Free Republic

A beloved store owner in Lake Arrowhead was shot and killed during a dispute over a Pride flag, officials say. The shooting happened around 5 p.m. Friday at the Mag Pi clothing store on Hook Creek Road in Cedar Glen. When deputies arrived, they found 66-year-old Laura Ann Carleton with a gunshot wound. She was pronounced dead on the scene. According to the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department, the suspect, who has not been identified, "made several disparaging remarks about a rainbow flag that stood outside the store before shooting Carleton." Deputies found the suspect near Torrey and Rause Rancho Roads,...

John Davidson asks at the Federalist, “Does DeSantis Know What Time It Is? Didn’t Sound Like It In That NBC Interview.” Responding to DeSantis’s assertion that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and was in large part responsible for allowing Covid-driven rules changes that helped Democrats collect a lot of mail-in votes, this is Davidson’s thesis: "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to have lost his way, unable to articulate a clear position on the most important issue of the primaries, which is what happened in 2020. . . . No issue is more important for DeSantis (and the entire GOP...

How far will Hollywood "progressives" go to advance their agenda of celebrating all things LGBT? Evidently, as far as taking a real historical figure and making him homosexual – with zero evidence – as a tool to inject "queer" history into the storyline. Tony Phelan and Joan Rater are the husband-and-wife creators of the popular historical mini-series "A Small Light," about Miep Gies, a Dutch woman who famously helped hide Anne Frank's family and other Jews from Nazi occupiers carrying out Hitler's "Final Solution" in World War 2-era Amsterdam. The Hollywood couple takes "artistic license" to a whole new dimension...

Attorney Lin Wood, who filed legal challenges seeking to overturn Donald Trump's 2020 election loss, is relinquishing his law license, electing to retire from practicing rather than face possible disbarment. Multiple states have weighed disciplining him for pushing Trump's continued false claims that he defeated Joe Biden. On Tuesday, Wood asked officials in his home state of Georgia to "retire" his law license in light of "disciplinary proceedings pending against me." In the request, made in a letter and posted on his Telegram account, Wood acknowledges that he is "prohibited from practicing law in this state and in any other...

The veracity of a key document in a major LGBTQ+ rights case before the US supreme court has come under question, raising the possibility that important evidence cited in it might be wrong or even falsified. The supreme court is expected to issue a ruling on Friday in 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, which deals with a challenge to a Colorado law prohibiting public-serving businesses from discriminating against gay people as well as any statements announcing such a policy. The suit centers on Lorie Smith, a website designer who does not want to provide her services for gay weddings because...

The Catholic Church doesn’t need to bless same-gender unions. The Southern Baptist Church doesn’t. The United Methodist Church doesn’t. No church needs to. God already blesses them—that is, if God is love in the way these churches all claim that God is. If God is really love, if that truly is the essence of the Divine, then God is for same-gender marriage, non-heteronormative marriages for the same reason God is for any loving, respectful, interdependent union. If God is love, God is for a mutually-beneficial relationship between two adult people; where they each find connection, affection, and devotion in the...

Estonia’s parliament passed on Tuesday a law legalizing same-sex marriage, becoming the first ex-Soviet country to do so. Two adults will be able to marry “regardless of their gender,” after the parliament approved amendments to the country’s Family Law Act, according to a press statement. The amended act will go into effect from January 1, 2024. The amendments to the Family Law Act also mean that same-sex couples can now adopt children. In Estonia, only a married couple can adopt a child, although single gay, lesbian and bisexual people can also petition to adopt. “Everyone should have the right to...

By now, it’s obvious that the reactionary culture warriors who want to reshape American education are inspiring a serious liberal counter-mobilization in response. Remarkably, this backlash to the backlash is gaining momentum in some of the reddest parts of the country. A raucous school board meeting in Hernando County, Fla., on Tuesday night captured what’s striking about this new phenomenon. The scene featured teachers pointedly declaring that right-wing attacks are driving them to quit, even as parents and students forcefully stood up on their behalf, demanding a halt to the hysteria. “I have never seen such fear from my colleagues...

So this came as a total shock to me, apparantly Chick-Fil-A are nowing celebrating "Pride Month". After everything that happened standing up for traditional marriage they do this U-turn? I say "may have" in the title since I'm still not entirely sure this isn't just a fake or not Was also shocked and disgusted to see Wendy's and Krispie Kreme have fallen too.

“Hello Father Martin,” wrote one mother, “I am a parent of a 13-year-old girl who identifies as gay. She is loving, kind, funny and has a heart as large as the continent. We have stopped going to Mass because all of our local parishes are pressing a hard anti-gay message, and I cannot sit in a pew with the thoughts that run through my head.” “Hi Fr. Martin,” another mother began, “My parish has a new pastor and our first introduction to him was a piece in the bulletin where he wrote about the ‘diabolical’ nature of Pride Month.” In...

Elections are supposed to be about the future, but Donald Trump is stuck in the past. He is dead set on running for president in 2024 by campaigning on the very worst part of his record. In his much-hyped return to the mainstream media, a CNN town hall on May 11, Trump doubled down on his claims that millions of fraudulent votes were the cause of his defeat in 2020. He said he had no regrets about his behavior before and during the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and that he does not owe Mike Pence an apology for...

<p>The Trump clone wars have begun. With Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's extremely online campaign announcement, the 2024 GOP primary just kicked into high gear. In an audio-only conversation on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk and VC David Sacks, DeSantis officially announced he is running for president. But first, much like some of Musk's rockets, there was a failure to launch that overshadowed everything that followed.</p>

A woman killed after returning from a trip to Colorado to get an abortion had told Dallas police officers — weeks earlier — that her boyfriend repeatedly had attacked her. Harold Thompson, 22, is accused of killing Gabriella Gonzalez on Wednesday after she had returned from a trip to Colorado to get an abortion. A police affidavit states that Thompson tried to put her in a chokehold and later pulled out a pistol and shot her in the head. After Gonzalez fell to the ground, the affidavit says, Thompson “then fired multiple more shots” into the 26-year-old Gonzalez’ body. The...

U.S. border patrol agents have seen a 50% drop in the number of migrants crossing the border since the pandemic-era immigration policy known as Title 42 expired at midnight on Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on CNN's "State of the Union" program on Sunday. "Over the past two days, the United States Border Patrol has experienced a 50% drop in the number of encounters versus what we were experiencing earlier in the week before Title 42 ended at midnight on Thursday," Mayorkas said. "It is still early. We are in day three. But we have been planning for...

Texas state legislators voted to advance a bill that would raise the legal age to buy certain semi-automatic rifles from 18 years old to 21 years old on Monday. State Rep Jarvis Johnson posted a video of the moment HB 2744 was passed out of committee. It will be scheduled for a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives next. HB 2744 passed with a vote of 8-5. The vote came two days after a mass shooting at a mall killed eight people, including children. Protesters, including families of Uvalde shooting victims, had filled the statehouse to support...

Friday, May 5 marks the end of Florida’s 2023 legislative session, which was host to a variety of bills rammed through by the state’s Republican supermajority in tandem with support from Gov. Ron DeSantis. At a bill signing in Jacksonville earlier this week, the governor thanked the state’s lawmakers for being “productive” off the heels of his 2022 reelection, which was host to a steep red wave. “We’ve done so much stuff this year to lead the country as is… We’ve got a lot more in the hopper that we will be signing in the law over the next few...

One has to ask the question: why is the LGBTQ industry so hell-bent on targeting children? Why is LEGO holding a queer festival in its stores to promote sexual deviancy to children who would otherwise not even think about such things? To be clear, the LGBTQ movement and its various symbols, including the pride flag, have absolutely nothing to do with love. Friends, even friends of the same sex, can love each other—but it is not sexual. The LGBTQ movement is a movement designed for the sole purpose normalizing aberrant, dangerous, and violent sex acts among people of the same...

For decades, progressives have been aggressively informing us that they are devout fans of “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” These words have taken on an almost totemic significance, with “diversity is our strength” becoming a mantra for Canadian lefties. I have my quibbles with these buzz-words—diversity is a description, not a value—but I have often found myself wishing, over the past few years, that those who brandish these terms actually believed in them. What we have found as the LGBT movement achieved cultural dominance is that for progressives, “diversity” is where people look different, but think the same. Thus, Western nations (primarily...

When we were children my mother would bring me and my sister to our local library every Saturday. We were allowed to take out two books of our own choosing (usually The Baby-sitters Club which my mother thought was cute, or one of the Sweet Valley High series, which she said was trash) and then the third book had to be what she deemed a classic: The Secret Garden, Tom’s Midnight Garden, A Little Princess and so on. When I turned 12 she took me down the steps from the children’s section of the library to the adult section and...