Free Republic

On Wednesday, 43 Republican members of Congress joined the Democrats to vote for President Barack Obama’s transgender agenda. Now they’re trying to spin their vote. These 43 Republicans voted for the Maloney amendment, which ratified Obama’s 2014 executive order barring private businesses who do contract work for the government from engaging in what the government considers to be “discrimination” on the basis of “sexual orientation and gender identity” in their private employment policies. As I pointed out in an earlier Daily Signal article, “discrimination” on the basis of “gender identity” can be something as simple as having a bathroom policy...

The 15-year-old girl had only been a student at South Fort Myers High School in Fort Myers, Fla., for two weeks when she went looking for her new crush in the boys’ bathroom. She’d spent the prior two years in and out of treatment facilities, her mother told NBC2, learning to cope with the horrors of the sex slave industry into which she had been trafficked at age 13. So when she tracked down her crush after school last week and he asked her for sex, her mother said through a victims’ advocate, the young teen agreed. But then word...

....Obama’s transgender directive isn’t about civil rights or bathroom use. It’s about state control over personal relationships. As usual, tyranny comes disguised as “civil rights.” The transgender movement has never been about “gender.” It’s all about sex. Sex is the real target. “Gender” is merely the politicized linguistic vehicle... It will serve to outlaw speech that identifies males as males and females as females... ...All such denials of reality require heavy-handed censorship. We have already seen the governors of South Dakota and Georgia fold.... ...Every single cell of you has either “male” or “female” written into its DNA, but the...

[A] Pennsylvania high school student barred from attending prom at her Catholic high school because she wore a suit rather than a dress has had her prom night — at a different school. Aniya Wolf, a student at Bishop McDevitt High School in Harrisburg, attended William Penn High School's prom Saturday at a banquet hall in York. Wolf says she learned at the last moment that girls were required to wear dresses to Bishop McDevitt's prom. She went anyway but was thrown out. The school says the dress code was sent to parents three months earlier. William Penn principal Brandon...

....Obama, the titular head of the LGBT movement, has added to the firestorm of confusion...by threatening schools with loss of federal funding unless they allow students to join the sex-segregated restroom, locker room, and sports teams of their chosen gender, without regard to biological reality. ....As someone who underwent surgery from male to female and lived as a female for eight years before returning to living as a man, I know firsthand what it’s like to be a transgender person.... What has arisen is a new breed emerging among young people that falls outside the purview of the LGBT: the...

I saw this suggestion by someone who is concerned, apparently, about kids...

Laverne Cox has been added to the list of celebrities Megyn Kelly will interview for her primetime special on Fox broadcast network Tuesday, May 17. ...The Emmy Award-nominated [man who thinks he is a woman] will appear as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in this fall’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show event on Fox.

Yale University was founded by conservative congregational ministers in the early 18th century. For those who haven’t been looking much has changed at Yale since its founding. You can catch up a bit via William F. Buckely’s Jr’s 1951 classic, God and Man at Yale. It’s available in paper and on Kindle. He’s gone but he lives figuratively in print and on Youtube (in Firing Line episodes). One of the ways that Yale has changed is that it now hosts a sex week and this year they offered to students a talk by a “sexologist” who claims to have...

President Obama’s Twitter account, which is run by his "Organizing for Action" staff, follows 636,000 accounts. Many of them you might expect: Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry. Even Mariah Carey and Snoop Dogg don't really raise an eyebrow. But several accounts on the presidential follow list fit a different theme: Asa Akira, a porn star who has 653,000 followers and, in her Twitter bio, states "I have an award-winning a****le." Joanna Angel (390,000 followers), who describes herself as a "multiple award winning punk porno princess;" Penthouse Pet Of The Year Nikki Benz (808,000 followers); and Ashley Steel (138,000 followers),...

The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping directive telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity. A letter to school districts will go out Friday, adding to a highly charged debate over transgender rights in the middle of the administration’s legal fight with North Carolina over the issue.

Dozens of United Methodist clergy members came out as lesbian, gay or bisexual on Monday, defying their church's ban on "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" serving in ministry and essentially daring their supervisors to discipline them. In a public letter posted online, 111 pastors, deacons, elders and candidates for ministry said church rules require "that we not bring our full selves to ministry, that we hide from view our sexual orientations and gender identities." "While some of us have been lucky to serve in places where we could serve honestly and openly, there are others in places far more hostile, who continue...

On Monday, CNN not only continued to misinform its viewers about the contents of the North Carolina bathroom law, but it also used a misleading CNN/ORC poll to dubiously claim that most Americans oppose the law. New Day, CNN Newsroom, and Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield have so far cited the poll claiming that 57 percent of Americans oppose the bathroom law, but the wording of the poll gives the false impression that transgenders are required to use the public restroom of their gender at birth when, as clarified by the North Carolina governor's office, the law still allows transgenders...

The so-called bathroom wars have nothing to do with bathrooms but are all about war. The push to allow a person to use the bathroom of his or her choice is merely the latest phase of the sexual revolution. It is part of a relentless war to bring about an irrational equality that now seeks to break down the final public barriers that make the sexes different.Let’s face it. Once it is held that anyone can use the bathroom that he or she feels comfortable with, the words “men” and “women” on the door are meaningless since anyone can...

PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown explained “Mapplethorpe was best known for his homoerotic photographs and explicit sadomasochistic imagery, and the political and legal battles around them. Even now, we’ve chosen not to present his most controversial work.” But PBS didn’t just censor the art. They couldn’t even bring themselves to describe it. We’re not told about Mapplethorpe’s naked self-portrait with a bullwhip us his anus. We’re not told about his pornification of a little boy and a little girl. We’re not told about “Jim and Tom, Sausalito” – a photo in which one man urinates into another’s mouth. So when the...

Now here is a legal question you may have never heard: If a man likes to dress as a woman, can he be arrested while driving for impersonating a woman? It's one man's concern, and Help Me Howard with Patrick Fraser has the cross-dressing answer. Some interviews begin a little differently than others. Terry Richards: "When I first tried on a slip, I was 13. And next time, there was a bra hanging up, 'Oh, let me try that on.'" ....Terry Richards: "I'm not gay. I'm a heterosexual male who enjoys wearing women's clothes." Terry has always enjoyed dressing as...

....Wilton Manors city leaders are in talks of expanding their insurance...Currently, gender confirmation surgery is excluded from the city's health plan, causing a financial strain that can often hinder the completion of the process.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former Pennsylvania Sen. Harris Wofford announced Sunday that he is marrying a man 50 years his junior, almost 20 years after his wife died. Wofford, a Democrat who was also a top adviser to John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., announced his marriage to Matthew Charlton in a New York Times op-ed....

....rocker Bryan Adams is canceling a performance this week in Mississippi, citing the state's new law that allows religious groups and some private businesses to refuse service to gay couples. Adams said in a statement Sunday night that he was canceling a show Thursday at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum in Biloxi..

When PayPal announced plans to expand in Charlotte, it made headlines by promising 400 jobs and millions of dollars in payroll. Now PayPal is making bigger headlines nationwide as it backs out of the deal with Charlotte, citing the recently passed House Bill 2. PayPal said the law violates their values and principles concerning equality... Congressman Robert Pittenger...released a statement saying, “PayPal does business in 25 countries where homosexual behavior is illegal… yet they object to the North Carolina legislature overturning a misguided ordinance about letting men in to the women’s bathroom? Perhaps PayPal would like to try and clarify...

A Los Angeles man who was attacked and placed in a submission hold inside Miami Beach's Burger King Whopper Bar last month is speaking out about what happened. The incident was caught on camera and police are.... ...He said he was targeted because he's gay. "It was just a simple kiss with my boyfriend," Schaeffer explained. "Then right after that kiss, I started walking over and....