Word: louisiana
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Although that case will have no direct impact on Roe v. Wade, there are four disputes pending in the lower courts that pro-lifers hope the Supreme Court will eventually use to either overturn or further limit the landmark 1973 ruling. One of them is Louisiana's tough new antiabortion law, which was struck down by a federal district judge last week...
Talk about strange bedfellows. Even David Duke, the blow-dried Louisiana legislator and former Ku Klux Klansman, must have been taken aback when a black Pentecostal church in Memphis invited him to speak at a rally to raise money for a gymnasium to serve inner-city black youths. "Duke draws a crowd, he has a message and he says he's a Christian," explained Jimmy Boyd, the owner of a local gospel radio station, who arranged the event...
...Duke is also an ambitious politician who is a candidate for Governor of Louisiana, a state with a large black vote. At the rally at a downtown convention center he delivered a typically bombastic Save Our Nation spiel, including his usual appeal to overhaul welfare and do away with quotas and set-aside programs for minority businessmen. The rally drew a meager audience of 30 people and was pitiful as a fund raiser. Duke, however, profited handsomely: he got a chance to soften his racist image without saying anything...
Beyond the whispering campaign, Gorman's attorneys hint at coercion. They suggest his programs were dropped from the satellite owned by James Bakker, of PTL teleministry notoriety, as a quid pro quo for Swaggart's business on the same system, and for the Louisiana preacher's silence about PTL hush money to Bakker paramour Jessica Hahn. If that was the deal, it didn't last: within a year Swaggart became one of Bakker's denouncers and helped bring about his resignation and PTL's financial collapse...
Gorman may exaggerate the threat he posed to Swaggart, whose operations were grossing $140 million a year before his fall. But he was beyond question a fast-rising figure. More important, Gorman was lining up wider distribution via two Louisiana TV stations and a satellite uplink -- a purchase that was scheduled to occur the day he quit the church. Gorman contends he could have brought the plan off but for Swaggart's accusations. Instead his TV ministry went bankrupt in 1987, and he left the airwaves. His new church, the Metropolitan Christian Centre in suburban Metairie, La., has 450 congregants...