Poor Mojo's Newswire

LeRoy Butler, former safety for the Green Bay Packers, was scheduled to give an anti-bullying presentation at a Wisconsin church this summer, but now the speech is off because he supported Jason Collins for coming out this week. Butler shared the following in a series of tweets today: Wow, I was schedule to speak at a church in WI, and a member said that the pastor wants to cancel my event, I said ok why? Then I was told, because I said congrats to Jason Collins on twitter, I said really? we have a contract, he said check the moral cause. FYI the fee was 8500$,then I was told if i removed the tweet, and apologize and ask god forgiveness, I can have the event, I said no.

All was not harmonious in Primm Springs either, according to the four Allison adoptees I interviewed at length for this story. (Sam Allison has denied all of their allegations.) "Everything was good for a month," CeCe, now 21, told me. "We got to the next month and things started to get a little weird." Serene's raw-food offerings were unfamiliar, but Sam would discipline them if they balked at eating her meals, the children said. Other cultural impasses included the children's use of Liberian English and the Liberian prohibition on children looking adults in the eye. "They'd say, 'You are so rude. I'm talking to you!'" CeCe recalled. "They expected us to adapt in a heartbeat." In October 2006, a year after their first Liberian adoptions, the Allisons adopted another pair of siblings: Kula, 13, and Alfred, 15. "In Africa we thought America was heaven," recalled Kula, who is 19 now. "I thought there were money trees." Primm Springs was a rude awakening: It was dirty, she recalled, and she had no toothbrush. The new house Sam was building—with the older kids working alongside him—often lacked electricity. There was only a woodstove for heat, and no air conditioning or running water yet. Toilets were flushed with buckets of water hauled from a creek behind the house. The children recalled being so hungry that they would, on occasion, cook a wild goose or turkey they caught on the land. "We went from Africa to Africa," CeCe said. They didn't attend school, either; home schooling mostly consisted of Serene reading to the younger children. When the older kids watched a school bus drive past on a country road and asked why they couldn't go, they were met with various excuses. So Isaiah and Alfred worked with Sam in his house-painting business or labored in Nancy Campbell's immense vegetable garden while CeCe, Kula, and Cherish cleaned, cooked, and tended to a growing brood of young ones. It was also the job of the "African kids," as they called themselves, to keep a reservoir filled with water from the creek. CeCe hadn't yet learned to read when Serene gave her a book on midwifery so she could learn to deliver their future babies. "They treated us pretty much like slaves," she said. It's a provocative accusation, but one that Kula and Isaiah—as well as two neighbors and a children's welfare worker—all repeated.

In New York City, the public school students who attend classes in a building owned by the Catholic Church can’t actually attend all of their classes there. As the New York Daily News reports, students need to leave campus in order to receive state-mandated instruction on sexual health, as part of a long-standing agreement between Church officials and the city’s public school district that has recently come to light. New York state law requires sex ed classes to include information about condoms, birth control, and HIV and STD transmission, and those standards were strengthened specifically for New York City’s public school district under a new citywide standard enacted in 2011. So far, those initiatives have been wildly successful, and New York City’s teen pregnancy rate has plummeted by more than 25 percent over the past decade. But Church officials say that type of comprehensive sex ed instruction violates Catholic doctrine. In Catholic-affiliated schools, students are taught abstinence-only education with no mention of contraceptive methods — and at least in New York City, the Church’s influence can even impact public schools’ ability to teach sex ed.