Lead Story
Crisis Averted
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In November the school district of Spurger, Texas, called off one of its longstanding homecoming-week traditions–a day when boys dress like girls and vice versa–after parent Delana Davies protested that such behavior might lead to homosexuality. It’s “like drugs,” she said. “You do a little here and there…eventually it gets you.” Instead, officials said, students would be encouraged to wear camouflage hunting gear.
A journal written by Tara Pisano, a former bailiff in Tampa, Florida, became public in November when it was introduced by her husband during divorce proceedings. It provided new details about her affair with former circuit court judge Gasper Ficarrotta, who resigned amid scandal in 2000. Pisano described one incident in which Ficarrotta laid out his judge’s robe on a hotel room bed and asked her to put it on. When she declined, he became angry and told her she “needed to feel the power that his black robe possessed.”
Ending decades of secrecy, residents of Villa Baviera–a cult community founded in 1961 by German immigrants to Chile–spoke to a Reuters reporter in November. Their leader was former German army nurse Paul Schaefer, who deleted references to love or sex from the Bible, forbade contact between family members, and banned physical intimacy, with the result that virtually no children were born in the village for 25 years. Schaefer also prohibited most technological innovations (including the telephone), and villagers lived (and dressed) much as 1930s Bavarian peasants did. After Schaefer, charged by Chilean authorities with sexual abuse, fled in 1997, loyal elders continued to enforce his rules for several years, but gradually the group came to admit that Schaefer was not an infallible “celestial being.” Though they’re now free to leave, one resident says the members of the community (who number about 280) plan to stay together.
