Free Republic

We expect secular humanists and others like them to celebrate the idea of tolerance as the greatest good, but sadly many believers have also hopped on to this foolish bandwagon. It is as if the greatest virtue is now tolerance and the greatest vice is intolerance. Well, it is time for some straight thinking here. In fact, it’s time to get biblical as well. Just today I read the words of Jesus in which he praised intolerance. Yep, you heard me right. In his words to the Church in Thyatira he praised their ‘faith, service and perseverance,’ but he went...

Was 2014 a year of darkness in America? Or was it a year of hidden promise? I think it’s the latter, because there are many hopeful harbingers for 2015. Despite some disturbing, jaw-dropping events of the past year, we really aren’t at the mercy of cowardly Republicans, demonic Democrats, vicious feminists and homosexual bullies. These fools present great challenges to American culture, to freedom and to the rule of law, but in many ways, they are in self-destruction mode. While we pray for any individuals who can be pulled out of the coming fire, let’s assist their causes toward a...

Two years ago, Bobby Jindal was pushing a state law to adapt national curriculum standards to local schools; today, not only is the Louisiana governor suing the federal government to stop Common Core — or “ObamaCore,” as many Republicans have taken to calling it — but most prospective Republican presidential candidates, except Jeb Bush, have reversed themselves. Likewise, two years ago, almost all GOP leaders were unified against gay marriage, supportive of most surveillance tactics designed to prevent terrorism attacks, opposed to a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and unwilling to accept any aspects of the Affordable Care Act....

With the results of the midterm election giving control of both the House and Senate to the Republican Party, leaders of two prominent social conservative political action groups said in interviews with The Christian Post that those candidates who fully embraced their conservative stances on social issues were fully rewarded by the voters. Tony Perkins, president of the social conservative advocacy group Family Research Council, and Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, agreed that Republican candidates who either supported abortion or hid their views on abortion and other social issues did not fare as well as those...

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has some advice for the Republican Party: Drop the social issues. "If I was going to give guidance to the Republican Party, ... I'd say, 'Stay completely out of social issues," Cuban said Tuesday morning on CNBC's "Squawk Box." The "Shark Tank" star and Dallas Mavericks owner said this would allow the GOP to communicate a strong message on the economy. "If you stay out of social issues, then the conversation from that side will only be about economics, and business, and growing business, and ideas," he said. "It should be easy!" Cuban also said he...

Christian conservatives are often the subject of study by academics, who seem to find their culture as foreign as that of Borneo tribesmen. And this is a particularly interesting time for brave social scientists to put on their pith helmets and head to Wheaton, Ill., Colorado Springs or unexplored regions of the South. They will find a community under external and internal cultural stress. It is fair to say that some cultural views traditionally held by evangelicals are in retreat. Whatever the (likely dim) future of political libertarianism, moral libertarianism has been on the rise. This is perhaps the natural...

The latest polls suggest the GOP now has only a 50–­50 chance of retaking the Senate. There needs to be a mass layoff — of highly paid GOP consultants. Otherwise we risk a repeat of 2012, when overconfident Republicans in the middle of the worst economy since the 1970s became convinced that all they had to do to win was not be Obama. And they lost. Romney’s strategy was simple. On the social issues, avoid, downplay, mute. On the economic issues, sound vague, promise to help job creators, and wait for the other team to self-destruct. The RNC’s “autopsy” of...

Churchgoing Christians who support same-sex marriage are more likely to think pornography, cohabitation, hook-ups, adultery, polyamory, and abortion are acceptable. And it’s reasonable to expect continued change in more permissive directions. As mainline Protestant denominations increasingly accept the ordination of gay clergy and publicly affirm same-sex unions, the sociologist in me wishes to understand what this development means for people in those denominations. I’m not talking about subtle linguistic shifts. While the difference between speaking of marriage as a “civil contract between a woman and a man” and as “a unique commitment between two people” is obvious to those who...

There is this notion, one we hear more and more, that the Republican Party has to shed the social issues to seize the future. "Social issues are not the business of government!" says thoroughly modern millennial. It's a seductive cry, one repeated this past Tuesday in an article about how some young libertarians dubbed the "Liberty Kids" are taking over the moribund Los Angeles GOP. Oh, wouldn't the political landscape be simple if we could just boil things down to fiscal responsibility? But life is seldom simple. If you would claim to be purely fiscal, or assert that "social issues"...

There is this notion, one we hear more and more, that the Republican Party has to shed the social issues to seize the future. “Social issues are not the business of government!” says thoroughly modern millennial. It’s a seductive cry, one repeated this past Tuesday in an article about how some young libertarians dubbed the “Liberty Kids” are taking over the moribund Los Angeles GOP. Oh, wouldn’t the political landscape be simple if we could just boil things down to fiscal responsibility? But life is seldom simple.If you would claim to be purely fiscal, or assert that “social issues” should...

The American public has become more tolerant on a number of moral issues, including premarital sex, embryonic stem cell research, and euthanasia. On a list of 19 major moral issues of the day, Americans express levels of moral acceptance that are as high or higher than in the past on 12 of them, a group that also encompasses social mores such as polygamy, having a child out of wedlock, and divorce.

Leave it to the Republican Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. While nearly every poll definitively affirms that Democrats are in deep doo-doo come November, and as leftist talking heads like Chris Matthews have already conceded a likelihood that Republicans will take the Senate in the 2014 mid-term elections, many of the GOP’s highest profile personalities obtusely refuse to take yes for an answer. They’re evidently hell-bent on disenfranchising the party’s pejoratively tagged “social issues” majority. Stupid, stupid and stupid. From mealy mouthed moderate establishment-types like Chris Christie, to dovish libertine libertarians like Rand Paul, it seems...

Via WaPo, compare and contrast. Here’s Mitch Daniels four years ago: Beyond the debt and the deficit, in Daniels’s telling, all other issues fade to comparative insignificance. He’s an agnostic on the science of global warming but says his views don’t matter. “I don’t know if the CO2 zealots are right,” he said. “But I don’t care, because we can’t afford to do what they want to do. Unless you want to go broke, in which case the world isn’t going to be any greener. Poor nations are never green.”And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “would...

The theme of Michael Tanner at the National Review is that the Tea Party has become unpopular because it’s against gay marriage and illegal alien amnesty. Yet it’s also true that the Tea Party’s clout is waning. According to the most recent Gallup poll, just 30 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the movement, the lowest level in its history. While this may technically be the lowest level, the Tea Party spent most of its time with a favorable rating in the 30s.In 2011, the Tea Party had a favorability rating of 33 percent. So the notion that...

Here at Ordered Liberty, I weighed in a few days back on the discussion Roger Simon and Bryan Preston were having about whether the Republican Party should de-emphasize social issues. Some other points are worth making.The first is that not all “social issues” are created equal.I don’t think either Roger or Bryan suggested otherwise. To recap how we got here, while Roger’s headline referred generally to “social conservatives” (“How Social Conservatives Are Saving Liberalism”), his post homed in on gay marriage. In rebuttal, Bryan did not delve deeply into the substance of gay marriage; instead, he broadened the debate...

Lou Dobbs, business anchor, offers a lot of truly excellent and a little really atrocious advice to the Republican Party in his new book Upheaval, released on January 7, which he discussed in his January 6 broadcast "Steps to creating a winning election strategy for the Republican Party." Dobbs' new book is a must-read; overall, the GOP should elect Lou Dobbs as its next party chairman. Though you may need to skip a few chapters. The problem is that Dobbs insists that the Republican Party must abandon social issues. He argues passionately that the Republican Party must not give up...

Lou Dobbs, business anchor, offers a lot of truly excellent and a little really atrocious advice to the Republican Party in his new book Upheaval, released on January 7, which he discussed in his January 6 broadcast "Steps to creating a winning election strategy for the Republican Party."  Dobbs's new book is a must-read; overall, the GOP should elect Lou Dobbs as its next party chairman.  Though you may need to skip a few chapters. The problem is that Dobbs insists that the Republican Party must abandon social issues.  He argues passionately that the Republican Party must not give up even...

Have you ever heard the expression, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” It appears that some women on college campuses have become “cows” as women sell themselves short, allowing casual sexual “hooking up” to dominate their relationships with male students.

Is there a backlash coming in rejection of the race monger diatribes by charlatans such as Al Sharton, Jesse Jackson, and the NCAAP?

On Sunday’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on ABC, Washington Post columnist George Will took on proponents of federal assistance for Detroit, which declared bankruptcy earlier this month. According to Will, the city isn’t undergoing a fiscal crisis, but is facing a much more serious cultural one, which is the source of its woes. “Can’t solve the problems because the problems are cultural,” Will said. “You have a city, 139 square miles. You can graze cattle in vast portions of it. Dangerous herds of feral dogs roam in there. You have 3 percent of fourth graders reading at the national...