ActRight

"We’ve come to take our country back..."

The Hoover Institution’s Richard Epstein argues that critics of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act are undervaluing the right to free association.

Politics has become more democratized and that’s a great thing.

Kentucky Sen.

#TheRefinery crew speculate as to the REAL cause of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's "exercise band" injury... What REALLY Happened to Harry Reid? - http:...

With an event on Tuesday in Louisville, Rand Paul kicks off an April shower of announcements from White House hopefuls.

Rand Paul’s Presidential campaign is still in its infancy and already its bombs away at liberal/progressive news outlets. Hyperbole, name-calling, and outright mischaracterization run rampant and demonstrate that these news sources, and the progressive faithful in general, are terrified of a candidate whose record on drugs, drones and Middle Eastern meddling are more liberal and humane than the Democratic Party’s likely 2016 standard-bearer.

Surveys find that men in U.S. special operations forces do not believe women can meet the physical and mental demands of their commando jobs, and they fear the Pentagon will lower standards to integra

They can also receive a wide variety of federal benefits once they arrive.

A student journalist at Barry University was slapped with a suspension for helping conservative provocateur James O'Keefe film a video on campus in which a university employee is asked to help start

The time for action is now, Tennessee! Call your state senator today!

After the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the REAL ID Act to prevent foreign nationals from fraudulently obtaining a U.S. driver's license -- by requiring any ID issued based on unverifiable foreign documents look different in design or color from an official driver's license. But more than a decade later, several state and local governments are openly flouting the law, issuing ID cards that are barely distinguishable from a bona fide driver's license.

Eighty-one percent "agree government should leave people free to follow their own beliefs about marriage as well as live their daily lives.

US president concedes that after 13 years under the agreement, Tehran will be able to use advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium faster, but says a future president's ability to take action against a nuclear Iran is undiminished.

Ted Cruz just released this statement, welcoming Rand Paul into the 2016 GOP primary: "I am glad to welcome my friend Rand Paul into the 2016 GOP primary. Rand is a good friend, and we have worked ...

It has been some time since I gave thought to the day my soon-to-be husband and I bought our wedding rings. But the spectacle over RFRA—all the panting hysteria of a predatory media and toadying politicians aided by timorous clergy—brings it back with great clarity. And even greater poignancy.Our wedding date was set. It was time to pick a ring. But where to look for one? How to shop? The two of us were young, broke, and scrappy. It would be some years yet before we could afford to pay retail. Besides, my intended was a combative shopper, born to hondel. He did not believe in fixed prices. There were only asking prices begging to be negotiated.We started in Manhattan’s diamond district in the west Forties. No diamonds were on our shopping list. But 47th Street was a place to haggle, draw swords, dicker away until the doomed asking price dropped in exhaustion. His ring was easy. A plain gold band was all. It was mine that took hunting for. I wanted something chaste and spare, low keyed but rich with symbolism. No glitz. Modest but not severe. It had to be unembellished but eloquent—a sort of Grail for my ring finger. I had no idea what my adjectives might look like in the concrete. So we trooped from stall to stall in the Exchange scouting for . . . what, exactly? Then, finally, there it was. In the showcase of an older jeweler, forearm tattooed with his identification number from a concentration camp, were simple gold bands embossed with phrases from the Tanakh. They were cut in the identical ancient block script familiar to Jesus of Nazareth, who grew in wisdom and study of Torah. James Tissot. Jesus Teaching in the Synagogue (c. 1897). Ann Ronan Picture Library, London.The graphic beauty of the Hebrew characters—heightened by our inability to read them—seemed a visible link to Him in Whom we would marry. One square letter followed another, spacing calculated to encircle the band with no marked beginning or end. The indissolubility of marriage seemed imprinted in the very design. Add the romance of indecipherability. This was my ring!Next came the contest over cost. The groom-to-be went into gladiatorial mode. The seller was good at the game. It was a lengthy, spirited match. Eventually the two settled on a price. All that was left was to decide on the phrase from a sheet of suggested lines. My heart set on a passage from the Book of Ruth that reads in full:Ruth said: “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest I will go, where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.Only the central portion (“wither thou goest . . .”) could fit around the ring but the entire antiphon is implicit in the fragment. Ruth’s pledge to Naomi is the purest and most stirring statement of friendship I have ever known. I ached to claim it for myself and wear it for the rest of my life. Marriage. Illustration from the Maciejowski Bible (13th C). Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City.Was one of us Jewish? The jeweler wanted to know. Was either of us leaving another religion to become Jewish? No, we were not. Well then, he was sorry but he would not give us that particular quotation. The point was non-negotiable.The rebuff was a sore let-down but we did not press. We deferred to his prohibition because, in some unspoken way, we understood. The story of Ruth is one of conversion that affirms the Jewish nation. It testifies to peoplehood. The intensity of this man’s concern to honor the sacred core of the text moved us. Here was a man who had suffered the unspeakable for no other reason than he was part of the people Ruth pledged herself to. There was grace in his refusal. Had he granted me the words I craved, he would, in conscience, have violated the grandeur of them. Ruth’s commitment was not simply to another person but to a covenanted community bound together since the call of Abraham. Her words were his inheritance; he was not free to extend them to us.Disappointed, I settled for words from the Song of Songs: “I found him whom my soul loveth.” Over the years, my second choice proved to be the better one. The ring is dearer to me than anything else I possess. But I did not feel that then.                                                                               •     •     •     •What innocents we were. It never entered our minds to challenge the denial. We took for granted the man’s moral right to refuse us; any legal issue, then, was irrelevant. But by today’s lights, we gave in too readily. We could have raised a stink. Demanded our rights as consumers. Bullied the vendor with accusations of anti-Christian bigotry. We did not have to submit to the discomfort of being told we were ineligible for what we desired.“Something there is that does not love a wall, / That wants it down.” Pace Frost, not every barrier should be cleared away. Not everything is permeable. A nation cannot survive without borders; no culture endures without limits. Walls provide a bulwark against chaos and dissolution. That day in the Diamond Exchange, we stumbled against the very wall a man had clung to in the camps. It was the same one that had kept Jewry from disappearing centuries before modern nation states existed. Had we been noisy enough, I might have gotten the thing I wanted at the time. But at what price to the commonweal?Anonymous engraving. Riot in Saint-Omer, 1780s (Incitement over a lightening rod placed atop a house.)How to discern which walls, like dikes, have to be maintained, and which left to crumble? Aggressive shows of grievance are meant to deflect discernment, not advance it. The nervous response of the five Roman Catholic bishops of Indiana cooperated with the machinery of deflection by rushing forward with anodyne assertions of the dignity of all people, all genders, as if that were in the balance. It was not. The bishops were anxious to appease malcontents whose agenda trumped conscience and the rule of law. If the bishops could not attend to the specific content of the bill—which provided standing in court for anyone substantially burdened by demands counter to their religious beliefs —better to have kept quiet. The way to protect religious liberty is not to bleat for it but to expose the distortions, conjectural ploys, and rabble-rousing used against it. It requires tooth. By contrast, the bishops’ bridge-over-troubled-waters approach signaled to RFRA antagonists that self-serving outbursts really do work. It cooperated with bootlicking politicians in ceding ground that was never in play. Reassurance misapplied is a sentimental concession to demagoguery. [email protected]

Long after Indiana's RFRA crisis is past, the changes in our political culture which it has . . . .

Wikipedia's "Neutral point of view" policy states: "All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and,...

A bust of Edward Snowden was erected overnight in Fort Greene Park—and it's already been covered up by authorities.

Leftists such as Apple CEO Tim Cook want to boycott Indiana over its RFRA law while they do business with countries that stone women and hang gay men.

Obama’s Justice Department, led by Eric Holder, first Attorney General in American history to be held in contempt of Congress has indicted Menendez and his heavyweight donor, Salomon Melgen, but not Reid, despite his making an intriguing cameo appearance in the indictment.

In The Wall Street Journal, Main Street columnist William McGurn writes that Christian conservatives aren’t the only defenders of religious free-association law.

“GOP? More like the Rand Old Party. I'm with you @RandPaul #StandWithRand”

President Barack Obama is rejecting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for Iran to recognize the state of Israel as part of a final nuclear deal. “The notion that we would condition Iran not getting nuclear weapons in a verifiable deal on Iran recognizing Israel is really akin to saying that we won’t sign a deal unless...

Share on Facebook 1 1 SHARES While we’ve been distracted by pizza restaurants in Indiana, you need to pay attention to what big business is doing. With the blessing of Republican leaders, they have begun systematically targeting conservative members of Congress. , Barry Loudermilk, Jody Hice, , , and others have all been targeted by the American Action Network. It s a group backed by | Read More »