American Bible Society goes on alert

From Gary Stern at Blogging Religiously:

I got this ominous-sounding press release today from the American Bible Society, a NYC-based group, nearly 200 years old, that tries to make the Bible available to everyone:

New York – May 20, 2008 – The American Bible Society Board Chairman, Dr. Dennis C. Dickerson, announced today that two American Bible Society executives, Dr. Paul Irwin, President, and Richard Stewart, Chief Financial Officer, have been placed on leave at the request of the Board of Trustees.

The Board has committed to a full and independent review of the financial stewardship of the American Bible Society.

The American Bible Society’s Executive Vice Presidents, Dr. R. L. Vest and The Reverend Simon Barnes, will assume responsibility for day-to-day operations, reporting to the American Bible Society Board of Trustees Chairman, Dr. Dennis C. Dickerson.

Sounds like a bit of cleaning house. The New York Times had reported Sunday that the American Bible Society paid $5 million to an "electronic commerce" mogul whose clients included pornographers. Irwin denied knowing of Richard J. Gordon's business with adult entertainers.

Study: Killing kittens cuts cancer risk

Gentlemen, you may have heard that every time you pleasure yourself sexually, God kills a kitten. The guys from XXXChurch remind us of this reality -- based on the biblical story of Onan, whom God deemed wicked for "spilling his seed" so his brother's widow would not become pregnant -- in the PSA above.

What then to make of this report from the BBC that masturbation "may" cut cancer risks?

Men who ejaculated more than five times a week were a third less likely to develop prostate cancer later in life. ... Dr Giles said fewer ejaculations may mean the carcinogens build up.

"It's a prostatic stagnation hypothesis. The more you flush the ducts out, the less there is to hang around and damage the cells that line them."

A similar connection has been found between breast cancer and breastfeeding, where lactating appeared to "flush out" carcinogens, reduce a woman's risk of the disease, New Scientist reports.

Another theory put forward by the researchers is that ejaculation may induce prostate glands to mature fully, making them less susceptible to carcinogens.

To be sure, the next study on this topic will likely report auto-stimulation increases the risk of heart disease. Circumcision, for example, is a practice that, though conversely biblical, has been found to reduce the transmission of AIDS in Africa and to have little medical benefit; it depends on who performs the study.

CleanFlicks founder accused of sex with minor

The co-founder of CleanFlicks, a video editing service once used by many Christians, has been arrested in Utah for allegedly paying a 14-year-old girl for sex.

Daniel Thompson, who ran CleanFlicks till the courts shut it down in 2006, had more recently operated Flix Club, a family-friendly edited-movie video business in Orem, Utah. He was arrested last Thursday on two charges of forcible sexual abuse and two charges of forcible sexual activity with a 14-year-old. Thompson is out on bail.

Thompson’s business partner at Flix Club, Isaac Lifferth, was also arrested on similar charges.

As soon as I saw the words "CleanFlicks founder arrested," my mind jumped to the story laid out above. Why? Because it's sadly unsurprising to find somebody accused of behavior that they publicly fought against. Ted Haggard and Sen. Larry Craig should sound familiar. For a little more backstory and an explanation of why CleanFlicks was put out, read the rest of this post here.

Christian mission at the porn convention

On this Wednesday last year, Brent Hopkins and I drove his Civic (not my Civic) out I-15 to Las Vegas for the annual AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. I am fairly certain that will be the only time I spend 20 hours over two days at a porn convention. My excuse was that I was writing a big story about adult-industry Christian ministries for the LA Daily News' then-upcoming porn series.

I focused on the guys and gals of XXXChurch.com, "the #1 Christian porn site," who are the most prominent of the anti-adult-industry ministries. Another character in this milieu is a former stripper named Heather Veitch, (pictured on left) who runs JC's Girls. I spoke with her last year at her booth, a black backdrop with furry pink accents, that was for some reason located in the gay porn section. She's back in Vegas this week with Hooker for Jesus Annie Lobert, and an LA Times blog gives them some play.

One Vegas topless bar allows Veitch to come at night to buy lap dances and use the time to talk to the dancers about Jesus. I have been invited along for a future trip and am very curious to see how that works out. Veitch says she has received almost no hostility from the people she is trying to reach in Vegas, even those not at all interested in her message.

On the other hand, selling her fellow Christians on her project has been difficult. Veitch has found that some churches are not interested in populating congregations with strippers she has invited to services. And then it always comes back to her look. Veitch says, "The Christian community can be very judgmental. But we think our look lets girls in the industry identify with us."

For the upcoming 40,000-strong Adult Entertainment Expo, Veitch and Lobert will be working the convention floor, handing out cards and delivering their message to whoever will listen.

There is no question that patrons and performers at the porn convention are open to Veitch and XXXChurch and the handful of other ministries. But after watching these interactions, I wasn't sure how effective they were. A lot of people listened, few people turned down the "Jesus Loves Porn Stars" Bibles handed out by XXXChurch, but they seemed to think it was more kitsch than Gospel.

Craig Gross, who runs XXXChurch, told me that people ask him all the time whether he feels like he is making a difference. And at one point he wasn't so sure. In his book "The Dirty Little Secret," he writes about a guy who he thought he had helped free from the bondage of porn -- only to find the guy later fly off the deep end.

Some Christians are cynical of Gross and his colleagues, claiming they're a bunch of perverts who want an excuse to cavort with unnaturally endowed women. In a documentary, "Missionary Positions," one of the guys from XXXChurch (I can't remember who) gets smacked by a more fire-and-brimstone preacher who thinks Gross is doing the work of the devil.

I don't buy this. Certainly there are people who want out of the adult business. People like Keri Humble. And knowing that, these ministries just want to be there. Even if there is there.

(Hat Tip: My old editor, A-Ron)

Playboy, that anti-Israel rag

You ask any guy over 40 why they read Playboy they will give you the same answer... for the articles. Over the years the interviews really broke ground ... remember Jimmy Carter's Lust in His Heart Interview for example? Folks I have bad news. As Hef continues to be overtaken by feebleness (or exhaustion from having 3 live-in girlfriends) and the rest of us pass middle age the quality of the non picture part of Playboy has suffered. We can no longer claim to look at Playboy just for the articles. In the latest Issue, for example they published an article that would have never gotten past Hef when he had all of his marbles.

That's Yid With Lid's riff on a report from that says Playboy has taken up the anti-Israel cause with an article in its October issue that states, "Jimmy Carter is correct in his book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid when he describes the control over Palestinians' movements as similar to South Africa's apartheid system."

This is one of the more unusual pairings of story themes I've seen in a while.

A porn star and 'Jew forts' on Sukkot

When I went to Las Vegas to write about Christians reaching out to porn stars, I met a heavily-tattooed and pierced woman about my age named Joanna Angel. She's an "alt-porn" performer and entrepreneur, and thanks to Luke Ford I just learned that Angel grew up an Orthodox Jew.

Curious, I searched Wikipedia and learned that Angel's mother was Israeli and her father American. It sounds like Angel still identifies as Jewish; Luke greeted her by phone two years ago with a "Shabbat Shalom." This is not unusual. Ethnic Jews are prevalent in the porn industry, a story I will get around to one of these days.

But what I found interesting was a Q&A Angel had with a smutty British lad mag called Bizarre. (The link was on her Wikipedia entry, I swear.) Today, it turns out, is the beginning of Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, on which occasion Jews eat and sometimes sleep under tents they have erected outside their homes, and the interviewer asked Angel about the holiday. Sort of.

Can you explain to me the deal with Jew forts?

Jew what?

Jew forts. You know, once a year the Jews build these treehouse things.

OK, there's this holiday called Sukkot. And you build these little huts next to your house and you're supposed to eat in them for eight days. You're supposed to appreciate nature on that holiday or something.

They're kind of crazy-looking.

Yeah, well, some people think Christmas trees are weird. A tree you decorate is really weird. Lights and balls and a big star on top of a cut-down tree; that's weird. You're just accustomed to seeing them that's all.

'Mideast peace through porn'

That headline was for an eye-popping, but ideologically wanton editorial in Saturday's LA Times.

The Vietnam War-era slogan "Make love, not war" has been taken to its logical extreme by an Israeli pornographic website, which is engaged in a sort of cultural exchange of bodily fluids with the Arab world.

According to a recent report in Daily Variety, when executives at Ratuv installed software that could track where their users were logging in, they found that the site was getting thousands of hits a week from such countries as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, even though some of these governments block the ".il" domain address on Israeli websites. So Ratuv responded by translating the entire site into Arabic, and traffic quickly skyrocketed.

What makes this more than a tale of clever entrepreneurs making a buck off Middle Eastern sexual repression is that Ratuv isn't an ordinary porn site. It's a clearinghouse of political parody porn, making fun of Israeli affairs such as sex scandals and often featuring Mossad agents or army soldiers getting out of uniform, thus providing a view of the Israeli military seldom seen in the Arab world. The next step, says Ratuv's manager, is to make movies with Israelis and Arabs performing together, in order to foster more intimate relations between the two peoples.

Yeah, right. Right? Forget the fact that plenty of people find pornography to be a demeaning, degrading thing. Is the LA Times -- a lightning rod for anti-Israel accusations -- really saying that if a Hamas suicide bomber watches a porno featuring Jews and Arabs together (think "Assraelis in the Occupied Territories") that he's suddenly going to think twice about exploding in a crowded market?

It's a quirky story, something editors love. But let's not take this seriously.

Is Luke Ford good for the Jews?

Loyal readers are familiar with the name Luke Ford. He is an LA blogger who writes about kinky porn, Orthodox Judaism and sinful politicians. But Luke is a contentious figure in the Jewish community, of which he is a convert into, and is both loved and loathed by people in the porn industry.

"Ford is an interesting cat -- a nice guy and a snake, all at the same time," a friend told me.

Of late, Luke has been receiving quite a bit more attention. He was the one who first reported that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had stopped wearing his wedding rings, that the nuptials were failing. And in June his reporting was vindicated.

Luke is a complex character, a man of many layers, and I set out last week to profile him for the cover of this week's Jewish Journal. I spent six hours with him -- eating together, praying together -- and tomorrow I'll put some of the audio online. Here's a snippet from the print story:

His techniques were unorthodox, and not simply because he kept kosher and Shabbat while profiting from pornography. Trading in rumor and innuendo, lawsuits became part of the gig because he was willing to publish one-source stories and anonymous accusations as fact.

"There are three reasons why people come into the adult industry and two of them are wrong. The first is sex, which is mechanical, and the second is money, which is incidental. The primary reason is for the glory, and Luke has made himself glorious," said Bill "Papa Bear" Margold, once dubbed "the renaissance man of porn" by Playboy. "He is the first site you go to see what is going on. Even if he doesn't know what is going on, you go there to see that he doesn't know what is going on."

But his notoriety as an adult-industry blogger complicated Ford's search for a spiritual home in Los Angeles' Orthodox community. The first shul to give him the boot was Aish HaTorah in 1995 for being too antagonistic and again in 1998 when Rabbi Moshe Cohen discovered Ford's double life as a porn journalist.

"He was one of the Torah weirdos," said Rabbi Aryeh Markman, the shul's executive director. "You get all sorts of people showing up in shul and we bust them. 'I'm happy you're looking for a place to daven. But this isn't one of them.' And you throw them out. ... The antithesis of Torah is porn."

(skip)

He lives in a guesthouse occupying half a converted garage. In a narrow room smaller than a college dorm, a few blankets -- Ford's bed -- lay on the ground between his desk and the bathroom door, against which two white pillows rest. A bookshelf is lined with Judaica items and books on the Talmud, Jewish history and English literature; most of the books he reads come from the library.

There is a fridge and microwave; cassette tapes of recorded phone conversations are piled on the floor, a smorgasbord of bottled vitamins and medication cover a white dresser with gilded accents. "The Hovel," as Ford endearingly refers to it, feels dank and smells worse, but for $600 a month, it's home.

Ford posts the story, slips into the bathroom to wash his hands, then locks up and begins the half-mile schlep to shul.

"This is a good place," an elderly man says to a teenage boy as Ford reads a Talmud commentary before a minyan has arrived. "You're welcome here. You can come in the morning; you can come in the evening. You will feel good here."

Certainly, that is true for Ford. This is the place that gives his life structure and purpose and stability. This is the only shul that's let him continue davening there after discovering the depraved world within which he works. Judaism is not about a personal relationship with God, and without an accepting community there is no religious observance. For a convert like Ford, there is no Jewish identity absent Judaism.

"Orthodox Judaism in general, not just going to shul, gives me much needed structure," Ford says after the service ended. "I have no core. I'm way too flexible on the things I do. This gives me some structure, and it's important for me to bounce off the same people everyday.... It gives my life meaning, it gives my life rhythm, it gives my day a beginning and end. And it reminds me that there is a God."

He returns home and hops in his van -- a distinctly dented and rusted old GTE work van -- and heads out to the Valley. He's got a porn party to infiltrate.

Luke is getting anxious

Luke Ford can't wait to see himself on the cover of The Jewish Journal tomorrow. Ford is the controversial LA blogger who writes about everything from porn to politics to Orthodox Judaism. Here's what he says on a post with the headline: "I'm Having A Hard Time Leaving The House Today."

I don’t want to die before I see myself tomorrow on the cover of the Jewish Journal. I don’t want, before my time, to get hit by a car or shot in a drive-by or raped by a group of urban parolees. I have so much that I want to give to the world. I want to learn to love others and myself.

I spent about six hours with Ford last Thursday for this story. I ate with him; I prayed with him; I got way more material then I could ever fit into the paper. Tomorrow I'll drop on The God Blog some of the good quotes that didn't make it into print.

Porn star to priest

Remember that story I wrote last month about the born-again porn star? Well, if the report in Sunday's New York Times is accurate -- and there is reason to believe it isn't -- the adult star formerly known as Rod Fontana is about to take that conversion a step further.

After turning his life over to Jesus earlier this year, Ronald Boyer is considering turning his nascent ministry, which reminds me of this story, into a path to the priesthood, the NYT reports.

From his work in the rented villas of the San Fernando Valley, where hard-core sex films are shot, he has moved just a short distance west, to the Church of the Epiphany, which is guiding his transformation from pornography star to preacher.

(skip)

Mr. Boyer’s embryonic ministry, devoted to bringing spiritual comfort to those marginalized by the sex industry, is driven by his deep faith and by a medical crisis that threatened the life of his child. But it is a work in progress, fraught with the contradictions and internal struggles of a man leaving behind a livelihood that was central to his identity.

He has tired of performing in sex movies, but even now doesn’t condemn it. “Not one time did Jesus refer to pornography, or homosexuality,” he observed on the Internet show, which he began as a co-host in May. “Jesus could have commented. He didn’t.”

But Boyer's pastor, who was not contacted by the NYT, says the story is full of holes.

"That's wrong on so many levels," Mitchel told epiScope. "I'm his pastor, so of course I'm guiding him in that spiritual sense. But no one at Epiphany knows--or knew--about his background, except some key people on the staff. And no one is training him for ordained ministry at any level."

Calling a key figure like the born-again pornographer's pastor seems like journalism 101. Complaints about the accuracy of this NYT reporter's research are not uncommon.

(Hat-tip: LAObserved)

Who's afraid of lashon hara? *

Lashon hara is Hebrew for "evil tongue," which I imagine looks something like a serpent's. It is forbidden in Judaism not just to gossip, but to say anything that might hurt another person, even if true. That is why working in the Jewish media -- yes that is different than MSM -- demands a delicate dance. It seems secular newspapers, however, are concerned about lashon hara as well. (That is an over-generalization; journalists are very good at them.)

The hottest story in LA right now is the rockstar mayor's failed marriage. Though the LA Daily News recovered nicely this week by being the first to identify TV newscaster Mirthala Salinas as the vixen who sparked Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's divorce, the paper never published this story by Tony Castro, filed in mid-January, that revealed the mayor hadn't worn his wedding ring since at least September and hadn't been seen with his wife since before then.

Quite presciently, Castro wrote in that unpublished article, now on his blog, that "(h)istorically, the coverage of marital troubles in the marriages of Los Angeles politicians has made for queezy stomachs among local mainstream journalists."

The 2003 breakup of then Mayor James K. Hahn, for instance, received scant coverage and apparently was first reported in a dot-dash column of The Wave, a community weekly in South Los Angeles which had long been a Hahn family stronghold.

“If Los Angeles worked like New York City, competitive pressures already would have flushed out any gossip involving the mayor,” Jewish Journal senior editor Howard Blume wrote at the time in his publication.

“Why is it in Los Angeles that the personal life of actor Robert Blake looms more newsworthy than the mayor’s? Is it a reflection of Los Angeles’ civic culture that the mayor barely seems to qualify as a public figure?”

So breaking the news that Antonio's marriage was on the rocks fell to cowboy blogger/porn watchdog/Orthodox Jewish convert Luke Ford. (Yes, all those adjectives are accurate.) After Ford wrote on his blog Jan. 29 that the mayor and Corina Villaraigosa were separated, the mayor told an LA Times reporter at the Getty House that the blogger's claim was untrue. Corina, however, couldn't spare the time to appear at his defense, and Villaraigosa's ball of yarn began to unravel quite publicly.

Ford, who was profiled last month by Castro in the Daily News' porn series, is now enjoying the limelight. He got a mention on Slate, interviewed by CNN and a Q & A at LAist.

But what about lashon hara?

* I sent Ford this post and asked him how he balanced the interest of reporting with the gossip taboo. He sent back this synthesis of his thoughts, these related thoughts and this comment about when reporters have the right to rake muck:

Unlimited right to publish about public officials in the public performance of their duty.

If they do things in their private life that make them vulnerable to blackmail, conflicts of interest, perjury, etc, also fair game.

If someone is flagrant about violating social norms publicly (as Villaraigosa has been over the years with his serial philandering, much of it was Mirthala Salinas was pretty public), then I don't see a problem with reporting on it.

(Photo: LAObserved)

'Secret life of a porn-addicted minister'

Sheryl and Paul Giesbrect are preparing to celebrate their 26th wedding anniversary. The sweethearts cherish their life together, which began when they met while attending a Christian university.

It's where they found religion and each other. Today, Paul is a minister in California and Sheryl broadcasts spiritual messages. Both counsel troubled couples, but now they find themselves in need of counseling. Their marriage holds a secret, one the 50-year-old parents of two say rattled their union.

Porn. That's Paul's secret. In fact, it's the secret of millions of American men and increasingly women. (Anti-porn groups claim as much as 70 percent of Christian men are enslaved by lascivious computer images.

I missed Paul's story when it ran on "Good Morning America" last week, but noticed it just now at religionheadlines.org. The LA Daily News just concluded a six-day porn series, for which I wrote articles about XXXChurch, which is leading the new paradigm for fighting porn addiction, and the born-again porn star.

Born-again porn star

CHATSWORTH -- In need of grace, Keri Humble walked into The Church at Rocky Peak one Sunday and received the recognition that shamed her.

"I love your show on the Playboy Channel," a door greeter told her, referring to "Spice Hotel."

There are many lifestyles born-again Christians can leave behind and begin with a clean slate. Porn star is not one of them.

"Once you do it, you are putting a permanent black fingerprint on your life that is going to follow you the rest of your life," Humble said. "You can't take it back: It's on film."

Every church pastor in America deals with porn's effect on their flock. But in the San Fernando Valley -- the heart of the adult-film industry -- ministers and churchgoers also must mend the fractured souls of people like Humble.

(skip)

"After I did it once, it was almost just like, `Now I've screwed up. I might as well just do a couple more,"' she recalled. "And then after that, it just kept going and progressing and progressing. That's how it works with sin. You feel like you have already made the mistake. You can't take it back so you just might as well keep on sinning."

That is one of my two final stories for the LA Daily News, both of which ran Thursday in the paper's "Valley Exposed" porn series. Click to read the rest of Keri Humble's story or the main story I wrote about the friendship between porn legend Ron Jeremy and an evangelical minister.

XXXChurch: Make love, not war, on porn

LAS VEGAS — If Craig Gross considers Jesus Christ his best friend, why is his arm around porn's leading man?

"We are the world. We are the children," Ron Jeremy sings as he and Gross draw a circus crowd at the Adult Entertainment Expo here.

During the past few years, the two — a conservative Christian who considers masturbation a sin and a secular Jew who has performed in 1,900 porn flicks — have grown close and, despite diametric career choices, have come to respect and appreciate each other.

"I have nothing against Ron Jeremy," says Gross, an ordained minister who leads the anti-porn crusade XXXChurch.com "I love this guy. I love hanging out with him."

Oh, how the war on porn has changed. The days of Christian groups prominently lobbying against obscenity are over. Enter the era of extending love and consolation to the adult industry and those touched by it.

Members of a Chatsworth church pray for the end of pornography and the healing of those it has harmed. Christian men gather to confess their Internet-fueled addiction. Rehab centers in Colorado and Kentucky provide short-term and months-long escapes more commonly used to treat drug abuse.

In the adult industry, it seems every dark corner has a ministry. The former strippers of JC’s Girls. Hookers For Jesus. And XXXChurch, the Web’s “#1 Christian porn site.”

XXXChurch, which runs a Web site where people confess their struggles and offers free anti-porn software, has made the biggest splash, using gimmicks at adult conventions — like Wally the Wiener, a 25-foot inflatable penis — to lure eyes, and hopefully minds, away from depictions of depravity.

The message is simple: porn separates husbands and wives, defiles teenagers’ minds and breeds lies. A tool of the devil, it can only be cured by God.

“People are blind to the consequences of this. They don’t realize the problems this will cause down the line,” Gross says, handing out Bibles. “This is a lie. This is not reality. Girls aren’t like this.”

That was the opening of the main story I wrote for Part V of the Daily News' porn series, which began today. The lede was retouched by editors, but I preferred the original. Here is the rest of the story.

Larry Flynt: Godspeed, Falwell

"The porn king and the preacher," a sketch drawing of Larry Flynt sitting in bed, staring at a nudie mag with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, thumbing through the Bible, by his side -- that was the cover of yesterday's Opinion section in the LA Times. The cover opinion piece was a first person appreciation of Falwell, who died Tuesday, and it was far more interesting than the other Falwell stories I've mentioned here.

Falwell and Flynt were for years pitted in an incredibly ugly freedom-of-speech battle. Flynt had been a whipping boy for Falwell's preaching, and Hustler's hero decided to fight back. His magazine ran a spoof in which Jerry Falwell was purportedly describing his "first time" -- in an outhouse with his mom, "drunk off our God-fearing asses."

The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Flynt won. It remains a critical free-speech case taught in universities and law schools.

THE FIRST TIME the Rev. Jerry Falwell put his hands on me, I was stunned. Not only had we been archenemies for 15 years, his beliefs and mine traveling in different solar systems, and not only had he sued me for $50 million (a case I lost repeatedly yet eventually won in the Supreme Court), but now he was hugging me in front of millions on the Larry King show.

It was 1997.

(skip)

In the years that followed and up until his death, he'd come to see me every time he was in California. We'd have interesting philosophical conversations. We'd exchange personal Christmas cards. He'd show me pictures of his grandchildren. I was with him in Florida once when he complained about his health and his weight, so I suggested that he go on a diet that had worked for me. I faxed a copy to his wife when I got back home.

The truth is, the reverend and I had a lot in common. He was from Virginia, and I was from Kentucky. His father had been a bootlegger, and I had been one too in my 20s before I went into the Navy. We steered our conversations away from politics, but religion was within bounds. He wanted to save me and was determined to get me out of "the business."

My mother always told me that no matter how repugnant you find a person, when you meet them face to face you will always find something about them to like. The more I got to know Falwell, the more I began to see that his public portrayals were caricatures of himself. There was a dichotomy between the real Falwell and the one he showed the public.

He was definitely selling brimstone religion and would do anything to add another member to his mailing list. But in the end, I knew what he was selling, and he knew what I was selling, and we found a way to communicate.

I always kicked his ass about his crazy ideas and the things he said. Every time I'd call him, I'd get put right through, and he'd let me berate him about his views. When he was getting blasted for his ridiculous homophobic comments after he wrote his "Tinky Winky" article cautioning parents that the purple Teletubby character was in fact gay, I called him in Florida and yelled at him to "leave the Tinky Winkies alone."

When he referred to Ellen Degeneres in print as Ellen "Degenerate," I called him and said, "What are you doing? You don't need to poison the whole lake with your venom." I could hear him mumbling out of the side of his mouth, "These lesbians just drive me crazy." I'm sure I never changed his mind about anything, just as he never changed mine.

I'll never admire him for his views or his opinions. To this day, I'm not sure if his television embrace was meant to mend fences, to show himself to the public as a generous and forgiving preacher or merely to make me uneasy, but the ultimate result was one I never expected and was just as shocking a turn to me as was winning that famous Supreme Court case: We became friends.