steam ahead. Egregious recent examples can be found in two bills under consideration in Congress which would grant special privilege to those embracing the homosexual lifestyle, and intimidate and punish those citizens whose values and principles are opposed to the moral revolution advocated by the homosexual movement. The first bill is H.R. 2015, known as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007; the second is H.R. 1592, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007. "Sexual Orientation," a Set of...

Our columnist, who has opted to have a termination since the birth of her two children, argues that it is a moral duty not to bring unwanted offspring into the world: On Wednesday, More4 broadcast Travels with My Camera — A Matter of Life and Death, a “personal journey” by the journalist Miranda Sawyer. This was heralded by a piece in The Observer, written by Sawyer, explaining the purpose of her quest. Sawyer’s dilemma has been that, until recently, she had been a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying, pro-choice feminist. After the birth of her son last year, however, she began to have...

Amanda Onnis just wanted a nice wedding. That's why, when the 33-year-old unmarried cosmetics saleswoman discovered she was pregnant last November, she panicked. She had known her boyfriend only a few months and recently moved from Boston to the Denver area to live with him. He immediately asked her to marry him. She figured they'd better elope. After all, it wouldn't be long before she would start to show. Still, a part of her heart broke to give up her girlhood dream of a lavish ceremony and a really great dress. But, in the end, she didn't. On April 21,...

BYU students wanting an alternative commencement speaker to Vice President Dick Cheney could get their wish, thanks in part to a local filmmaker. The Deseret Morning News reports shortly after director Steven Greenstreet posted video footage online from a protest April 4 at BYU, the donations came pouring in. By Monday afternoon, students, faculty and alumni received more than $12,000. The money should be able to fund an alternative commencement at Utah Valley State College. Meanwhile the uproar has drawn national attention because it's seen as a sign the Bush administration's support is waning. Cheney will speak at BYU's commencement...

ROSIE O'Donnell's blue humor made faces red when she emceed the Matrix Awards in front of 2,000 feting New York's most accomplished women in media at the Waldorf-Astoria Grand Ballroom yesterday. The loose-lipped lesbian dropped the F-bomb as Barbara Walters lowered her head on the dais and covered her face with her hand. O'Donnell concluded a rant about Donald Trump by grabbing her crotch and shouting, "Eat me!"

New York-Mass public shootings have become such a part of American life in recent decades that the most dramatic of them can be evoked from the nations collective memory in a word or two: Luby's. Jonesboro. Columbine.

An article in The Wall Street Journal (April 12) breathlessly informs us of the latest fad on the Incredible Shrinking Continent -- "As Religious Strife Grows, Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit: Islam's Rise Gives Boost To Militant Unbelievers; The Celebrity Hedonist," the headline teases. The "Celebrity Hedonist," isn't geriatric frat-boy Hugh Hefner, but Michel Onfray, a 48-year-old author dubbed "France's high-priest of atheism" in the Journal piece. Reporter Andrew Higgins describes the doyen of disbelief -- commander of the faith-less -- strutting onto the stage of Caen's 500-seat Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium, dressed in black from head to toe, to deliver...

"I would ban religion completely," British pop-music star Elton John said in a much-noted interview last November. "It turns people into hateful lemmings, and it's not really compassionate." It isn't exactly news that many people find religion odious, but what is being called the New Atheism has lately become a booming industry. Books, articles, and lectures in profusion extol secularism and deride faith in G-d as pernicious and absurd. Such antipathy to religion was once relegated to the edges of polite society. Today it shows up front and center: A California congressman is cheered for announcing that he is an...

Defense attorney Bernard Shelton argued there was no evidence the girl knew Grocesley was a coach until after most, if not all, of their seven sexual encounters. They occurred from December 2005 to February 2006. "He wasn't in a position of trust with respect to her," Shelton said in closing arguments. "She decided to have sex with him because she liked him, not because he hung out at the school." Fillipitch argued it did not matter whether the girl knew he was a coach. "You don't have sex with students," she said, pointing out Grocesley knew the girl was a...

A longtime custodian of a Highland Park synagogue was charged Thursday with rigging a video camera in one of the building's restrooms and taping at least 20 children over three weeks, Lake County prosecutors said. Salome Zequeida, 49, of the 2500 block of Waukegan Road in Highland Park, would face up to 5 years in prison if convicted on charges of unauthorized videotaping, said Assistant State's Atty. Patricia Fix ... The video camera was discovered by contractors working in the synagogue, Fix said. The unisex bathroom in which the camera was found is not used often and is a "small,...

Shocking details were revealed Thursday in the investigation of Anthony LaCalamita, a man who police say went to his former employer's office on Monday and shot three people, killing one of them. Experts close to the investigation told Local 4 that LaCalamita, 38, was fired from his job because a pimp showed up at his office at Gordon Advisors. Local 4 sources said a so-called pimp allegedly came to LaCalamita's office to collect a debt he owed on a prostitute.

A friend recently quipped to me that if Americans were as good at the “war on terror” as we are in our “war on common sense,” the world would be a much safer place. He was talking about our country’s increasingly confused attitudes toward sex. Last week offered a good example. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, said that “I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts. I do not believe the United States is well-served by a...

Most Americans think culture is becoming more immoral, and they view the media -- both entertainment and news -- as prime culprits, according to a new survey.     If the media continue to "singularly promote" secular values while undermining orthodox faith and values, it will be very difficult to reverse America's moral decline, said the National Cultural Values Survey, released yesterday by the Culture and Media Institute (CMI) of the Media Research Center.     "Americans who care about the nation's moral condition should insist that the media strive to more fairly represent all views, including those of the orthodox," the report stated....

It's Saturday night, and as one group of 12-year-old girls prepares to head out for a night at an all-ages dance in Toronto's nightclub core, another group of preteens is busy fussing over their expensive gowns and shoes and wheedling their parents to arrange a limousine for their Grade 8 graduation. In the week that has followed an altercation involving a 12-year-old girl stabbed on the streets of Toronto's Entertainment District at 2:30 a.m. last Saturday, there has been an outcry over parental abdication of responsibilities, calls for a strict children's curfew, and considerable hand-wringing about what kind of society...

Urban teens are increasingly losing their virginity before they can legally drive. A new survey shows four out of 10 city kids say they have had intercourse before age 14, and have engaged in oral and even anal sex by 17. "This study makes clear that urban young adults engage in a variety of sexual behavior beyond vaginal intercourse," said Dr. Danielle Ompad, who authored the survey for The New York Academy of Medicine. Ompad said the findings raise concerns about the possibility of a boom in sexually transmitted diseases among teens who don't know about safe sex. "Sex education...

A GERMAN politician caused outrage by suggesting East Germany's communist past created a morally bankrupt social climate where a woman could kill nine of her babies unnoticed by neighbours. Police arrested a 39-year-old German woman in the eastern state of Brandenburg on Monday and charged her with killing nine newborn babies between 1988 and 1999 after finding their bodies buried in flower pots at her parents' home. The comments by Brandenburg Interior Minister Joerg Schoenbohm have been condemned from within his own Christian Democrats (CDU) party, amidst fears they could further damage the CDU's standing in the region ahead of...

Introduction One of the more popular Probe radio programs has been "Decline of a Nation." I would like to return to this important theme by summarizing the significant work by Jim Nelson Black in his book When Nations Die. When we look at three thousand years of history, we observe that civilizations rise but eventually fall and die. The history of the world is the history of nations that are conquered by other nations or collapse into anarchy. Jim Nelson Black sees ominous parallels to our own country. He says, As I have looked back across the ruins and landmarks...

How corrupt and degenerate has Europe become? This much: Even the clergymen are losing faith in God. "The Danish government today upheld the clerical suspension of a Lutheran minister who proclaimed last year that there was no God or afterlife, and he now could be fired or fined for declaring his beliefs in the pulpit," the Associated Press reported. Lutheran ministers are on the taxpayers' dole in Denmark. Eighty-five percent of Danes supposedly belong to the state Evangelical Lutheran Church, but only 5 percent attend church regularly. "The Rev." Thorkild Grosboell was temporarily suspended after claiming in an interview last...

HBO thinks it may have found a series that — in some ways — can replace the mighty (and soon to depart) "Sopranos" as its centerpiece drama. The show is "Deadwood," the gritty, foul-mouthed Western. The news on "Deadwood," HBO's latest drama series, has been highly favorable on two fronts. It drew the second-highest rating for any new drama in HBO's history, and it was also greeted with some of the best reviews that the network has seen at least since the start of "Six Feet Under" three years ago.

Save Marriage? It's Too Late. The Pill made same-sex nuptials inevitable. BY DONALD SENSING Monday, March 15, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST Opponents of legalized same-sex marriage say they're trying to protect a beleaguered institution, but they're a little late. The walls of traditional marriage were breached 40 years ago; what we are witnessing now is the storming of the last bastion. Marriage is primarily a social institution, not a religious one. That is, marriage is a universal phenomenon of human cultures in all times and places, regardless of the religion of the people concerned, and has taken the same basic...

A self-confessed cannibal went on trial in Germany accused of murdering a victim who was apparently willing to be killed, carved up and eaten in front of a running video camera. Armin Meiwes, a 42-year-old computer technician, was pictured laughing and chatting easily to his lawyer moments before the case opened in the central city of Kassel. It is the first time Meiwes, dressed smartly in a jacket and tie, has been shown in public since he was arrested a year ago. The macabre case is unprecedented in German legal history, not only because it concerns cannibalism -- which Meiwes...

(*) I knew that'd get your attention... --------------------------------------------------------- Sex and Property From The Well and the Shallows In the dull, dusty, stale, stiff-jointed and lumbering language, to which most modern discussion is limited, it is necessary to say that there is at this moment the same fashionable fallacy about Sex and about Property. In the older and freer language, in which men could both speak and sing, it is truer to say that the same evil spirit has blasted the two great powers that make the poetry of life; the Love of Woman and the Love of the Land. It...

While standing in line to purchase a pair of khaki Dockers the caterwauling began. "Muthaf**ka, muthaf**ka, muthaf**ka," blared forth from the miniature Bose speakers attached to the steel gray pylons holding up a display of the latest oversized "pipes" jeans. Not being an aficionado of the genre, I was unable to determine the provenance of the rap tune, but its literary structure was unmistakable. All human discourse had been reduced to three words -- bitch, 'ho and variations......