Five Articles Relating to the Novels

1
WOMAN SUES CHURCH ELDERS ON PUNISHMENT
TULSA, Okla., March 10 Marian Guinn's soul was the issue, church leaders say,
when elders of the Collinsville Church of Christ denounced her for adultery before
the congregation and forbade 120 members to associate with her.
But privacy will be the issue Monday when Marian Guinn's lawsuit against the elders
goes to trial in State District Court. She is seeking $1.3 million, alleging invasion of
privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Miss Guinn, 36 years old, a nurse who is a divorced mother of two sons, 18 and 12
years old, and two daughters, 16 and 14, described her experience as ''terrible.''
''You feel very much alone, totally rejected by the ones you always have thought
were your friends,'' she said. ''You feel anger and hurt.''
Her lawsuit says that in October 1981, three elders, Ron Witten, Ted Moody and
Allen Cash, publicly denounced her for ''the sin of fornication'' and ordered church
members to avoid her. She had already resigned from the congregation in
anticipation of the sanctions and shortly afterward moved to Tulsa, where she
works. Elders Cite Bible
The elders say they based their actions on Matthew 18:15-17:
''If your brother sins against you, tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he
does not listen, take one or two others along, that every word may be confirmed by
two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church, and if he
refuses to listen even to the church, let him be as a Gentile and a tax collector.''
In depositions and pretrial hearings, Miss Guinn has acknowledged her relationship
with Pat Sharp, a former Mayor of Collinsville, a town of about 3,500 people 10 miles
north of Tulsa. Besides the church's action, she said some townspeople avoided her
and she had a ''falling-out'' with her sister and brother-in-law, who is a deacon in the
church.

Miss Guinn said the ban on fellowship had not been uniformly observed. Some
church members have visited her, she said. ''Others meet me and ask how I'm
doing and rush away before I can answer,'' she added. ''Others don't even do that.''
Miss Guinn and her attorney, Thomas Frasier, do not see the suit as a question of
church doctrine but of her right to privacy.
''It doesn't matter if she was fornicating up and down the street,'' Mr. Frasier said,
arguing that the church had no business getting involved.
But Truman Rucker Jr., an attorney for the church leaders, said the ban was an
internal church matter. ''Withdrawal of fellowship was an action of discipline within
the Church of Christ,'' he said. Warnings From Church Leaders
Mr. Rucker said the elders, who learned of her relationship with Mr. Sharp through
rumors, had talked to Miss Guinn several times before the withdrawal of fellowship,
asking her to change her ways.
''Apparently she did not want their help,'' Mr. Rucker said. ''She wanted to run her
own life regardless of the effect it would have on the church.''
The Church of Christ, with approximately two million members. has 18,000
congregations nationwide. Each church is autonomous and governed by a board of
elders. They teach principally from the New Testament.
The withdrawal of fellowship is a method of enforcing moral values within the
Church of Christ and is used fairly frequently in the Collinsville church, perhaps once
every two or three years, Mr. Rucker said.
''The elders have a sacred duty to watch over the flock, to help them overcome
these type problems,'' Mr. Rucker said. ''The problem affected the church, its
reputation and the reputation of its members.''
Mr. Rucker said a central issue would be the church's right to punish Miss Guinn
even though she had left the church.
''There is some question in the law whether her withdrawal of membership
terminated the right of the elders to comment on her actions,'' Mr. Rucker said.
''That is what will be judged by the court.''

2
John Edwards, the former Democratic senator from North Carolina and nominee for
vice president in 2004, was once one of his partys most promising young stars. But
on Friday he found himself in a stunning fall from grace in a courtroom in North
Carolina, being read his rights.
Multimedia

Earlier in the day, a federal grand jury indicted him on charges that he violated
federal campaign finance laws by secretly obtaining and using contributions from
wealthy benefactors to conceal his mistress and their baby while he was running for
president in 2008.

He pleaded not guilty to the charges and set the stage for a trial that will most likely
dredge up embarrassing details of his affair and his betrayal of his wife and those
who believed in his campaign. But Mr. Edwards, a skilled trial lawyer, had rejected a
chance to avoid a trial through a plea bargain, opting instead to take his chances in
front of a jury.

I will regret for the rest of my life the pain and the harm that Ive caused to
others, Mr. Edwards told reporters outside the courthouse in Winston-Salem
afterward. But I did not break the law. And I never, ever thought that I was
breaking the law.

The trial was scheduled to begin July 11 in Winston-Salem, but lawyers involved said
they expected it would start much later.

The grand jury, which has been investigating the case for two years, indicted Mr.
Edwards on six counts one involving conspiracy, four involving illegal payments
and one involving false statements. If he is found guilty, Mr. Edwards, 57, faces a
maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines.

Mr. Edwardss wife, Elizabeth, died of cancer in December. The couple had two
young children and an older daughter, Cate, a lawyer, who accompanied Mr.
Edwards to court. Mr. Edwards was released without having to post bail, but was
ordered to turn in his passport and to avoid talking with potential witnesses.

The indictment contends that Mr. Edwards and his co-conspirators solicited
$725,000 from Rachel Mellon, the 100-year-old heiress to the Mellon banking
fortune, and $200,000 from Fred Baron, Mr. Edwardss campaign finance chairman.

The money, the indictment said, was used to cover up his affair with Rielle Hunter, a
campaign videographer with whom he had a child, and to pay for her prenatal
medical expenses, travel and accommodations.

The fact that Mr. Edwards tried to cover up his affair is not at issue. The Justice
Department says that those contributions from two wealthy patrons were campaign
donations and therefore subject to federal campaign finance laws that set limits on
the amounts that can be donated and received, and require public reporting. Those
two donations were well in excess of the limit of $2,300 that an individual can give.

The indictment says the money was actually used for campaign purposes: If the
public knew that he was having an affair, his campaign would have been over. (It
was over anyway in January 2008, before he confessed to the affair in August, after
he lost too many primaries to Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. But it
might have imploded even earlier if the affair had been known.)

Mr. Edwards is alleged to have accepted more than $900,000 in an effort to

conceal from the public facts that he believed would harm his candidacy, Assistant
Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer said in a statement. As this indictment shows, we
will not permit candidates for high office to abuse their special ability to access the
coffers of their political supporters to circumvent our election laws.

The Edwards defense is that the money was used not for political reasons but for
personal reasons: he wanted to conceal the affair from his wife.

The Edwards legal team, headed by Gregory B. Craig, who defended President Bill
Clinton during his impeachment proceedings, says the government is trying an
untested theory and applying a too-broad definition of campaign contributions.

Their decision to fight the charges reflects their view that the governments case
will not hold up in court. It also reflects the feeling by Mr. Edwards that no matter
how much he has disgraced himself by lying to his wife and the country about the
affair, which wrecked his marriage and ended his political career he does not
want to be seen as a felon or lose his law license.

The defense team has already retained Scott E. Thomas, a former chairman of the
Federal Election Commission, as an expert witness. In a statement, Mr. Thomas said
the government was basing its case on a novel and misguided theory that had no
precedent. He said he would not consider the payments in question to be campaign
contributions or expenditures within the meaning of the campaign finance laws.

But the Justice Department said that the contribution limit applies to anything of
value provided for the purpose of influencing a federal election, including
contributions, expenditures and payments for personal expenses of a candidate
unless those payments would have been made irrespective of his/her candidacy.

The indictment included the transcript of a note that Mrs. Mellon sent to Andrew
Young, a former aide to Mr. Edwards, in May 2007 about the time that Mr.
Edwards and Mr. Young were looking for ways to raise money to conceal the affair.

Mrs. Mellon said she had been sitting alone in a grim mood furious that the press
attacked Senator Edwards on the price of a haircut. But it inspired me from now
on, all haircuts, etc., that are necessary and important for his campaign please
send the bills to me. ... It is a way to help our friend without government
restrictions.

The money from his patrons, which was delivered through checks made out to a
third party one was stashed in a box of chocolates paid for Ms. Hunter to live in
various hotels and in gated communities in North Carolina and California. She was
often in the company of Mr. Young, who claimed paternity of the child to protect Mr.
Edwards.

While some legal experts questioned the validity of the governments case, saying it
was applying an overly broad definition of campaign contributions, others say it is
important that candidates take campaign finance law seriously.

The alleged payments of hush money raise the specter of political influencepeddling in the form of gifts to candidates in high-stakes campaigns, said
Meredith McGehee, policy director for the Campaign Legal Center. Not to pursue
them, she said, would set a dangerous precedent.

The scarlet letter

An offender and his victim struggle together with the realities of registration.
By David Koon

Carrie Moore and her husband, "Adam," (they asked that we conceal his name to
protect his employment) understand all too well about the burdens placed on a sex
offender and his family. Married for almost 10 years he and his wife have two
children now, and live a comfortable, middle-class life in a semi-rural home in
Central Arkansas Adam is classified as a Level 3 sex offender. When Carrie was
14 and he was 21, they started a relationship through a mutual friend that
eventually led to Carrie getting pregnant. Carrie was well developed for her age and
both insist that neither knew how old the other was until the relationship was
several months along. Adam said he tried to break it off when he found out how
young Carrie was, but she kept calling, and they decided to continue. When Carrie
became pregnant and was forced to tell her parents about the relationship, Moore's
mother went to the prosecuting attorney, and Adam was arrested for statutory rape,
a charge later reduced to sexual misconduct.

"We've lived together since then," Moore said. "We've been together ever since I
was 14. We've had two children. Technically, he's not allowed to be within 2,000 feet
of the victim, but I'm the victim. He lives with me, so we're breaking the law every
day."

Adam said he doesn't know exactly why he was assessed at a Level 3 status by
SOSRA (at the suggestion of the reporter, Carrie recently requested a copy of her
husband's assessment report from SOSRA, but hasn't received it as of this writing),
but Adam notes that he was "young, and had a little bit of an attitude" during his
assessment, which he thinks might have had something to do with the level he was
assigned.

Carrie Moore said she isn't trying to say that the relationship between her and Adam
was right at the time it began, pointing out that if her 13-year-old daughter tried to
date a man in his 20s, she'd have problems with it. But she said she wouldn't
change the past if she could, even knowing how it all turned out. Adam worked two
jobs to support her and their child while she finished high school and then college,
where Carrie earned a B.A. degree, allowing her to get what she said is a wellpaying job.

Carrie said having her husband on the sex offender registry a fact they didn't tell
their kids until this year has been hard. They live under a dark cloud. Periodically,
local law enforcement officers come to the house, requesting to search the premises
and examine the family computer. Recently, their daughter came home in tears
after a classmate who'd seen the online Sex Offender Registry listing about Adam
told the girl that her father was a rapist and that she should be taken away from her
parents by the state. Two years ago, Carrie and Adam said, Adam was suddenly let
go from what he'd thought was a stable job with a local company after someone at
work saw his page on the registry.

"They said they didn't want him working there anymore," she said. "They sent a
copy of the Sex Offender Registry print-out with his final paycheck."

Because of his sex offender status, Adam can't attend any events at his children's
school without prior approval from the local police, and only then with a law
enforcement monitor sitting within arm's reach at all times. At Christmas last year,
Adam was arrested and threatened with prison for attending his daughter's holiday
play at school after a local police officer saw him there (both Carrie and Adam insist
they didn't know until then that he couldn't attend events at the school that were
open to the public).

The Moores have applied for a pardon from the governor's office three times, and
have been denied every time. They'd filed yet another request when we spoke at
their home in late 2011. Sentenced to be on the registry for a mandatory 15 years,
the soonest Adam can even begin petitioning the court to be removed will be 2015.

As parents, Adam and Carrie said they see the need for strong laws concerning sex
offenders, and understand that a case like theirs with the offender and victim
getting married and living together long-term is rare. Still, they said they believe
there should be some kind of review process to let certain offenders off the registry
before the 15 years is up, if they can show they're not a threat to the community.
"Do I think that 14-year-olds should be able to have sex with 21-year-olds and then
the 21-year-olds not be held accountable for it?" Carrie asked. "That's not what I'm

saying. What I'm saying is that I think that after a certain time period, if you've
established that you have a relationship and it wasn't just a one-night stand or a
fling, at some point there's a review board that can look at that."

Adam said he often feels guilty about what being on the sex offender registry has
meant to his children. "I know you have to draw the line between sympathy and
right and wrong," he said. "I know you have to have [laws governing sex offenders]
in place. But I can't go to their school, I can't go to their plays. I can't go to anything
that has to do with the school. I guess I am allowed to go, but I have to call and ask
if they have somebody who can babysit me ... I've been married for almost 10
years. I'm not interested in children in any kind of bad way. I'm interested in if my
children are succeeding. It's kind of hard for a kid to think you're on their team if
you can't be there."

Not all hardships end for teen immigrants once they cross the border and make it
into the United States. They struggle to adapt to a new school, language and
culture, according to immigrant high school students who wish to remain
anonymous.
Immigrant teenagers say they live within their own worlds in high school. Because
they must learn English as a second language, they have separate teachers and
curriculum. For the most part, these students are both socially and academically
isolated.
Athens native Ellie Lawson, a freshman at Oconee County High School, noticed the
separation of immigrant teenagers from the rest of the student body, though the
numbers of Hispanic students in her school are limited.
There arent many Hispanic kids at my school, Lawson said. None of them are
even in my classes. According to Lawson, Oconee County High School lost a large
number of Hispanic students after the destruction of the Arbor Glen Mobile Home
Community, which was originally in the school district.
The teenage years are a difficult time period for most people, but teen immigrants
say they have to adjust to a whole new way of life at the same time. One 16-yearold sophomore at Centennial High School in Roswell, a school with a greater number
of immigrant students, described her fear of entering a new school without knowing
a single person.
A 17-year-old Centennial senior talked about learning how to dress in a new style. In
addition to all that, these students had to learn how to speak an entirely new
language.

Starting over in a new high school is really hard, especially when you dont speak
the language, a 17-year-old student who emigrated from Mexico told a Grady
Journal reporter in Spanish. Its tough to fit in. She and other immigrant students
asked to keep their identities anonymous for personal reasons. All interviews in
Spanish were translated by a Grady Journal reporter.
The group of immigrants from Centennial High School agreed that learning English
is the hardest part about moving to this country. A close second to this struggle is
the fight to fit in and the sometimes obvious racism they encounter.
Social barriers justify the fears and worries of teen immigrants. Differences in
ethnicity and cultural lifestyle set them apart from the rest of the student body.
They pretty much stick to themselves, said Bobby Callahan, an 18-year-old
Centennial classmate. I would say they are stereotyped as short and wearing lots
of hair gel. Thats true though. These social stigmas seem to transcend through
most high schools.
Language is a problem, of course, but students are also often isolated to peer
groups based on shared country of origin or language, said University of Georgia
professor Pedro Portes, executive director of the Center for Latino Achievement and
Success in Education. Moreover, the stigma attached to immigrants in this country
often trickles down to younger kids, resulting in a lot of negative attitudes toward
newcomers.
Centennial High School has more than 80 students enrolled in the English for
Speakers of Other Languages program. Senior Victoria Guzman said that she has
no problem having a large number of immigrant students at her high school.
Though born in the U.S., her father is Cuban. She believes that anyone who wants to
should be able to come to this country, and that the government should make it
easier for people to do so legally.
We are lucky to be born in America, Guzman said. Not everyone is so lucky. So
why should we keep them out? Everyone deserves the same opportunities.
Lawson disagrees with Guzmans opinion.
I feel like its really easy to get into this country. I have nothing against them as
people, but they come over and take American jobs and a lot of them dont even
pay taxes.
Some immigration advocates have begun referring to immigration and deportation
laws as Juan Crow laws because they feel that these policies exploit immigrants
similarly to the Jim Crow laws of the post-Reconstruction South. Examples of these
laws include housing discrimination to those who cannot provide identification,
racial profiling, and redistricting around Latino areas.
Recent legislation has given the power to enforce immigration law to local law
enforcement agencies instead of federal agents. Many legal immigrants feel there
are needed changes in immigration legislation.

As a legal immigrant, total amnesty for illegal immigrants is almost like a slap in
the face, said Enrique Celedon, a 20-year-old Colombia native and Georgia State
student. By being legal immigrants, we spend thousand of dollars to be at the
mercy of paper work and human error. Immigration Services is heavily over booked.
Many cases are lost or separated causing them to be delayed years, while we still
have to pay for our lawyer and visa fees. I understand that we cannot deport them
all. A program that allows illegal immigrants to become legal must be
implemented.
High school students have a vast array of opinions, but many are simply apathetic
toward the issue.
I dont think we should build a fence or anything, Callahan said. I honestly just
dont care. I dont think about it.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, around 400,000 people try to enter the United
States illegally each year. Of this group, about 10 percent are minors. Many endure
hardships coming to America.
I walked a ton and we suffered because there was no water and it was very hot,
recalled a 19-year-old high school student who emigrated from Mexico with his
mother and sister four years ago. A man who came with the group died on the
way, but when we crossed the border I was happy. My American dream had become
reality.
Immigrants face great risk when working with coyotes, who are American citizens
that charge money to bring foreigners into the U.S. These coyotes have been known
to drop immigrants off in the middle of nowhere, keeping their money and leaving
them to die.
I had to walk for such a long time, said one 16-year-old, who was only 11 when
she emigrated from Mexico. The coyotes were bad to my family and we had no
water to drink. We had to suffer for four days in the desert.
She recalled feeling sad, scared and worthless during her journey to the United
States. However, she realized that she and the cousins she traveled with were lucky.
Thousands of immigrants have died while trying to enter the country illegally.
They suffer to make it safely to the U.S. and later struggle to fit in to a new culture.
Teen immigrants face a wide range of acceptance, rejection and disregard. They
leave behind friends, family and a whole life in their native countries.
Aside from all the obstacles they face, teen immigrants find plenty to be happy
about. One freshman immigrant from Mexico joked that what he liked most about
this country are the cute girls. Many others appreciate the better schools and jobs.
One student summarized his American experience simply: I like freedom.
Immigration is one trend that is not slowing. According to the U.S. Census Bureau,
the immigrant population has grown about 16 percent in the last five years. Large
portions of these immigrants have emigrated from Mexico and other Hispanic

countries. Hispanics are the fastest growing minority, and are predicted to reach 25
percent of our population by the year 2050.
If we are to continue on the track that we are on, which is basically creating a
permanent lower class made up of Latinos, we will have some major problems in the
future, Portes said. It makes much more sense to make an effort to welcome
newcomers to our society, to invest in them and work toward a more integrated
society. Deep divisions in a population have rarely benefited civilizations throughout
history and we have a responsibility to begin closing hours before we are left with
problems that are even more difficult to solve.

5
According to the Migration Policy Institute's analysis of the 2010 Census, 15 percent
of the immigrant population is between the ages of five and seventeen. Many
immigrant children arrive speaking only their native language, or very limited
English; many live in low-income areas and face the challenge of assimilation along
with the many other issues families living in poverty have to deal with on a regular
basis; many arrive in the United States having fled violence in their homelands.

Whether the Tsanaev brothers had difficulties integrating into American society as
young immigrants is unknown. The brothers left a violent region for the United
States; but the American public has yet to learn whether the violence in their
homeland contributed to their wish to perpetrate violence on others.

While these question may remain unanswered, Marcelo Surez-Orozco argues that
the Tsarnaev case does highlight the issues many immigrant children face in the
United States. Surez-Orozco has has interviewed hundreds of immigrant children
over the course of his career as an anthropologist. He is the dean of U.C.L.A.s
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and co-author of "Learning a
New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society."