Free Republic

In the shadow of a nearly 200-foot cross, Central Florida Christian Academy enrolls students who live by the Bible’s commands and abstain from “sexual immorality” — meaning gay children aren’t welcome on the state-supported campus in west Orange County.... ....Florida’s scholarship programs, often referred to as school vouchers, sent more than $129 million to these religious institutions. That means at least 14 percent of Florida’s nearly 147,000 scholarship students last year attended private schools where homosexuality was condemned... The debate touches on civil rights, religious freedom, past discrimination cases and the future of Florida’s school choice programs. It comes as...

At the urging of conservative advocacy groups, Republican legislators in more than a dozen states are promoting bills that focus on transgender young people. One batch of bills would bar doctors from providing them certain gender-related medical treatment; another batch would bar trans students from participating on school sports teams of the gender they identify with. The proposed laws, if enacted, “would bring devastating harms to the transgender community,” said Chase Strangio, a transgender-rights lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. He warned that the medical bans — now pending in Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and South Dakota...

Ron Reagan Goes Scorched Earth On 'Traitor' Trump: My Dad Wouldn't Have Voted For Him Ronald Reagan’s son lacerated Donald Trump in a scathing interview with The Daily Beast published Friday, saying his late father never would have voted for Trump. “He would have been embarrassed and ashamed that a president of the United States was as incompetent and traitorous as the man occupying the White House now,” said Ron Reagan, 61. “He’s a disgrace to the office of the presidency.” Reagan, speaking to the Beast from Italy, where he lives half the year, said if his father were alive...

Ron Reagan’s advertisement for the Freedom From Religion Foundation was the clear winner of the CNN/Des Moines Register Democratic presidential primary debate, according to several Twitter users. Tuesday night's event was criticized for being “low energy,” but one commercial that reappeared several times kept viewers entertained. The Freedom From Religion Foundation ran an advertisement featuring Reagan, who is the son of President Ronald Reagan, proudly declaring that he’s not afraid of “burning in hell.” “Hi, I’m Ron Reagan, an unabashed atheist, and I’m alarmed by the intrusions of religion into our secular government,” Reagan says in the opening of the...

The family of a man who Democratic donor Ed Buck allegedly killed by supplying him with methamphetamine filed a wrongful death suit in civil court against him, a report said. In the suit, sisters of Timothy Dean claim Buck “forcibly and repeatedly injected Mr. Dean with crystal methamphetamine” against his will, NBC reported. Dean died of a meth overdose in Buck’s West Hollywood home in January 2019. Buck pleaded not guilty in October to federal charges that he caused the overdose deaths of Dean and another man, Gemmel Moore. In their suit, Dean’s family claim Buck has, “a history of...

It is a startling reaction, but LGBTQ advocates are continuing their campaign to ostracize “transgender” people who want to return to their birth sex. Charlie Evans fits the profile of a “former transgender” who felt shunned by LGBTQ members and was labeled a “traitor.” She naively set out to help teenagers from making the same “horrendous mistakes” she had made when starting to transition at age 17. She began living as a boy, binding her chest and shaving her head. The floodgates to this bizarre phenomenon opened in the aftermath of Evans appearing on a popular cable program, Sky News,...

At their annual conference last February, conservative Methodists won the vote to keep the 3rd largest Christian denomination in America traditional on the subjects of marriage and the clergy.  They decided that, like the Catholic Church and many other denominations, the United Methodist Church would continue with a one-man, one-woman approach to matrimony, and not have openly LGBTQ clergy. As the largest Christian denomination in the United States other than the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptists, both of which prohibit same-sex marriage, the United Methodist Church has roots going back to the fiery Anglican preacher John Wesley.  The American...

One of the several downsides in watching too much football this past weekend was watching too many TV commercials. And although I had grown used to the “stupid white man” trope, now a staple of comic advertising, I was unprepared for AT&T’s impressively racist and sexist “Just OK is not OK” campaign. The larger message of the campaign is that “when it comes to wireless networks, just OK is not OK.” According to some dubious test, AT&T is allegedly “America’s best network.” To launch this concept, AT&T and its marketing geniuses at the Omnicom Group designed a series of scenarios...

[Catholic Caucus] Openly gay priest claims Pope Francis affirmed his homosexuality in private phone call January 3, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – An “out” gay priest who rejects the Church’s teaching on homosexuality shared his personal reaction to a phone call he claims he received from Pope Francis in which the Pontiff reportedly affirmed him as a homosexual priest.     In an article published by New Ways Ministry – a pro-LGBT Catholic organization that has been condemned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops – the openly homosexual priest also explained why he finally chose to make public the phone call.  Fr. James Alison,...

Hollywood only wants certain stories to be told. The stories where underage kids are plied with alcohol at the homes of glittery celebrities, like Chris Pratt and Anna Faris, and then sexually abused by adults in the industry aren’t stories anyone in tinsel town wants you to hear. Stories about how Disney knowingly allows their underage stars to be surrounded by pedophiles, and that their executives know about, witness, and even partake in child sex abuse aren’t stories they ever want the world to hear.

With just over a year left in President Donald Trump's first term, another late-breaking news item barely made waves: The Interior Department — which manages the majority of the federal government's public lands — deleted "sexual orientation" from its anti-discrimination guidelines, as HuffPost first reported last week. The removal was just the latest in a nearly three-year-long effort to strip mention of LGBTQ people from the executive branch bureaucracy. Reports of such changes began the day Trump assumed office, when LGBTQ content was deleted from the White House, State Department and Labor Department websites within "minutes" of his having been...

Even though American culture warriors of the right are fighting what Tolkien called ‘the long defeat’, surrender in the Battle of Chick-fil-A was a monumental symbolic loss. That’s because the fast-food chain had become what psychology calls a ‘condensation symbol’: a phrase or entity that powerfully evokes a worldview, and usually calls forth strong emotions around it. Chick-fil-A sells fried chicken. When are chicken nuggets not mere morsels of battered and fried chicken? When LGBT activists transform them into sacraments of Bible-thumping wickedness, as they have done with enormous effectiveness since 2012. That was the year that Dan Cathy, CEO...

A United Methodist Church congregation in Texas with approximately 2,800 members has voted to leave the mainline denomination because of its debate over homosexuality. Grace Fellowship UMC of Katy voted Dec. 15 to leave the UMC due to the divisive debate on whether to amend the Book of Discipline to remove language calling homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.” Jim Leggett, the founding pastor of Grace Fellowship, told The Christian Post in an interview Monday that his congregation wanted “to remove ourselves from the dysfunctional fighting going on in the United Methodist Church so that we can fully devote our energies...

An Iowa man was sentenced to 16 years in prison for setting an LGBTQ flag on fire. Adolfo Martinez, 30, stole a rainbow-colored pride banner that was hanging from the side of a church and lit it on fire in June of this year. The County Attorney said “hate crimes” were added to the charges because Martinez is suspected of criminal mischief against someone’s property because of “what it represents as far as sexual orientation.” This is outrageous! Murderers and rapists serve less time! The Des Moines Register reported: An Ames man was sentenced Wednesday to about 16 years in...

Germany moved one step closer to banning “conversion therapy” targeting transgender and gay people after its Cabinet approved a draft bill on Wednesday morning. The bill will next be presented to Germany’s lower house, Health Minister Jens Spahn told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland news group (RND). If the bill passes both houses of parliament, advertising or offering conversion therapy will be banned and infringements will carry fines of up to €30,000 ($33,000). After the proposed ban, only adults who freely seek out the controversial “therapy” will be legally permitted to undergo it. It is estimated that up to 2,000 conversion therapies...

Actress Hilarie Burton says she walked away from a job for the Hallmark Channel earlier this year after executives ignored her requests for an "LGBTQ character, an interracial couple and diverse casting." Burton's claims come after the network was embroiled in a scandal this month over first pulling and then reinstating commercials with a same-sex kiss. Burton, who has appeared in several Hallmark Channel movies such as “Summer Villa” and “Naughty or Nice,” wrote in a Twitter thread Sunday that she was “let go” from a job back in January. “I had insisted on a LGBTQ character, an interracial couple...

The Hallmark Channel certainly wasn’t expecting to find itself at the center of a viral culture war controversy this weekend. But in 2019, corporations never know which move might grab the internet’s attention. The controversy started when Hallmark decided to cancel an advertisement they had accepted from the wedding planning service Zola. The ad depicted, in a humorous fashion, a lesbian wedding, and at one point, the couple kisses. The conservative group One Million Moms complained to Hallmark and launched a petition, angered that an advertisement on the family-friendly network showed a type of family arrangement not in accordance with...

It’s being reported that just a day after LGBTQIA+ fanatics made the hashtag #BoycottHallmark trend on Twitter, the Crown Media team that opertaes the Hallmark brands decided to issue a letter on December 15th, 2019 apologizing to the LGBTQIA+ community and vowing to reinstate the Zola ad featuring a lesbian couple kissing during their wedding. Axios picked up the news after Hallmark sent out the letter, the relevant part of which reads… "Hallmark is, and always have been, committed to diversity and inclusion – both in our workplace as well as the products and experiences we create. It is never...

The president and CEO of Hallmark, Inc., announced on Sunday that the company will be reversing a controversial decision it made earlier this month to pull advertisements that featured a lesbian couple getting married and kissing. The executive, Mike Perry, said on Sunday that the team at the parent company behind The Hallmark Channel, Crown Media Family Networks, has “been agonizing over this decision as we’ve seen the hurt it has unintentionally caused.” “Said simply, they believe this was the wrong decision. Our mission is rooted in helping all people connect, celebrate traditions, and be inspired to capture meaningful moments...

Someone needs to remind all these mega-corporations that Pride month ended months ago… or did it? Based on the amount of alphabet soup propaganda finding its way into the mainstream nearly every other major ad these days, one would think that Pride has become a 24/7 holiday. Not to be outdone by Amazon’s lesbian kiss, or Renault’s lesbian make-out session, or Sprite’s LGBTQIA+ ad, T.G.I. Fridays decided to get in on the action with an ad featuring a gay kiss. YouTube outlet SN posted up the ad, featuring a couple of couples kissing, one of which involves two men locking...