Church/sex
October 29th
posted: October 29, 2007 6:22 EST
An anti-porn crusader wants Kansas City juries to redefine what's obscene.
By Justin Kendall, The Pitch (Kansas City)
Inside the Hollywood at Home store in suburban Overland Park, a poster advertises Hustler publisher Larry Flynt's best-selling book Sex, Lies & Politics: The Naked Truth. The pornography baron watches over the shop like a portly guardian angel, and he's an appropriate one. Hollywood at Home is caught in a Flynt-style free-speech fight.
On September 25, a Johnson County grand jury indicted the video store on misdemeanor criminal charges of promoting obscenity. The store's alleged crime was renting out four allegedly obscene movies — Don't Kiss Me I'm Straight, Hellcats 12, Anal Machines and Real Female Masturbation. A man who gave his name as Sean O'Cleary rented the videos in late August and never returned them. He had paid a $100 deposit and, later, called to tell the store that he'd turned the films over to the grand jury.
The grand jury handed down 15 obscenity charges against the store and three other Johnson County businesses. They're accused of renting out racy videos, selling sex toys and displaying obnoxious Halloween costumes.
Johnson County isn't alone. Citizen petitions have forced grand juries to convene throughout Kansas. This grassroots effort is the work of Phillip Cosby, a Ned Flanders look-alike and anti-pornography crusader. The 56-year-old retired Army master sergeant is the zealous leader of the Kansas City office of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families.
read on . . .
comments (0)
October 24th
posted: October 24, 2007 4:50 EST
The cardiologist traded on his status as a doctor to fondle young girls
By Craig Malisow, Houston Press
Stuck to the window of the Jefferson County District Attorney's office in Beaumont is a poster with the admonishment "Never Hurt a Child. Never, Never, Never." It's been a core platform issue for Tom Maness, who's held the office for 20 years. For a while, the slogan graced billboards along I-10 in Beaumont. The words looked so good there, big and bold.
The D.A. got a pat on the back for his fierce dedication to child safety last February, when a U.S. Department of Justice press release announced the arrest of a 52-year-old man suspected of soliciting sex online from an investigator with the Texas Attorney General's Office posing as a 13-year-old girl.
The suspect pleaded guilty to one count of coercion and enticement in federal court, a charge that could land him in prison for the rest of his life for trying to have sex with a girl who never existed.
Unlike that case, the abuse against Ashlyn Treadway was very real.
It started in Beaumont in 2000, a few weeks after her Aunt Beth returned from her honeymoon in the Caymans with Jeffrey Alan Klem, a cardiologist. Ashlyn was 11 and enamored of her aunt. And everyone was enamored of Klem, none more so than Ashlyn's grandfather, Lonnie Charles Treadway.
Treadway, whom everyone called "Buck," was the longtime pastor of New Life Tabernacle, a Pentecostal church at the epicenter of the lives of the Treadway clan. Klem made a great impression upon the church right away. He played cello in the orchestra, sang in the choir and sat in the front pew every Sunday. At New Life, church members were addressed as "brother" or "sister," but Pastor Treadway junked that for Klem. Klem was "my son-in-law, the cardiologist." In the mostly working-class congregation, the title had cachet, and Pastor Treadway intended on using it.
Shortly after the newlyweds returned, they helped celebrate Buck's birthday with a crawfish boil. That night, the Klems spent the night at Buck's home — the church parsonage. They invited Ashlyn to stay.
Ashlyn recalls Beth asking her if she wanted to sleep with her and Klem that night. Ashlyn was extremely close to Beth and spent many nights in bed with her, so she didn't think much of the invitation. Beth slept between Ashlyn and her 38-year-old husband.
At some point that night, Ashlyn recalls, she felt Klem's fingers on her. Her uncle had reached across his sleeping wife and pushed his niece's nightshirt toward her chin. His hands moved all over.
Is this really happening? Maybe he was checking for breast cancer. After all, this was Dr. Jeffrey Alan Klem. So when Ashlyn's little sister came to her a few years later and asked about Uncle Jeff's hands, that's what Ashlyn told her. Probably just checking for signs of breast cancer.
And when Ashlyn's younger stepsister asked about Uncle Jeff's hands, Ashlyn didn't know what to say. All of this, whatever it was, was liable to make someone mad. Like Beth. Like her grandfather. And no one would believe it anyway. Better not to say anything at all.
But in 2003, Ashlyn's stepsister Ashlee McEntire spoke up anyway, followed by Ashlyn's sister, Brea. Ashlyn and Brea's father, Les Treadway, and his second wife Lisa (Ashlee's mom), took the allegations to Buck and Patsy Treadway. It remained a family secret for two more years, until Randee McDaniel, another young girl from the church, came forward.
Although church members say Buck called his granddaughters and Randee liars and whores, Klem, in August, pleaded guilty to three counts of injury to a child in Jefferson County district court. In a carefully crafted plea bargain, Klem avoided having to register as a sex offender and was hit with ten years' probation and a $6,000 fine. He's facing two more charges in Harris County — one of which also involves Ashlyn.
All the girls' parents have also filed a civil suit against Klem and Buck Treadway, accusing the pastor of covering up his son-in-law's pedophilia. For this offense, Buck booted them all out of New Life Tabernacle. It has divided the church, but the United Pentecostal Church International has expressed no interest in investigating whether one of its ministers allowed a child molester to prowl around the church's children for seven years.
read on . . .
comments (0)
October 8th
posted: October 8, 2007 1:53 EST
The diocese of New Ulm knew that Father David Roney was a pedophile when it sent him to live among orphan schoolchildren in Guatemala.
By Jonathan Kaminsky, City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul)
On a warm summer day nearly 40 years ago, Father David Roney, the widely revered parish priest in Willmar, a town west of Minneapolis, took a sprightly six-year-old girl and her two brothers to a clear-blue lake outside of town.
After sending the two boys out on a long swim, the bespectacled, handsome clergyman, then in his late 40s, turned his attention to the brown-eyed girl with short hair sitting beside him. He put hisÊhand on hers, she recalls, guiding it inside his pants.
"You're God's chosen one," he told her. "He has a special job for you."
A few minutes later, after Roney's sexual urges had been satisfied, he told her something else: She must never, under any circumstances, tell anyone what had happened. If she told, he warned, God would show his fury by harming someone she loved. Roney pointed to the younger of her brothers as they swam to shore. "He's not a strong swimmer," the priest remarked.
It would take nearly 40 years for that little girl—now a gray-haired, overprotective mother of three—to come forward with her story. In 2005, she and four other women filed a lawsuit against the Diocese of New Ulm and their parishes, alleging not only that Roney repeatedly sexually abused them, but also that the diocese did nothing to stop him.
The mountain of documents constituting Roney's personnel file paints a deeply disturbing picture of a pedophile priest whose taste for young children went unchecked and unpunished for decades. And it doesn't end in Minnesota. According to a sworn affidavit secured by the women's lawyer, Roney spent his retirement years at the diocese's mission in Guatemala, where he took up with a prepubescent orphan girl whom he planned to adopt.
"Their attitude was, 'It's okay for him to abuse kids in Guatemala, because they probably won't say anything,' " Kathleen Stafford, an attorney representing the women in the suit, says of the church leadership. "The whole thing makes me sick."
read on . . .
comments (0)
posted: October 8, 2007 1:29 EST
By Gustavo Arellano, OC Weekly
On Friday, the Catholic Diocese of Orange settled a civil suit filed against it and former Mater Dei High School boys' basketball coach Jeff Andrade.
Strange, considering that diocesan lawyers were publicly proclaiming they were raring to start the trial. And isn't it convenient that they announced it on a Friday afternoon, just as the weekend started and reporters were busy planning how to lose themselves in glasses of Jack Daniels?
read on . . .
comments (0)
October 1st
posted: October 1, 2007 6:44 EST
The bishop broke his covenant. The former chancellor broke down. But the truth about the Diocese of Orange's sex-abuse scandal is emerging in court anyway.
By Gustavo Arellano, OC Weekly
Monsignor John Urell enjoyed a blessed life until this summer. The Tustin High graduate joined the Catholic Diocese of Orange County as a priest in 1978 and zipped up the church's hierarchy—first as the secretary to the bishop, then as a chancellor, and finally as a vicar general. The last two positions placed him in the inner circle of county Catholicism, making him one of the men in charge of the second-largest Catholic diocese west of the Mississippi.
Urell stepped down as vicar general in 2003 to serve as the pastor of St. Norbert in Orange. Parishioners loved him; in fact, one, Supervisor Bill Campbell, nominated Urell to the Orange County Human Relations commission in 2004.
Monsignor John Urell, from a videotape of his deposition.
But the priest also had a direct role in the Orange diocese's darkest episode, leaving a paper trail that previously hasn't been thoroughly examined, one the
Weekly has obtained. From 1988 through 2002, Urell was in charge of investigating sex-abuse allegations lodged against diocesan priests. The complaints poured in while Urell was in charge—at least 25, by his admission. He interviewed victims, helped arrange therapy for them—but usually assisted superiors in covering up pedophilia in county parishes.
As the Orange diocese sex-abuse scandal exploded in 2004, as church officials eventually paid victims $100 million for their suffering at the hands of county priests and released documents showing the hierarchy's culpability, Urell largely escaped scrutiny. But the monsignor finally reckoned with his past on July 27.
The setting: Orange County Superior Court, in a pretrial deposition for a lawsuit filed by a former Mater Dei High School student against the Orange diocese and Jeff Andrade. Andrade was a coach in the school's powerful boys' basketball program until Mater Dei officials dismissed him in 1996 after allegations emerged that he had sex with a student (see "Hardwood Babylon," April 27, 2006). Andrade denied the charges at the time, but he admitted to having sex with the then-15-year-old female student last year (identified in court records as Jane C.R. Doe) in a deposition for her lawsuit.
In his July 27 deposition, Urell claimed he never knew about Andrade's guilt or even any molestation allegations against the coach until the diocese's attorney recently told him.
Plaintiff's attorney John Manly—who represents Doe and has previously sued the Orange diocese regarding clerical sex abuse—didn't buy it. He asked Urell whether other church employees were accused of child molestation while he handled complaints, but the monsignor didn't answer, on advice of church attorneys. Manly persisted. He grilled Urell about whether the Orange diocese knowingly transferred pedophile priests during his tenure. Again, diocesan lawyers instructed Urell to remain quiet.
Manly then asked a curious question: "Do you still have your calendars?"
"No, I do not," Urell replied.
"When did you throw those away?" Manly asked.
"At the end of each year, I throw it away."
"Well, that's odd," Manly shot back, "because we got your calendar from 1994 in 2001 in the [Ryan] DiMaria case. So, how did that happen?"
It turned out Urell had thrown away all of his personal calendars in 2002, the same year the Orange diocese began receiving multiple civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse by county priests. The calendars detailed his day-to-day work for the diocese.
Urell denied Manly's charge that the monsignor destroyed evidence that prosecuting lawyers could use against the diocese. Manly asked more questions; Urell replied, "I do not recall" five straight times.
Manly had had enough. "Do you have any memory problems?" he asked Urell.
"Well, actually, I'm-—yes."
An incredulous Manly asked Urell to explain. At the beginning of the deposition, Manly had specifically asked the monsignor if he had any memory problems; Urell said no. Diocesan lawyers objected to Manly's request, but Judge Robert Jameson instructed Urell to respond.
"Well, you know when I worked at Marywood [the diocesan headquarters] for those years that I was there, many of those years, a good number of those years were in a tremendous variety of ministries," Urell replied. "And one of them, the most painful for those who came forward and for me who had to try to help them and manage these things, was all these allegations of sexual abuse.
"And I can't tell you what it is, but I just don't remember them anymore," Urell continued. "I try to forget them. It is a horrible—I don't forget the people, but a horrible chapter in their lives and in mine. And so I don't remember a lot."
Manly asked Jameson for a break. Twenty-five minutes later, church lawyer Peter Callahan told the judge that Urell couldn't continue—he was "overcome. . . . He is not in a psychological state where he can listen to the questions and give answers to complicated questions."
"Do you think this is a temporary circumstance, or is this permanent?" Jameson asked Urell.
"I—I don't know," Urell replied. "I actually, until about two months ago, thought this whole kind of thing was over for me. It's never over for people who get victimized. I know that, I know it. So, I don't know. I mean, I can't hold my head up at the moment, and in the last number of questions Mr. Manly's asking, I cannot—I can't figure out where we're going. Not where we're going, but what I'm supposed to answer with it.
"So I—I just don't know what to do today," he continued. "I don't know. I mean—so I don't know. I don't know what to say. I . . ."
Jameson called off the deposition with the understanding Urell would return. But on Sept. 14, Urell's personal lawyer made an extraordinary announcement: His client could not give any more depositions.
read on . . .
comments (0)
September 17th
posted: September 17, 2007 12:51 EST
By Gustavo Arellano, OC Weekly
Long-time observers of the Catholic Diocese of Orange pedo-priest scandal no doubt remember Father Joseph Fenton, the former director of communications who was an unrepentant asshole and didn't mind using sex-abuse survivors when convenient for Bishop Tod. D Brown. He's no longer the Orange diocese's PR flack; that dirty work now falls to one Ryan Lilyengren. And the man is earning whatever Brown pays him.
On September 13, after Brown's deposition for a civil lawsuit filed against former Mater Dei boys' basketball coach Jeff Andrade revealed that Brown allowed a confessed pedophile to continue working in Orange County parishes and also revealed a sex-abuse allegation against His Excellency, Lilygren released a statement that read, "Bishop Tod D. Brown has served with distinction for 43 years and is today widely recognized by Catholics and those of other faith communities as a progressive church leader committed to transparency and accountability." Oh, the lies and hyperbole in that statement! Rather than go link-crazy, just read through the Weekly's years-long coverage of the Orange diocese sex-abuse scandal--you shan't be disappointed.
But Lilygren and his communications team outdid themselves on Sept. 14 on the Orange diocese's website. Under the headline, "CLARIFICATION OF CURRENT MEDIA REPORTS," their report purports to set the record straight on Brown's recent shuffles. "The courts give great latitude to lawyers in the way they represent their clients, particularly in cases involving civil litigation," the introduction states. "In the current case involving former Mater Dei basketball coach, Jeff Andrade, certain lawyers have gone beyond the facts."
Notice how the headline doesn't mesh with the intro, how the "clarification of media reports" quickly becomes an attack on "certain lawyers." Lilygren doesn't even have the guts to identify those lawyers: the Newport Beach-based law firm of Manly, McGuire & Stewart, which has battled the Orange diocese for almost seven years.
It's not an auspicious start for the report, and it goes only downhill from there.
read on . . .
comments (0)
August 30th
posted: August 30, 2007 6:29 EST
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Idaho senator Larry Craig hasn't come out of the closet yet but this just in: He's now gone from three key committees — Veterans Affairs, the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior, and Energy's Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests.
All this because he temporarily served on a two-man public bathroom committee.
Craig's hometown TV station KTVB.com just reported Craig's ouster from the committees. Ouch. He won't be cruising around Boise anytime soon. And he didn't volunteer to leave those posts. In fact, Craig didn't even make the announcement, as the Boise TV channel reports:
The announcement came in a statement from Republican leaders Senators Mitch McConnell, Trent Lott, Jon Kyl, Kay Bailey Hutchison, John Ensign.
"Senator Larry Craig has agreed to comply with Leadership's request … This is not a decision we take lightly but we believe this is in the best interest of the Senate until this situation is resolved by the Ethics Committee."
An ethics inquiry? That's what I can't understand. If the police report from Minneapolis is true, Craig followed perfectly the ethics of cruising, according to yesterday's ABC News story "Secret Signals: How Gay Men Cruise for Sex". Take a look at the police report, and then read the "Secret Signals" story and tell me that Craig, with all that toe-tapping and hand-signalling, wasn't following the ethics of cruising.
We don't know what tune the formerly gay-bashing Craig will be singing as this saga unfolds, but he and the aforementioned Lott sure made some sweet music together at one point, especially when John Ashcroft was hanging around D.C. Those three and Jim Jeffords were once known as the barbershop quartet The Singing Senators (that's Craig, sandwiched between Lott and Ashcroft, forming a perfect "O" with his mouth).
Ashcroft's penchant for singing started to piss people off when he moved from the convivial old boys' club of the Senate to the halls of the Justice Department in his job as AG. As Glenn Weiser noted in Metroland in August 2002:
The staunchly fundamentalist Ashcroft had already been holding morning prayer meetings at Justice, but has now found a new venue — and a captive audience — there for his musical ambitions. Staffers arriving for work are receiving printouts with the lyrics to his songs so they can take part in the daily singalongs. And lest no one be left out, Spanish speakers have even been pressed into service to translate the words.
Ashcroft's latest effort, the country-flavored "The Eagle Soars," starts out like this:
"Oh she's far to young to die/You can see it in her eye/She's not yet begun to fly."
Sour notes are being heard in the choir, though. One worker, when asked by the BBC why she wasn't thrilled about singing "The Eagle Soars," put it bluntly. "Have you heard the song? It really sucks." And some employees hate it so much they won't sing it at all.
Ashcroft's now gone from D.C., and Craig's days as a "singing senator" are clearly over. The self-proclaimed God-fearing Craig had better devote himself to silent prayer, or whatever else he does on his knees.
comments (0)
August 22nd
posted: August 22, 2007 9:04 EST
By Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer
Swinging — and not, like, on the playground — is big business, says this Reuters piece. But the very last paragraph makes us wonder, like, why:
Swinging also boosts ancillary services such as breast enhancements and erectile dysfunction drugs. "Viagra is definitely part of the adult scene," said Deborah, a 52-year old aesthetician grandmother from Dallas, Texas, who asked that her last name not be used. "Instead of four stars before, it's probably five stars now."
On second thought, is there a more sexy phrase in this whole wide world of ours than "a 52-year old aesthetician grandmother"?
comments (0)
August 15th
posted: August 15, 2007 5:09 EST
By Michael Roberts, Westword
Believe it or don't, August 13 marked ten years since the debut of South Park, an animated series that turned a gaggle of profanity-spewing kids living in a Colorado mountain town into television and big-screen favorites. The show is the unlikeliest kind of success, and that's appropriate, since Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the onetime locals behind the phenomenon, hardly followed the predictable path to stardom. They had a DIY sensibility from the beginning, as is demonstrated by the following Westword article — their first major interview, published more than four years before the American public in general knew thing one about them.
"The Ultimate in Sound Bites," which first appeared on April 21, 1993, the better part of a year before the beginning of Westword's online archives, caught Parker and Stone while they were CU film students trying to raise money to complete their first film, then called Alferd Packer: The Musical; better known as Cannibal: The Musical, it was released in 1996. The pair stopped by Westword's former offices alongside cohorts Jason McHugh and Ian Hardin and proved to be just as joyfully anarchic as their legend would suggest — particularly Parker, who was just 23 at the time, but already had a finely tuned sensibility for bad taste. They were rewarded for their efforts when Westword's own Kenny Bé drew an excellent mock poster for Alferd Packer, reproduced here.
McHugh and Hardin, who's now known as Ian Keldin, didn't disappear. According to the Internet Movie Data Base, McHugh worked on several Parker-Stone projects, including the big screen opus Orgazmo and episode one of South Park, and produced and acted in 2006's Electric Apricot, a Spinal Tap-like parody from the mind of Primus' Les Claypool. As for Hardin/Keldin, an interview on a Cannibal: The Musical tribute site, notes that he went on to form his own video company and play in a local Denver band called Zed.
What about Parker and Stone? You know that story — but you probably don't know the one below:
The Ultimate in Sound Bites
CU students are filming a musical based on galloping gourmet Alferd Packer.
By Michael Roberts, Westword
April 21-27, 1993
“We used a lot of our money and a lot of our time to make it as gory as possible,” says 23-year-old moviemaker Trey Parker about his first feature film, Alferd Packer: The Musical. “People ask, ‘Is the gore tastefully done?’ And I say no — absolutely not. That would ruin it.”
Taste is the enemy for director-producer-lead-actor Parker, a student in the University of Colorado-Boulder’s tiny film department. Rather than trying to make a historically accurate film about Packer, who was convicted of killing and eating five men he’d been hired to guide through the Colorado mountains during the winter of 1874, Parker’s come up with a story that combines cannibalism and musical comedy. “It’s an ironic contradiction,” Parker says. “One minute, people are singing a song, and the next, it’s really violent and disgusting.”
Originally, the project was little more than an elaborate joke. In trying to come up with an idea for a five-minute film that would serve as his senior thesis, Parker remembered a term paper about Colorado’s most famous cannibal that he’d written for a history class a year earlier. Turning this tale into a full-length musical epic, with himself as Packer, never crossed his mind. “Me and my friends just went out to Loveland Pass and had fun,” he says. “We made a fake preview for a fake movie.”
read on . . .
comments (0)
August 6th
posted: August 6, 2007 3:32 EST
Christian nudists hit the church — and the hot tub — for three days of wet and wild worship in the backwoods of Tennessee.
Eric England
By
Elizabeth Ulrich,
Nashville Scene
It's unusually cool for a June evening at the Cherokee Lodge, and the nudists have finally covered up. They sit at round plastic tables under the pavilion's tin roof, drinking $3 cans of Miller High Life and watching a 60-something in a teal thong shake her deep-dimpled ass to some Top 40 song. Every once in a while, she spins to reveal quick snapshots of her nipples peaking out of a fishnet top that sparkles under the disco ball and Technicolor spotlights.
Soon the sweaty DJ spins the "Electric Boogie" as a herd of middle-aged and elderly bodies, sagging in painful ways, begin to move mechanically to the electric slide on the dance floor. More than 20 people have gathered for the Christian Nudist Convocation, a semi-annual gathering of salt-of-the-earth folks whose dedication to being nude whenever possible is rivaled only by their love for Christ. "May the Lord protect our nudity from the sight of those who will not benefit, and may He allow us to be seen by those who will.... Amen," goes the prayer from one of the nudist's websites.
In three days, they'll hike, swim, barbecue, have sing-alongs and, of course, praise Jesus au natural. Some won't put as much as a shirt on all weekend. For most, the convocation is a respite from their churches, neighbors and families — the prudes of the clothed world who are scared to high heaven by the thought of bare butts on church pews. For others, it's a coming-out event, a safe place to test the waters where "Christian nudist" isn't considered an oxymoron.
read on . . .
comments (0)
