Free Republic

A well publicized anti firearms rights advocate wrote last week that those who openly carry firearms make a political statement just like John Wilkes Booth, Timothy McVey, Sharon Angle, and Ted Nugent. What? They are like a Presidential assassin, a mass murderer, a female Nevada politician, and a rock star/hunter? This isn’t a fringe concept. This is mainstream liberalism. This is why gun sales have begun to soar again just like before the 2008 election of Barack Obama. All of this was over a man who was legally openly carrying. A Michigan Concealed pistol permit holder walked into a polling...

US universities in Africa 'land grab' Institutions including Harvard and Vanderbilt reportedly use hedge funds to buy land in deals that may force farmers out Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds and European financial speculators to buy or lease vast areas of African farmland in deals, some of which may force many thousands of people off their land, according to a new study. Researchers say foreign investors are profiting from "land grabs" that often fail to deliver the promised benefits of jobs and economic development, and can lead to environmental and social problems in...

I write this essay with a heavy heart. I’ve always considered myself an ardent advocate for education. But a recent rally staged by teachers and students in favor of school funding forced me to reluctantly acknowledge an awful truth:We have to destroy education in order to save it.Let me explain how I came to this miserable conclusion.The May 13 “State of Emergency” School Funding Protest A few weeks ago (on Friday, May 13, to be precise) teachers up and down the state of California protested for more school funding. This mass multi-city “State of Emergency” protest was meant to be...

When House Speaker John Boehner calls for trillions of dollars of spending cuts, the message is clear. Any deal to raise the federal debt ceiling must include significant savings in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Subsidizing the elderly is the biggest piece of federal spending (more than two-fifths of the total), but trimming benefits for well-off seniors isn't just budget arithmetic. It's also the right thing to do. I have been urging higher eligibility ages and more means-testing for Social Security and Medicare for so long that I forget that many Americans still accept the outdated and propagandistic notion that...

Officials in Indianapolis are turning up the heat on a bakery that refused to take an order from a student group seeking rainbow-colored cupcakes for next month's National Coming Out Day. A spokesman for Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard said city officials are conducting an inquiry into the bakery, Just Cookies, which declined to take the order last week from a diversity group at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), which ordered the cupcakes for Oct. 11. "The city's position is, it's the city's market, it's a public place," mayoral spokesman Robert Vane told FoxNews.com. "There is no litmus test for buying...

A St. Louis scientist who was among a select group picked by the Obama administration to pursue a solution to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been removed from the group because of writings on his website, the U.S. Energy Department confirmed Wednesday. Washington University physics professor Jonathan Katz was one of five top scientists chosen by the Department of Energy and attended meetings in Houston last week. Though considered a leading scientist, Katz's website postings often touch on social issues. Some of those writings have stirred anger in the past and include postings defending homophobia and...

Christian opposition to homosexuality is based upon Divine Revelation and the Natural Law. For Catholics, the Catechism clearly teaches that homosexuality is contrary to nature and homosexual acts are among the "sins gravely contrary to chastity" (CCC, 2396) and that "Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.' They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved." This...

American public education, a perennial whipping boy for both the political right and left, is once again making news in ways that show how difficult it will be to cure what ails the nation’s schools. Only last week, President Obama declared that every high school graduate must be fully prepared for college or a job (who knew?) and called for significant changes in the No Child Left Behind law. In Kansas City, Mo., officials voted to close nearly half the public schools there to save money. And the Texas Board of Education approved a new social studies curriculum playing down...

On Monday, Jan. 11, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker will put the people of California on trial for voting against gay marriage. The case will be a show trial in a kangaroo court. I don't say that lightly of any federal judge, but Judge Walker's extraordinary bias has already been flagrantly on display. Take the trial itself. The constitutionality of Proposition 8 is not really a matter for a trial of fact. It's a question of law. But Judge Walker ordered one anyway. Why? Ordinarily a trial judge's rulings of fact cannot be questioned by higher courts. So the more...

NEW YORK: Liberals -- on both the Right and Left -- may posit that they favor freedom, reason and the well-being of ordinary people. But some critics believe that liberalism itself erodes the very institutions -- family, religion, local associations -- necessary to restrain its excesses. One such liberal skeptic is attorney and writer James Kalb, who recently wrote a book entitled, "The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command" (ISI). Kalb explained to ZENIT why he believes liberalism inevitably evolves into a form of soft totalitarianism, or a "dictatorship of relativism," and...