ABSTRACT
A popular Catholic priest confesses to father-ing a child, makes a public apology, and agrees to take a leave of absence from his pulpit (Goodstein, 2012a). President Barack Obama puts gay marriage-a controversial position supported by a bare majority of the electorate-on his campaign agenda (Landler and Zeleny, 2012); Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a staunch conservative, admits that his daughter’s lesbianism has changed his position on the question of homosexuality (Cooper and Peters, 2012). The Vatican denounces a nun, Sister Margaret Farley, for publishing a theological tract entitled Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, which supports same-sex marriage, masturbation, and remarriage after divorce (Goodstein and Donadio, 2012). In Minneapolis, twentynine Somali immigrants and Somali Americans are charged with sexual trafficking (Eckholm, 2012). A scandal erupts when reporters reveal that U.S. Secret Service agents are paid to protect the president who had hired prostitutes two days before at an international summit in Cartagena, Colombia. Eight agents are fired from their jobs; more are likely to follow (Leonnig and Nakamura, 2012). Tek Young Lin, a retiree, publicly admits that when he taught English at the Horace Mann School, a preparatory school in the Bronx, he had sexual relations with his fourteenand fifteen-year-old students (Anderson, 2012).
