By the way, regarding the National Prayer Breakfast, that was founded by The Family, it would be wise to hear Jesus on this subject:
And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you , They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6:5-6)
It would be naive to think that The Family and its allies don't have a great deal of direct and indirect political sway both in the U.S. and most likely in other parts of the world as well.
Implications of groups like The Family for LGBT rights should become obvious and that's why, whether or not homophobic professing Christians are associated with this group or not, they are certainly on the same page as is this group and what it seems to represent, certainly regarding Gay civil rights, and many people in positions of political power are certainly influenced by the values of this group, as explicated in this interview!
All too often we have seen Christianity represented by mere thugs, often with smug, self-righteous, and sanitized rhetoric, who link what they call "Christianity" with Americanism, jingoism, capitalism, and militarism! And the gullible among us (and there are a lot of them) buy into this perversion hook, line, and sinker!
(In this connection, you might be interested in an article that I wrote concerning the enmeshment of most of the institutional Church with the Power Elite that is comprised of those who have positions in the highest places of the corporate, political, and military worlds, entitled, It's Not About Issues.)
When professing Christians seek to deny civil rights to others; when they seek to deny universal health care to others; when they transform the Gospel of grace (God's unmerited favor) into the worship of power; when they affirm or don't speak out against unjust wars; when they transform faith (trusting God over and above seen circumstances) into their own political machinations; when they demonize and bear false witness against Gay people; when their values are given credibility by others, whether or not they know of this group and those with whom they are directly or indirectly allied, the precipitous deterioration of our country and of the global community is certainly seen and is certain to even further deteriorate as time goes on.
That's one of the reasons I've always felt that the separation of Church and State is a myth in America, the very essence of "Christianity" has been perverted by ignorant and/or mendacious thugs, and I have long stated that LGBT people are the current canaries in the mine-shaft of society!
The way LGBT people are horribly treated; the way they and their love and sexuality and gender expression are denied dignity and equality that accrue to heterosexual citizens and citizens who can easily be compartmentalized into constructed binary boxes, shows those with eyes to see the poison gas emanating from those who would pervert Christianity, and all decency, to be in accord with their own prejudices.
Just one example: No other minority group would be allowed to suffer the indignity of having their civil rights be put up to a vote of the electorate! What do you think would be the result if a group sought to put on the ballot that African-Americans could no longer enter through the front doors of any public buildings? There would be justifiable outrage expressed, and it would come from virtually all quarters. However, when it comes to Gay people, the rules, rationalizations, and "justifications" become different, for some reason!
As I wrote above, no other minority group would allow itself to suffer the indignity of having its civil rights be put up to popular vote! This fact shows how the poison gas of others' ignorance and/or hatefulness and/or quest for political and "moral" hegemony in the name of "Christianity" has even influenced so many LGBT people!
This is a brief excerpt of the interview, an interview that I strongly urge you to read in its entirety:
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.
Now, he is not a neo-Nazi. What he is doing there is he's fetishizing strength. He is not looking to democracy, but this model of absolute strength, and that leads The Family into relationships with men like Museveni in Uganda. Before him, their key man for Africa was a guy named Siad Barre of Somalia, for whom Chuck Grassley became a kind of defacto lobbyist as the United States pumped up his military, which he then used to absolutely destroy his country to such an effect that Somalia has never recovered and today is a haven for al-Qaida, for terrorism, for piracy. It's a lawless nation. The Family says that's part of God's plan.
[For the full interview, see here.]
[Now, also please read The Secret Political Reach of "The Family".]
For a ten minute interview by Thom Hartmann with Jeff Sharlet about The Family, please seen the following video:
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