Free Republic

<p>Among the Christian Right, and most Republican presidential candidates, it’s now an article of faith that the United States is persecuting Christians and Christian-owned businesses—that religion itself is under attack.</p> <p>Why has this bizarre myth that Christianity is under assault in the most religious developed country on Earth been so successful? Because, in a way, it’s true. American Christianity is in decline—not because of a “war on faith” but because of a host of demographic and social trends. The gays and liberals are just scapegoats.</p>

In 1870, Ma, Pa, Mary, and Laura Ingalls left their home in southeast Kansas, where they had lived for about a year, and headed back to Wisconsin. Their Kansas home was later the basis for Laura's book The Little House on the Prairie. That same year, a group of new families moved into the area. They were Spiritualists, a religion that was totally foreign to the homesteaders already in the new state. Two of the families moved away within a year. The others kept to themselves, with the exception of the Benders. John Bender, Sr., and his family settled in...

THE cluttered closet of the Republican Party is being wrenched open by the sex scandal involving the disgraced former Congressman Mark Foley and his explicit computer messages to teenage male interns on Capitol Hill.Washington’s gay Republicans — the “velvet mafia” — are caught in the crossfire of an election-time battle over who should take the blame for allowing Mr Foley to continue his predatory activities for so long. On one side are radical gay activists seeking to expose the “hypocrites” willing to work for a party that has campaigned so hard against proposals such as same-sex marriage. Since the Foley...