"C Street" Cabal of Anti-Democracy Fundamentalist Senators and Reps Wouldn't Turn Over Child Rapist Among Them to Police?

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

By Mark Karlin

Kudos to Rachel Maddow for latching on to the captivating and chilling story about not just the lascivious and potentially illegal activities of some of the "C Street" Family, but -- more importantly -- focusing on their belief that they are chosen by God to lead and infiltrate our governnment.

And she hasn't stopped pursuing this startling story, defying the normal news cycle of a nano-second of coverage unless it's Michael Jackson's death or a blonde white girl disappearing in Aruba.

What gets lost in the disgusting details of Ensign's adulterous affair, Mark Sanford's (an associate member of the Family) lust for an Argentine, and former Congressman Chip Pickering's adulterous bonking on-site at the C Street "Christian fellowship house" is something that Maddow has repeatedly come back to: these men don't believe they are responsible to moral or governmental laws. If they deviate from the "righteous path," God is only testing their strength, because they are the ones divinely chosen to lead -- and it is weakness to succumb to remorse about one's "misbehavior."  That is why Mark Sanford said he won't resign and compared himself to King David, who slept adulterously with Bathsheba and then had her husband killed.

The low-key author, Jeff Sharlet, of "The Family:The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" is a credible chronicler of this cabal that is like a dagger in democracy.  He writes:

Family leaders consider their political network to be Christ's avant garde, an elite that transcends not just conventional morality but also earthly laws regulating lobbying. In the Family's early days, they debated registering as "a lobby for God's Kingdom." Instead, founder Abraham Vereide decided that the group could be more effective by working personally with politicians. "The more invisible you can make your organization," Vereide's successor, current leader Doug Coe preaches, "the more influence you can have." That's true -- which is why we have laws requiring lobbyists to identify themselves as such.

But David Coe, Doug Coe's son and heir apparent, calls himself simply a friend to men such as John Ensign, whom he guided through the coverup of his affair. I met the younger Coe when I lived for several weeks as a member of the Family. He's a surprising source of counsel, spiritual or otherwise. Attempting to explain what it means to be chosen for leadership like King David was -- or Mark Sanford, according to his own estimate -- he asked a young man who'd put himself, body and soul, under the Family's authority, "Let's say I hear you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?" The man guessed that Coe would probably think that he was a monster. "No," answered Coe, "I wouldn't." Why? Because, as a member of the Family, he's among what Family leaders refer to as the "new chosen." If you're chosen, the normal rules don't apply.

Yes, you read that right, the son of Doug Coe, the "spiritual leader" of the Family and his heir apparent, would consider a Family member raping a child a test of the member's choseness and to be resolved inside of the fellowship, without reporting it to the law authorities, it appears.

This is how dangerous they are. They apparently believe even child rape is something that God wants them to keep secret amongst themselves!

And the heroes held up for the Family are the likes of great tyrants as Sharlet writes:

If the Family men who stood over John Ensign as he wrote a baldly insincere breakup letter to his mistress were naive about hearts that want what they want, they don't claim ignorance about the strongmen with whom they build bonds of prayer and foreign aid. They admire them. Counseling Rep. Tiahrt, Doug Coe offered Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden as men whose commitment to their causes is to be emulated. Preaching on the meaning of Christ's words, he says, "You know Jesus said 'You got to put Him before mother-father-brother sister? Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that's what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn't murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom."

Sen. Ensign, facing calls for an investigation of what may have been felony abuses of campaign funds in his attempt to cover up his affair, might not get there. Then again, the Family's preview of a "new kingdom" -- a private club of men protecting one another's secrets -- doesn't sound so different from the old kingdom. That's the awful secret behind the closed doors of the C Street House, the Family's authoritarian rhetoric, and even the Family's real mission: business as usual, fortified by faith in more power for the powerful and privilege itself a form of piety.

The Family on C Street includes Dr. Tom "Execute Abortionists" Coburn who grilled Sonya Sotomayor during her Judiciary Committee hearings -- and who counseled Ensign on his ongoing adulterous affair with a staffer who is the wife of another staffer.

These are dangerous men to the Republic.  They think that they are members of some modern Skull and Bones of Sparta, selected by God to inflict a deranged "Christian" government upon the democracy of America -- and for whom immorality and breaking the law are only acts in which God is testing them -- and for which they hold no public responsiblity in their hearts and minds.

Keeping secret one of the members who might admit to child rape!

God help us all -- but not their God, who is merely a monstrous, self-serving excuse in their own minds for evading the laws, ethics, and responsibilities of living a civilized and legal life.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (July, 2009 Paperback Edition). Available by clicking here from BuzzFlash.com

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