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Hillary's Nasty Pastorate
There's a reason why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.
You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the "Fellowship," aka The Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.
Sean Hannity has called Obama's church a "cult," but that term applies far more aptly to Clinton's "Family," which is organized into "cells" -- their term -- and operates sex-segregated group homes for young people in northern Virginia. In 2002, writer Jeff Sharlet joined the Family's home for young men, foreswearing sex, drugs, and alcohol, and participating in endless discussions of Jesus and power. He wasn't undercover; he used his own name and admitted to being a writer. But he wasn't completely out of danger either. When he went outdoors one night to make a cell phone call, he was followed. He still gets calls from Family associates asking him to meet them in diners -- alone.
The Family's most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer
Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes
on behind the scenes -- knitting together international networks of rightwing
leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family
reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that
exemplary leader, Adolph Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole
bestiary of murderous thugs. As Sharlet reported in Harper's in 2003:
During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.
At the heart of the Family's American branch is a collection of powerful rightwing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe, and Rick Santorum. They get to use the Family's spacious estate on the Potomac, the Cedars, which is maintained by young men in Family group homes and where meals are served by the Family's young women's group. And, at the Family's frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already-powerful.
Clinton fell in with the Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When she ascended to the senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, the Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."
Furthermore, the Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.
What drew Clinton into the sinister heart of the international right? Maybe it was just a phase in her tormented search for identity, marked by ever-changing hairstyles and names: Hillary Rodham, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and now Hillary Clinton. She reached out to many potential spiritual mentors during her White House days, including new age guru Marianne Williamson and the liberal Rabbi Michael Lerner. But it was the Family association that stuck.
Sharlet generously attributes Clinton's involvement to the underappreciated depth of her religiosity, but he himself struggles to define the Family's theological underpinnings. The Family avoids the word Christian but worship Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the "meek." They believe that, in mass societies, it's only the elites who matter, the political leaders who can build God's "dominion" on earth. Insofar as the Family has a consistent philosophy, it's all about power -- cultivating it, building it, and networking it together into ever-stronger units, or "cells." "We work with power where we can," Doug Coe has said, and "build new power where we can't."
Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the Trinity Unity Church of Christ. Now it's up to Clinton to explain -- or, better yet, renounce -- her longstanding connection with the fascist-leaning Family.
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But Obama has admitted attending weekly Senate prayer breakfast. Does that mean he is in the "Family" too? I am confused.
Yes, you are.
Why do we have to wait until May for this? Shouldn't it be published YESTERDAY?
Read the post at the Daily Howler for today. Most of it is concerned with Ms Ehrenreich's bona fides, or rather, her crippling lack thereof.
That's what I was trying to say! How did you get a two line comment? Are they being rationed?
More info on The Family
I am not posting 1 line comments...see dailyhowler.com for more on this article.
Seems I left something out of my previous comment!
By the way...
If this allegation is true, this is very serious. These people are a highly organized group of extremists who operate internationally. Harper's ran an article in 2003 about this group, "Jesus plus nothing: Undercover among America's secret theocrats".
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525
You have a pulpit; we don’t.
We need to get the Democratic Party in the White House if what’s left of our Republic can be saved. With all due respect, your article is going to further split the party. Obama, Clinton, they are who they are and they’ll both do fine if chosen.
This is all really fascinating, but have you noticed the media presentations lately have not included the bread and butter issues which will affect us most viscerally: the economy, the war, the borders, Nafta, etc. I did catch a TV segment of Senator Clinton giving a well-reasoned speech on Iraq, and I actually came back into the room to watch it, it was so unusual in this time, when we mostly talk about Rev. Wright, what he-said or she-said about Rev. Wright, passports, and now Clinton's prayer meetings. We are no longer discussing what matters to us most in the political scene. Many of us have strong religious feelings, and so this story is very interesting: but it's not the main event! Where IS the main event?
So the writer, Jeff Sharlet, has known of this since 2002 and has just decided to write about it 6 years later, during a candidates run for the nomination? Why? Why not release it while she was in the Senate, before she even had a chance to become a candidate.
The whole race issue etc could have been averted, there would be no split in the democratic party, money spent against each other could have gone to a national campaign and Obama would be running against McCain as we speak...
Something smells fishy about this.
I certainly hope both Jeff Sharlet and Barbara Ehrenreich have their facts all lined up along with proof positive this is actually happening.
If it is true, she's toast! If not, they're toast with zero credibility, but I'm still pissed this wasn't brought out before so any party split may have been avoided!!!!!
JackW. Maybe for the same reason Rev. Wright's 2001 speech just surfaced. It's always political isn't it. In this case, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Nothing would have avoided a split. An expose on her religious background would not have deterred her race to the white house. Nothing will stop her.
HRC: going down for the count....
seems like the right wing media is desperately determined to criticize Obama and this whole Wright thing is much to do about nothing. Sorry folks, but all Wright said is that if America is supporting the bombing of palestinians, perhaps it deserves to be damned...God is certainly not going to bless violent behavior...so what's so shocking there? Obama didn't say it. he's shuttling back and forth from d.c. on weekends, how many sermons do you think he caught in the past few yrs? stringing together a bunch of provocative comments from over 30 years of preaching is just ridiculous.
So why is the right wing pushing Hillary upon us? Because she has taken so much lobbyist money and corporate money, they figure she is one of them...and she is somewhat abrasive and will turn off more of the general electorate...they're not so sure they can beat Obama. Makes me want to see him get it. If Wright is all they can throw at him, they don't have much ammo.
That's not all he said...go back and watch the video's or dvd's.
Perhaps Clinton didn't say anything about right because she is a decent human being who wouldn't want to stoop so low as to attack a person for the religious company he keeps. But fellow females who've drunk the Obama Koolaid, on the other hand...
As the author of this piece has earned tens of thousands for writing about her impersonation of a poor person with few prospects, perhaps now would be an opportune time for her to put her poor person's hat on just more, and ask herself this question: if, by January, the world financial system has collapsed, who between the two democratic candidates still seeking the nomination would you think could get soup and blankets to the most in need fastest?
Yean, Hillary is not saying anything because she's a decent human being... Talk about drinking the Koolaid. Psst... your candidate will do ANYTHING SHE CAN GET AWAY WITH to sink Obama. ANYTHING.
Should the same intellectual and professional reporting standards be applied to Ehrenreich’s cut and paste reporting of Sharlet’s “reporting”m to the following?
Barbara Ehrenreich lives in the GOP run state of Florida (also home of Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge) , the state that couldn’t vote straight in 2000 and which threatens to divide the nation once again in 2008.
She’s of Jewish heritage, just like Joe Lieberman who accepted GOP money to get himself re-elected as an “Independent” after being rejected by Pennsylvania Democrats, supports the continued occupation of Iraq despite the lack of progress (and never mind the dead) and who has declared he will speak at the RNC convention this year.
Barbara writes for the New York Times, which famously promoted Judith Miller’s unsubstantial “reporting” on Hussein’s WMD programs, and which has recently hired the infamously wrong PNAC founding neocon William Kristol.
When is Barbara Ehrenreich going to publicly disassociate herself from her Republican and neocon connections?
See how easy that is?
Ehem - Joe Lieberman is from Connecticut, not PA. At least get that right if you don't get anything else.
Changing the subject does not erase the reality. If you want to tag Sen Obama by his associations than Hillary and McCain are fair game to receive the same treatment.
This is the best post I have seen on here ever! The parallel in logic is great!!!
I would like to hear Barbara Ehrenreich's response!
By the way I do not think Barbara is that bad but she deserves this as she now has an acute case of Obamamania as does Arianna Huffington who in normal times is also a reasonably intelligent woman. Time the country moves on from Obamamania as it is very similar to the media caving in to Bush around the time of the Iraq war and we all know how much trouble that got us into!!!
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