Word: jehovah
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...like the stateroom in A Night at the Opera. Strange people just keep piling in. In the course of a long day, Pepa runs into her lover's ex-wife, his new mistress, his son and the lad's fiancee. Plus a couple of doped-up cops and a Jehovah's Witness concierge. The film is devious enough to have speared every foreign-language prize from U.S. critics and obvious enough that Hollywood is genuflecting at Almodovar's door. "Pedro is going to become a major director," says Orion Pictures' Mike Medavoy, "either in Hollywood or wherever he decides...
...causes that receive the backing of the A.C.L.U. -- which is dedicated to defending the individual freedoms in the Bill of Rights -- often require that even its supporters hold their noses. The A.C.L.U. has made enemies left and right in defense of draft-card burners during the Viet Nam War, Jehovah's Witnesses who choose not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Nazis who wanted to march in Skokie, Ill., and a fair trial for Oliver North. Says William Schneider, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute: "Being linked to the A.C.L.U. is a problem because it takes up unpopular causes...
Although the pledge has seeped into the popular imagination as a paean to patriotism, religious groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses, who are forbidden to swear secular oaths, have repeatedly gone to court to keep it from becoming a mandatory ritual. In 1972 a federal appeals court ruled that an upstate New York teacher had a right to refuse to participate in the pledge in her classroom. "Patriotism that is forced is a false patriotism," Judge Irving R. Kaufman wrote, "just as loyalty that is coerced is the very antithesis of loyalty...
...cares about, has always cared about, is music. Gary Garland remembers the child Whitney, "dressed up in mother's gowns, down in the basement, singing her lungs out like she was in Madison Square Garden." At eleven, Whitney made her solo debut singing Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah at the local Baptist church. "I was scared to death," she recalls. "I was aware of people staring at me. No one moved. They seemed almost in a trance. I just stared at the clock in the center of the church. When I finished, everyone clapped and started crying. From then...
Like certain Amish and Mennonite groups, Jehovah's Witnesses practice shunning: believers are required to treat as pariahs those who have been ousted from the sect. Since 1981 those who leave voluntarily have also been ostracized, even by close relatives. Janice Paul of Anchorage, a former Witness who was shunned by her close friends in the sect after she defected, decided to strike back. She sued the Governing Body of the Jehovah's Witnesses for unspecified damages, citing her emotional distress. An appeals court in San Francisco, upholding a previous ruling by a federal district court, has turned away Paul...