Influential Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote an excellent column today, calling on Rick Warren and other evangelicals to do more to stop Uganda’s heinous Anti-Homosexuality Bill. According to Parker:
The proposed law is a case study in the unintended consequences of moral colonialism….If we (Rick Warren) decide that genocide is too political for interference, then what good is moral leadership?…
….Other evangelical Christians operating in Uganda are less easily excused from responsibility in the country’s increasingly hostile attitudes toward gays. Often cited as having stirred the pot are pastors Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer, who last March worked with Ugandan faith leaders and politicians to help stop the “homosexualization” of the country….
…In a “Meet the Press” interview last November, Warren said he never takes sides, but one wishes he would. To borrow his own words, it is in certain cases extreme, unjust and un-Christian not to.
Parker is correct to say that Warren and other evangelicals have not done enough, considering their deep involvement in Uganda. At Truth Wins Out, we warmly welcomed Warren’s denunciation of the hate bill, however, that was merely covering his behind.
If Warren and others (Alan Chambers, James Inhofe, and Doug Coe – I mean you) are serious about stopping the persecution, imprisonment and murder of innocent people, they will board planes to Kampala this week and speak directly to the people and lawmakers of Uganda. They helped cause this horrific mess, so it is their duty to clean it up.
I just checked Orbitz and confirmed that flights still fly to Kampala. Will any evangelical butts fill the seats? Or, do they only light fires in places like Uganda and then butt out when there is too much heat in the kitchen?
The world is watching….and these “moral leaders” will be judged by their action — or inaction.
For more than 50 years, the National Prayer Breakfast has served as a prime networking event in Washington, bringing together the president, members of Congress, foreign diplomats and thousands of religious, business and military leaders for scrambled eggs and supplication.
Usually, the annual event passes with little notice. But this year, an ethics group in Washington has asked President Obama and Congressional leaders to stay away from the breakfast, on Thursday. Religious and gay rights groups have organized competing prayer events in 17 cities, and protesters are picketing in Washington and Boston.
The objections are focused on the sponsor of the breakfast, a secretive evangelical Christian network called The Fellowship, also known as The Family, and accusations that it has ties to legislation in Uganda that calls for the imprisonment and execution of homosexuals.
The Family has always stayed intentionally in the background, according to those who have written about it. In the last year, however, it was identified as the sponsor of a residence on Capitol Hill that has served as a dormitory and meeting place for a cluster of politicians who ran into ethics problems, including Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, and Gov. Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina, both of whom have admitted to adultery.
More recently, it became public that the Family also has close ties to the Ugandan politician who has sponsored the proposed anti-gay legislation.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group, sent a letter this week to the president and Congressional leaders urging them to skip the prayer breakfast. They have also called on C-Span not to televise it this year.
Melanie Sloan, executive director of the ethics group, said: “It is a combination of the intolerance of the organization’s views, and the secrecy surrounding the organization. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be allowed to hold their breakfast; of course they should. The question is, Should American officials be lending legitimacy to it, giving their imprimatur by showing up.”
The Family has no identifiable Internet site, no office number and no official spokesman. J. Robert Hunter, a member who has spoken publicly about the group, said that it was unfair to blame the Family for the anti-gay legislation introduced by David Bahati. Mr. Hunter said that about 30 Family members, all Americans, active in Africa recently conveyed their dismay about the legislation to Ugandan politicians, including Mr. Bahati.
Mr. Hunter said the recent controversies had prompted a debate within the group about its lack of transparency. “I and quite a few others are saying we should be much more open,” he said.
Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power” (Harper Perennial, 2009) said in a telephone interview, “Here’s an organization that, in the past, has not acknowledged its own existence.”
“It’s not a sinister plot. This is their theological stance,” said Mr. Sharlet, who infiltrated the group to do research for his book. “Their leader, Doug Coe, says that the more invisible you can make your organization, the more influence it will have.”
A White House official said that Mr. Obama, like each president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, planned to attend the breakfast. Michelle Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and other cabinet members will also attend. The president will deliver remarks about “the importance of an openness to compromise,” the official said.
The official also said that the president and the State Department had spoken out strongly against the legislation in Uganda.
The breakfast, which usually features a prominent keynote speaker (past ones have included Bono, Mother Teresa and former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain), is only the most visible in several days of gatherings where the Family’s networking takes place in smaller groups. There are separate meetings for African politicians, military leaders, business people and media professionals, to name a few.
Many states also have prayer breakfasts this week, which may appear to be government-sponsored but are also mostly affiliated with the Family.
Liberal members of the clergy and gay rights leaders organized the alternative events in haste this year, calling theirs the American Prayer Hour. The will convene at places like Calvary Baptist Church in Washington; Glendale City Seventh-day Adventist Church in California; the bishop’s chapel of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, in Rochester; and Covenant Community Church in Center Point, Ala.
Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, a gay rights group, said he initiated the prayer-hour idea because many religious Americans who attend the breakfasts have no idea about the connection to the Family and the anti-gay legislation.
“They have symbolically taken the mantle of religion,” Mr. Besen said, “and I think it’s time to take it back. And the American Prayer Hour is a step in that direction.”
In a harsh rebuke of the increasingly extreme United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, a major Catholic health group backed the Senate’s health-care compromise on abortion. The Catholic Health Association said that the most important thing that Congress could do was pass a bill that would cover the nation’s uninsured.
Needless to say, the uncompromising, obstinate Bishops proclaimed the compromise “morally unacceptable.
I suppose the Bishops believe that leaving people uninsured to die in the cold in order to use health reform as a platform for abortion politics is the moral and ethical route.
The current crop of conservative Bishops appear hardhearted and clueless to the concerns of real people who desperately need help. They seem to believe that priestly polemics will solve the health care problem in this country.
“The Catholic Health Association does not represent the teaching of the Catholic Church on the non-negotiable defense of innocent life,” the conservative Catholic activist Deal Hudson said in a statement, calling the association’s move “utterly offensive.”
The difference between The Catholic Health Association and ideologues like Hudson, is that the hospitals actually deal with uninsured sick people. Well, Hudson and his ilk also deal with sick people – but in their case, a good shrink and medication is all that is needed.
Good for the Catholic Health Association for standing up to the extremists in the Catholic Church and the Republican Party.
In other Catholic News:
The Associated Press reports that two more Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland have resigned in the wake of a damning investigation into decades of church cover-up of child abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese.
The bishops, Eamonn Walsh and Ray Field, offered an apology to child-abuse victims as they announced their resignations during Christmas Mass on Friday. Priests read the statement to worshipers throughout the archdiocese, home to a quarter of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics.
In his Christmas sermon, Archbishop Martin said the church for too long had placed its self-interest above the rights of its parishioners, particularly innocent children. “It has been a painful year,” he told worshipers. “But the church today may well be a better and safer place than was the church of 25 years ago — when all looked well, but where deep shadows were kept buried.”
Of course, we know this is nonsense. Until the Catholic Church does the following, there will be abuse:
1) Allow openly gay, sexually active priests. Doing so will attract psycho-sexually healthy gay men who will not use the priesthood to hide their sexuality – and in many cases use their power to take advantage of the young and vulnerable. Out gay priests will look for age-appropriate partners.
2) Allow women into the priesthood. This would immediately break up the good old closet boys network.
3) Allow married heterosexual priests. Just as it is imperative to attract sexually mature gay people, it is just as key to attract sexually healthy heterosexuals. Having a team of immature, pent-up priests is a recipe for disaster.
Until these rule changes are made, the Vatican is just spinning us.
NEW YORK – Truth Wins Out (TWO) today urged world leaders and members of Congress to skip the National Prayer Breakfast, February 4th, in protest of ‘The Family’s (aka The Fellowship) direct role in promoting a bill that would lead to severe human rights abuses against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Uganda.
“The National Prayer Breakfast is giving legitimacy to those who promote barbarism in the name of the Bible,” said TWO’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “We hope that world leaders who care about human rights will reconsider attending this year’s breakfast. To say grace with the people pushing this hateful and dehumanizing bill in Uganda would be disgraceful.”
On National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed author Jeff Sharlet (pictured), whose book, “The Family”, is a groundbreaking expose on the clandestine group in charge of the National Prayer Breakfast. On the program, Sharlet revealed a “smoking gun”, tying The Family directly to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009, which threatens liberty and life for all GLBT people living in Uganda. Here is the key part of the transcript:
GROSS: So you’re reporting the story for the first time today, and you found this story – this direct connection between The Family and the proposed [Uganda anti-gay hate] legislation by following the money?
SHARLET: Yes, it’s – I always say that the family is secretive, but not secret. You can go and look at 990s, tax forms and follow the money through these organizations that The Family describe as invisible. But you go and you look. You follow that money. You look at their archives. You do interviews where you can. It’s not so invisible anymore. So that’s how working with some research colleagues 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, and 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.
GROSS: So how did you find out that Bahati is directly connected to The Family? You’ve described him as a core member of The Family. And this is the person who introduced the anti-gay legislation in Uganda that calls for the death penalty for some gay people.
SHARLET: Looking at the, The Family’s 990s, where they’re moving their money to – into this African leadership academy called Cornerstone, which runs two programs: Youth Corps, which has described its in the past as an international quote, “invisible family binding together world leaders,” and also, an alumni organization designed to place Cornerstone grads – graduates of this sort of very elite educational program and politics and NGO’s through something called the African Youth Leadership Forum, which is run by -according to Ugandan media – David Bahati, this same legislator who introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Act.
“It is unconscionable to pray with a group that is actively preying on innocent people in Uganda, just because of their sexual orientation,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “We call on all world leaders who care about human rights to opt out of this year’s National Prayer Breakfast. No one should break bread with a group that is breaking the bones and spirits of gay and lesbian people.”
Earlier this month, four members of Congress wrote a powerful letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to express alarm over the proposed law in Uganda.
“This egregious bill represents one of the most extreme anti-equality measures ever proposed in any country and would create a legal pretext for depriving lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Ugandans of their liberty, and even their lives,” said the bipartisan letter, signed by Reps. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc., Pictured), Gary Ackerman (D-NY), Howard Berman (D-Calif.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.). “Particularly given the United States’ substantial contribution to Uganda through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), we believe swift action is necessary to ensure Ugandan leaders understand this bill is wholly unacceptable and antithetical to democratic values.”
The United States embassy in Uganda also spoke out against the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009, calling it a major setback in the promotion of human rights.
“If adopted, a bill further criminalizing homosexuality would constitute a significant step backwards for the protection of human rights in Uganda,” the embassy’s public affairs officer Joann Lockard said in an email. “We urge states to take all necessary measures to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests, or detention.”
Truth Wins Out is a non-profit organization that counters anti-gay misinformation, fights religious extremism exposes the “ex-gay” myth and educates America about the lives of GLBT people.
Additional coverage: The Family’s Sen. Ensign Scandal and cover-up
In March, American anti-gay activists traveled to Uganda for a conference that pledged to “wipe out” homosexuality. Seven months later, a draconian bill has been introduced that pledges to make good on this threat. The “Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009” is so severe that it is designed to shred the spirit and suffocate the soul of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Ugandans. If it passes, Uganda will become a predator state that actively hunts down GLBT people to destroy them.
Uganda already punished gay intimacy with life in prison. But, apparently that was not harsh enough, with this bill penalizing anyone who “attempts to commit the offence” with up to seven years in jail. Additionally, a person charged will be forced to undergo an invasive medical examination to determine their HIV status. If the detainees are found to be HIV+, they may be executed.
This barbaric legislation stifles free speech by threatening anyone who is accused of “promoting” homosexuality with five to seven year prison sentences. Snitching on gay friends and family members is strongly encouraged because “failure to disclose the ‘offence’ within 24 hours of knowledge makes somebody liable to a fine or imprisonment of up to three years.”
Sadly, this witch-hunt has the blood stained fingerprints of leading American evangelicals. The Fellowship, (aka The Family) one of America’s most powerful and secretive fundamentalist organization’s, converted Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni (pictured top) to its anti-gay brand of Christianity, which is the “intellectual” impetus behind the anti-gay crackdown. The clandestine organization’s leader, Doug Coe, calls Museveni The Fellowship’s “key man” in Africa. Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Family”, writes of the African strongman’s conversion:
“So,” Doug Coe told us, “my friend said to the president, ‘why don’t you come and pray with me in America? I have a good group of friends—senators, congressmen—who I like to pray with, and they’d like to pray with you.’ And that president came to the Cedars (a religious retreat), and he met Jesus. And his name is Yoweri Museveni…And he is a good friend of the Family.”
