Can we call them Nazis now?
The politically connected conservative religious group in Washington, DC, known as “The Family” made infamous in the United States recently by the sex scandal of one of it’s member’s, Senator John Ensign, seemed creepy but also essentially harmless. Sort of a Religious Right version of The Addams Family. Good for a laugh, even if that laugh was a nervous one.
Well, today, I’m no longer willing to consider The Family, it’s members and its agenda as quite so harmless, because it appears to be the driving force behind laws meant to execute homosexuals in Uganda:
We already noted the religious right-wing’s support of making Uganda a home base for homophobia, but now comes word that America’s own Christian politicos are backing President Yoweri Museveni’s campaign to make gay sex punishable by death.
As Jeff Sharlot, author of the expose The Family, tells it, the bill’s biggest supporter is a member of The Family. David Bahati, the lawmaker pushing for aggravated homosexuality crimes, “appears to be a core member of The Family. He works, he organizes their Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which The Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda.”
Moreover, says Sharlot, “we discovered that David Bahati, the man behind this legislation, is really deeply, deeply involved in The Family’s work in Uganda, that the ethics minister of Uganda, Museveni’s kind of right-hand man, a guy named Nsaba Buturo, is also helping to organize The Family’s National Prayer Breakfast. And here’s a guy who has been the main force for this Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda’s executive office and has been very vocal about what he’s doing, in a rather extreme and hateful way. But these guys are not so much under the influence of The Family. They are, in Uganda, The Family.”
Don’t doubt for one minute that this is exactly the same agenda that The Family would like to bring to America: laws to exterminate homosexuals. In Uganda, homosexuality is already a crime punishable by life imprisonment. The new Ugandan law would execute “repeat offenders” as well as jail anyone for three years for failing to “inform authorities” of someone they knew to be gay.
It seems the current Dictator of Uganda, “President” Musevini, has had deep connections with members of The Family since the mid 1980’s. Thus it should come as no surprise that his tyrannical regime, which imprisons journalists, has received the support of prominent American Republican Senators with ties to the Religious Right, such as Sam Brownback of Kansas and James Inhofe of Oklahoma. They help him obtain material aid from the United States government and he just happens to pass and enforce the most heinous anti-homosexual laws:
GROSS: So what does that mean? What influence does The Family have on him?
Mr. SHARLET: It means that they have a deep relationship of what they’ll call spiritual counsel, but you’re going to talk about moral issues. You’re going to talk about political issues. Your relationships are going to be organized through these associates. So Museveni can go to Senator Brownback and seek military aid. Inhofe, as he describes, Inhofe says that he cares about Africa more than any other senator.
And that may be true. He’s certainly traveled there extensively. He says he likes to accuse the State Department of ignoring Africa so he becomes our point man with guys like Museveni and Uganda, this nation he says he’s adopted. As we give foreign aid to Uganda, these are the people who are in a position to steer that money. And as Museveni comes over, and as he does and spends time at The Family’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, a place called The Cedars, and sits down for counsel with Doug Coe, that’s where those relationships occur.
It’s never going to be the hard sell, where they’re going to, you know, twist Museveni’s arm behind his back and say do this. As The Family themselves describes it, you create a prayer cell, or what they call – and this again, this is their language from their documents – an invisible believing group of God-led politicians who get together and talk with one another about what God wants them to do in their leadership capacity. And that’s the nature of their relationship with Museveni.
Who is the secretive leader of The Family? A man named Doug Coe who has been active in promoting the political influence of his particular brand of Christianity in Washington for decades. Here’s how Jeff Sharlett, the investigative reporter Terri Gross interviewed, describes a meeting he attended with this man regarding the proper model for exerting Christian influence in countries around the globe:
And some of the, really the core rhetoric of The Family is this idea that most of us misread the New Testament, that Christ’s message – the bottom line of Christ’s message wasn’t really about love or mercy or justice or forgiveness. It was about power. So Doug Coe, the leader of the group, tries to illustrate this, for instance, by saying, sort of posing a puzzle: name three men in the 20th century who best understood that message of The New Testament. And most people are going to say someone like Martin Luther King, or Bonhoeffer; or maybe they’re more conservative, they’re going to say Billy Graham. And Coe likes to give in answer: Hitler, Stalin and Mao, which just makes your jaw drop. And he will say – he’s quick to say these are evil men, but they understood power. And that message recurs again, and again, and again in The Family.
When I was at the C Street house, I sat in on a session between Doug Coe and Congressman Tiahrt of Kansas. And Coe was encouraging Tiahrt to understand the message of Jesus by thinking about the model of power exemplified by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. There are so many examples of this, and I give several because I don’t want people to think that I’m cherrypicking one bad choice of words. This is a core idea of The Family. There is actually video that [NBC News] found of Coe talking about the fellowship that he wants to model the things on is like that of the great friendship enjoyed by Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler.
If that isn’t a formula for Christian Fascism, I don’t know what is. In Uganda today, gay people are paying a steep price, and perhaps soon the ultimate price, for the immutable fact of their sexual orientation. And this has happened because of the active support of a putative Christian Dictator by a secretive religious organization of influential Christian politicians based in Washington, DC. In short, these “Family” politicians are, at best, enablers of genocide against homosexuals in Africa. At worst? We can only speculate, but ask yourself these questions:
Do you want prominent American politicians involved in a secretive organization whose primary mission is to spread the message that Jesus Christ wasn’t about loving people and forgiveness, but was instead preaching about obtaining power for Christian rulers? Rulers who would make life and death decisions regarding the fate of millions based on their own interpretation of that message? Hell, do you really want our politicians acting as missionaries for one tiny but influential and powerful sect of Right Wing Fundamentalist Christians? And using US tax payer dollars to further that goal?
I can tell you how the gay people in Uganda would answer that question today.
