As more activists call attention to the activities of The Fellowship, or The Family, the secretive fundamentalist powerhouse whose National Prayer Breakfast (NPB) is this Thursday, a group of religious leaders has launched an alternative American Prayer Hour to condemn The Family’s role in the kill-the-gays bill pending in the Ugandan parliament.
“Prayer is a good thing, and Americans ought to gather to pray, but we better be careful what we pray for,” said the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, the Ninth Bishop of New Hampshire and the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal church, speaking at the National Press Club Tuesday morning. “We have a duty to confront those who are praying for those things that would break God’s heart.”
“I call upon our president to make himself known to be in opposition not just to the death penalty but to this violation of human rights for all of God’s children in Uganda and beyond,” Robinson added.
President Obama is scheduled to speak at the NPB despite calls for him to boycott it. The religious leaders behind the American Prayer Hour are asking him to take the opportunity to speak out against homophobia and heterosexism, said Harry Knox, the Director of the Religion and Faith Program at the Human Rights Campaign, which is co-sponsoring the events. Knox is also a member of Obama’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Advisory Council (and RD’s advisory council).
Alternative prayer hours are currently scheduled in 17 cities, according to Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, which is coordinating the event.
Speakers at Tuesday morning’s launch warned that the Ugandan bill would cause a genocide of LGBT people in that nation. Moses, a gay man from Uganda seeking asylum in the United States, gave a chilling account of the harassment and terror he withstood growing up there—even before the bill, which would not only call for the death penalty and life imprisonment for LGBT people but also require friends and family to turn people suspected of being LGBT over to the authorities.
Moses, who addressed reporters with a paper bag over his head to conceal his identity, spoke of how in Uganda, “one would rather die than come out of the closet,” because LGBT people are so terrorized in a culture that portrays homosexuality as “deviant” behavior. He described being beaten at school and living in constant “fear of rejection, fear of isolation by my family, making my family a laughingstock... fear of losing friends, fear for my life.” He experienced a “constant feeling of shame,” and ultimately abandoned his studies and lost his job. LGBT people in Uganda, he said, are routinely denied housing because of fears of “spreading” their “deviant” behavior.
Moses said that he was raped by a policeman, but feared seeking medical attention because “if I told health workers they would not give me help. They would instead report me, and the next day I would hit the headlines in the newspaper.” Moses displayed lists of suspected homosexuals published in Ugandan newspapers with headlines like “Top Homos” and “Homo Terror.” People lost their jobs and received death threats as a result of their names being published, he said.
Two former evangelical powerbrokers who were familiar with The Family spoke at the press conference: Frank Schaeffer, whose father Francis Schaeffer was a key figure in the religious right, and Bishop Carlton Pearson, whose questioning of the concept of hell several years ago caused all of his evangelical friends to abandon him. (Pearson, who lived in Oklahoma at the time, started attending National Prayer Breakfasts in the 1970s, at the invitation of now-Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), a key member of The Family.)
Schaeffer condemned Doug Coe, The Family’s leader, for not publicly speaking out against the Uganda bill, adding that “it is stunning” that Obama would speak to the group. (Schaeffer has otherwise been outspoken in his support for Obama, both during the presidential campaign and since he took office.)
Jeff Sharlet has shown that the member of the Ugandan parliament who introduced the bill, David Bahati, is deeply involved in The Family, telling NPR last year:
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.
Pearson described The Family’s agenda as “to Christianize the world.” He said Coe was “like an icon to us... in the same category as Pat Roberston, Billy Graham... supposed to be a great man of God... it’s frightening now, when I look at it from the other perspective, what was going on: to gain power and become intoxicated by it.”
Sharlet has described how The Family sees Jesus as a “strong man” and seeks to emulate that. “Jesus was the strongest man of all, and if he was alive today, he’d be the greatest quarterback, he'd be the number one CEO, he’d be the head of General Electric. When you live in The Family, they sit around and wonder how awesome Jesus would be if he raced NASCAR,” Sharlet told me in 2008.
This morning, Robinson said, “you can talk about Jesus all day, but if you are not doing what Jesus would have you do, then it matters not. God save us from admirers of Jesus.”
Tags: american prayer hour, carlton pearson, gene robinson, harry knox, jeff sharlet, lgbt, lgbt rights, national prayer breakfast, the family, uganda, uganda anti-gay law
I hope he does thim.
Everyone has a right to their sexual preference and government should uphold those rights, where they don't infringe the rights of others.
Churches have the right to uphold their beliefs within their own sanctuaries but that should not become an all inclusive rule for the rest of the world.
It's not right for any group to force their beliefs on someone else!
If churches make it uncomfortable for gays and lesbians to be there (and they will because in their minds, same-sex relationships are a sin)- gays and lesbians can start their own churches. Afterall, if you want to worship God, He is freely accessible to everyone.
It appears to me that these arguments are simply both sides wanting their own way, regardless of who it hurts. This is neither love nor freedom!
Obviously, the idea that these guys have a role in shaping brutal policies in other countries is bad enough.
But this is really about something much bigger than "religious beliefs". This is really about power-hungry people who are a clear and present danger to our democracy. This is something all Americans should be very alert to.
These people are a danger because they have a following. Why is that? What went wrong?
The demoncratic law that America was founded upon no longer exists. Political-correctness is running everything now.
You can't call a spade a spade anymore because some group is likely to get their feelings hurt, take you to court and get the laws altered. The more it's altered the more unbalanced society seems to become!
Was your typo a Freudian slip or simply a mistake?
The C Street "Family" or The Fellowship, which purports to be a "Christian" organization, has been exposed by Jeff Sharlet in his 2008 book "The Family" and on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show. Its "National Prayer Breakfasts" are a misuse of religion for hyperconservative political purposes and are designed to subvert our country's constitutional principle of church-state separation. It's past time for this outfit to be "outed" as umAmerican. -- Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty, www.arlinc.org
Sarah Posner writes: "Sharlet has described how The Family sees Jesus as a “strong man” and seeks to emulate that. “Jesus was the strongest man of all, and if he was alive today, he’d be the greatest quarterback, he'd be the number one CEO, he’d be the head of General Electric. When you live in The Family, they sit around and wonder how awesome Jesus would be if he raced NASCAR,” Sharlet told me in 2008."
I'm fairly certain that a guy who insists that he wash the feet of his disciples, who insists that rich people won't easily make it into Heaven, and who insists that the greatest people in Heaven are those who make themselves the lowest on Earth, would NEVER be a CEO.
It's page 109 of "The Secret" (by Rhonda Byrne) rearing its ugly head yet again: "If you have been brought up to believe that being wealthy is not spiritual, then I highly recommend you read The Millionaires of the Bible Series by Catherine Ponder. In these glorious books you will discover that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of."
We don't know all that much about Issac, who appears to be in the Bible mostly to will all his stuff to his younger son instead of his older son. The rest of the Old Testament Patriarchs listed above have their immense wealth explicitly stated in the Old Testament. Including Jesus in that list requires rewriting the Gospels to add in all the missing bits, such as Jesus being wealthy, Jesus teaching material world prosperity, and Jesus living an affluent life. One jar of oil in his entire lifetime for personal use is not "living affluently". He even had to make his own bread and fish, and brew his own wine.
Now, I can imagine him being a quarterback or a NASCAR racer, but he'd be well known as the quarterback who always made sure every game ended in a tie, or as the NASCAR racer (with a blank white jumpsuit and car) who always finished last (so he would be first). Probably not what "The Family" has in mind when they fantasize about Jesus.
Frankly, it is hard to imagine President Obama standing for anything. He seem to be a shallow man in his religion.I recall only one president standing uo to Billy Graham and his silliness.
Obama's promises for the gay community still remain an unfinished business, such as repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy for gays and lesbians in the military.
Deborah from dog allergies blog
Bishop Gene Robinson is quoted in the article: "I call upon our president to make himself known to be in opposition not just to the death penalty but to this violation of human rights for all of God’s children in Uganda and beyond."
The issue here isn't freedom of religion. The issue is genocide, pure and simple -- people being sentenced to death by a government purely because of who they are. It is clear that there are people in the world today who believe in the extermination of LGBT people. And then there are the myriad numbers of people here today who hide behind "freedom of religion" or other rationalizations in order to refrain from speaking out against this genocide of LGBT people. This is what happened during the reign of Nazi Germany and this sort of attitude by "good Germans" is what allowed the Holocaust to take place.
Pastor Martin Niemoller once said in 1946: "First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist; then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist; then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew; then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out."
It is time to take a firm stand and speak out against genocide.
It is genocide. Yes, precisely. Why is the president having a prayer breakfast with thosse who support genocide?
Obama made his position clear at his inauguration by promoting his homophobic friend Rick Warren. As an accommodationist, Obama is unsurpassed.
Comments closed
The comments for this story have been closed. Thank you to everyone who participated.