Hillary's Ties to Religious Fundamentalists (the "Fellowship," aka the Family)

[Leo 9]

Hillary's Ties to Religious Fundamentalists

By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbaraehrenreich.com. Posted March 20, 2008.


When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, Hillary Clinton is a lot more vulnerable than Barack Obama.

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 right-wing 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:

snip

http://www.alternet.org/election08/80248/

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. Cells!?!

:scared:

[EmperorHasNoClothes]

2. "The Family??"

Do they wear white tennis shoes? Creepy.

[anonymous171]

3. She wouldn't pray with Wright or the anyone from the TUCC (a very liberal church)

But she will pray with the likes of Santorum. That explains a lot.

[Leo 9]

11. Clinton Bashes Rev. Wright, Worships With Nazis?

Clinton Bashes Rev. Wright, Worships With Nazis?

Posted Mar 28th 2008 3:11PM by Alexis Stodghill
Filed under: BlackSpin, Elections, Hillary Clinton


By Alexis Stodghill, BlackVoices.com



Obama is being harshly criticized for having a pastor who holds challenging views on race in America. Hillary Clinton has used this moment to express her religious views, chiming in: " would not have been my pastor. You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

Interestingly enough, a story has broken about the type of "church" Hillary Clinton does choose to attend: an organization cultivated in an open quest for power with a controversial history, an un-Democratic modus operandi and ties to destructive political regimes. These facts will be explained in detail in 'The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,' by Jeff Sharlet to be published in May.

Columnist Barbara Ehrenreich reports that Hillary seeks spiritual guidance by worshiping with The Family, "a collection of powerful right-wing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe and Rick Santorum." During the 1940s this religious organization "reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that exemplary leader, Adolf Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of murderous thugs."

Interesting. To quote Ehrenreich further:

The Family avoids the word Christian but worships 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

snip

http://www.blackvoices.com/blogs/2008/03/28/clinton-bashes-rev-wright-worships-with-nazis/

[City Lights]

4. K&R

[Cheap_Trick]

5. additional reading

from The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/ehrenreich

and Mother Jones
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillary...

>snip<
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. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. "A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation," says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. "I don't....there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer."

>snip<

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.

>snip<

The Fellowship's long-term goal is "a leadership led by God—leaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit." According to the Fellowship's archives, the spirit has in the past led its members in Congress to increase U.S. support for the Duvalier regime in Haiti and the Park dictatorship in South Korea. The Fellowship's God-led men have also included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators. Clinton, says Schenck, has become a regular visitor to Coe's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, a former convent where Coe provides members of Congress with sex-segregated housing and spiritual guidance.

>snip<

Throughout her time at the White House, Clinton writes in Living History, she took solace from "daily scriptures" sent to her by her Fellowship prayer cell, along with Coe's assurances that she was right where God wanted her. (Clinton's sense of divine guidance has been noted by others: Bishop Richard Wilke, who presided over the United Methodist Church of Arkansas during her years in Little Rock, told us, "If I asked Hillary, 'What does the Lord want you to do?' she would say, 'I think I'm called by the Lord to be in public service at whatever level he wants me.'")

>snip<

These days, Clinton has graduated from the political wives' group into what may be Coe's most elite cell, the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast. Though weighted Republican, the breakfast—regularly attended by about 40 members—is a bipartisan opportunity for politicians to burnish their reputations, giving Clinton the chance to profess her faith with men such as Brownback as well as the twin terrors of Oklahoma, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, and, until recently, former Senator George Allen (R-Va.). Democrats in the group include Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, who told us that the separation of church and state has gone too far; Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) is also a regular.

>snip<

Clinton has championed federal funding of faith-based social services, which she embraced years before George W. Bush did; Marci Hamilton, author of God vs. the Gavel, says that the Clintons' approach to faith-based initiatives "set the stage for Bush." Clinton has also long supported the Defense of Marriage Act, a measure that has become a purity test for any candidate wishing to avoid war with the Christian right.

>snip<

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, Sharlet joined The Family's home for young men, forswearing 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.

>snip<

At the heart of The Family's American branch is a collection of powerful right-wing 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.

>snip<

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.

>snip<

Sharlet generously attributes Clinton's involvement to the under-appreciated depth of her religiosity, but he himself struggles to define The Family's theological underpinnings. The Family avoids the word Christian but worships 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."

[juno jones]

8. More reading: Jeff Sharlet

http://jeffsharlet.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-post.html

There are links there to a number of other articles by Sharlet.


If she's going there for political and social reasons, her feminist base had better insist she remove herself, the tenets of this philosophy are not at all benign. If she's there because she actually believes in this stuff, then God help us all.

[Leo 9]

18. Jeff Sharlet, The Family, 2008

Sunday, February 3, 2008
Jeff Sharlet, The Family, 2008



"Just when we thought the Christian right was crumbling, Jeff Sharlet delivers a rude shock: One of its most powerful and cult-like core groups, the Family, has been thriving. Sharlet's book is one of the most compelling and brilliantly researched exposes you'll ever read -- just don't read it alone at night!"
--Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch, and Dancing in the Streets

From the bookjacket:

They are the Family—fundamentalism’s avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen, congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a “leadership led by God,” to be won not by force but through “quiet diplomacy.” Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have written from inside its walls.

The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the Far Right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a “family” that thrives to this day. In public, they host prayer breakfasts; in private they preach a gospel of “biblical capitalism,” military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao, the Family's leader declares, "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."

Sharlet’s discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the Cold War, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not “What do fundamentalists want?” but “What have they already done?”

snip

http://jeffsharlet.blogspot.com/2008/02/blog-post.html

[Leo 9]

10. Thanks for the additional reading,

both here and in this other thread...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x5299288

[Leo 9]

14. Hillary's Minister Problem (Joshua Green; theatlantic.com)

Wednesday, 03.26.08

Hillary's Minister Problem


Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Barack Obama isn't the only candidate with ties to a controversial religious group.


Since Hillary Clinton has launched a frontal attack on her opponent's church and pastor, it's worth noting that she has some odd religious ties of her own. When I was profiling her two years ago, I learned about her involvement with a secretive Christian organization called The Fellowship that has operated in the Washington shadows since the 1930s. I found the story of Clinton and The Fellowship so bizarre that I made it the lede to my piece. In light of recent events, it's worth revisiting.


If you've never heard of The Fellowship (also known as The Family), it will sound like some shadowy organization in a John Grisham novel. (Indeed, as a Google search will demonstrate, critics consider it a cult.) The group was formed in the 1930s to minister to political and business leaders throughout the world, modeling itself as a kind of Christian Trilateral Commission. Several members of Congress are affiliated with the group, mostly Republicans, but some Democrats, too. To the extent The Fellowship is known beyond its members it is probably for founding the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington.

snip

In my piece, I chose to focus on the Senate prayer group, but others have written extensively about the strangeness and secrecy of The Fellowship. As this Los Angeles Times story and this exquisitely reported Harper's piece make clear, there is something deeply strange about the group. They certainly do not like press coverage, so in that regard Clinton's attraction might make sense. Reporters hoping to look into the group might want to think again. A few years ago, The Fellowship’s archives, which are held at Wheaton College, the evangelical school in Illinos, were reclassified as “restricted” and placed under lock and key.

— Joshua Green

snip

http://thecurrent.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/clinton-fellowship.php

[Leo 9]

15. MSNBC Opens The Door On Hillary's Participation In The Family

Headlined on 3/26/08:
MSNBC Opens The Door On Hillary's Participation In The Family

by Steve Brant

http://www.opednews.com


Shortly before 2 p.m. Eastern today, Andrea Mitchell interviewed Joshua Green of The Atlantic regarding Hillary Clinton's participation in The Fellowship (a/k/a The Family). You can read my opinion of Hillary's participation in this organization (including links to background articles in Harpers in early 2003 and Mother Jones in late 2007) in my earlier post on this subject.

I am posting this follow up to acknowledge MSNBC for cracking open the door on this vastly under-reported subject and Joshua Green for his new reporting on the subject in The Atlantic. Here's how his report ends...

In my piece, I chose to focus on the Senate prayer group, but others have written extensively about the strangeness and secrecy of The Fellowship. As this Los Angeles Times story and this exquisitely reported Harper's piece make clear, there is something deeply strange about the group. They certainly do not like press coverage, so in that regard Clinton's attraction might make sense. Reporters hoping to look into the group might want to think again. A few years ago, The Fellowship's archives, which are held at Wheaton College, the evangelical school in Illinois, were reclassified as "restricted" and placed under lock and key.

You can watch his interview with Andrea Mitchell below. The most telling point for me was when Andrea said "... clearly she is involved in a religious organization that is much more right wing that she (pause) claims to be

snip

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_steve_br_080326_msnbc_opens_the_door.htm

[Leo 9]

16. Say Hillary, What About The Religious "Family" You Have Chosen To Be Part Of? (by Steve Brant )

March 26, 2008 at 09:33:15


Say Hillary, What About The Religious "Family" You Have Chosen To Be Part Of?


by Steve Brant

http://www.opednews.com



"You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend." said Hillary Clinton, to reporters and editors of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on Tuesday the 25th.

This is an interesting choice of words, since - while we mostly hear about her Methodist upbringing - Hillary Clinton has chosen to associate herself with The Family (also known as the Fellowship), a very conservative, fundamentalist organization started by Abraham Vereide...

"...an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the Far Right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a "family" that thrives to this day. In public, they host prayer breakfasts; in private they preach a gospel of "biblical capitalism," military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao, Doug Coe, the Family's current leader, declares, "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."

This quote is taken from the book on The Family by the same name which will be published in May... a book which claims to

"...dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the Cold War, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not "What do fundamentalists want?" but "What have they already done?"

snip

Is it possible that Hillary's participation in this fundamentalist group - which apparently preaches the "gospel of military might" - would help explain her vote in favor of authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq? Is it possible her pro-NAFTA stance during her husband's administration comes from its embrace of "the no-holds-barred economics of globalization"? Is it possible that the sense some get that Hillary feels entitled to be president comes in part from this group's belief that "it's only the elites who matter"?

snip

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_steve_br_080326_say_hillary_2c_what_ab.htm

[Moochy]

6. Where the Elites Meet to plan our Defeat!!

Elites that prey together pray together!

[Hope And Change]

7. Thanks for posting.Really scary stuff...

[leveymg]

9. Bush, Elder also associated with the Fellowship.

Interesting choice of words by Poppy. Said more than he intended, perhaps? http://chasevectors.blogspot.com/2008/03/fellowship.html

At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, George H.W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what he described as “quiet diplomacy, I wouldn't say secret diplomacy,” as an “ambassador of faith.”

Coe has visited nearly every world capital, often with congressmen at his side, “making friends” and inviting them back to the Family's unofficial headquarters, a mansion (just down the road from Ivanwald) that the Family bought in 1978 with $1.5 million donated by, among others, Tom Phillips, then the C.E.O. of arms manufacturer Raytheon, and Ken Olsen, the founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation. A waterfall has been carved into the mansion's broad lawn, from which a bronze bald eagle watches over the Potomac River. The mansion is white and pillared and surrounded by magnolias, and by red trees that do not so much tower above it as whisper.

The mansion is named for these trees; it is called The Cedars, and Family members speak of it as a person. “The Cedars has a heart for the poor,” they like to say. By “poor” they mean not the thousands of literal poor living barely a mile away but rather the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom: the senators, generals, and prime ministers who coast to the end of Twenty-fourth Street in Arlington in black limousines and town cars and hulking S.U.V.'s to meet one another, to meet Jesus, to pay homage to the god of The Cedars.

There they forge “relationships” beyond the din of vox populi (the Family's leaders consider democracy a manifestation of ungodly pride) and “throw away religion” in favor of the truths of the Family. Declaring God's covenant with the Jews broken, the group's core members call themselves “the new chosen.”

A cell, indeed.

[FrenchieCat]

12. More....

what may startle people, including her supporters, is that the group she has associated herself with since 1993 which sponsors these groups as well as the National Prayer Breakfast is very conservative and exclusive. Known now as the Fellowship, it is a group that reporter Sharlet knows very well given his past investigative pieces in Harper's Magazine several years ago, and a Rolling Stone piece about Sam Brownback in 2006. Digby has written about this group as well. Even though Mother Jones will not post the piece online until Tuesday, I have been given permission to post segments of the piece in the extended entry. I encourage all of you to buy the current issue and read the piece for yourselves, because Hillary’s association with the Fellowship may lead some to question her judgment and true beliefs, given what the group stands for. http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/010937.php

Hotline-- Sept 2006

Hillary Clinton: The Faith Angle

Hillary Clinton’s hiring of “faith guru” Burns Strider as an adviser to her presumptive presidential campaign, reported two days ago in the Hotline, draws some rare attention to Clinton’s religiosity, as yet unexamined in the same way that ’08 heavyweights like Mitt Romney and, through his high-profile meeting with Pastor Rick Warren, Barack Obama have been.

In Clinton’s case, there’s plenty to examine: religion seems to be the only part of her life that hasn’t undergone rigorous scrutiny.

Though Strider, as a onetime staff member for Nancy Pelosi, is squarely in the liberal camp, Clinton is part of not one, but two, prayers groups with distinctly conservative bents: an exclusive Senate prayer group that meets on Wednesday mornings, and a women’s prayer group that she’s been a part of since her early White House days. The women’s group is run by Holly Leachman, a layperson at the McLean Bible Church in Virginia, itself magnet for prominent conservatives, including former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Republican senators John Thune and James Inhofe, as well as several Bush staffers and their families.

Leach's prayer group includes many prominent Republican wives, among them Susan Baker, wife of Iraq Study Group co-chairman James Baker, who along with Leachman ministered to Hillary Clinton in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. (Leachman, mentioned briefly in Clinton’s memoir, Living History, is the wife of Washington Redskins chaplain Jerry Leachman).
http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2006/12/hillary_clinton_4.html

Most of the prayer groups are informally affiliated with a secretive Christian organization called the Fellowship, established in the 1930s by a Methodist evangelist named Abraham Vereide, whose great hope was to preach the word of Jesus to political and business leaders throughout the world. Vereide believed that the best way to change the powerful was through discreet personal ministry, and over his lifetime he succeeded to a remarkable degree. The first Senate prayer group met over breakfast in 1943; a decade later one of its members, Senator Frank Carlson, persuaded Dwight Eisenhower to host a Presidential Prayer Breakfast, which has become a tradition.
<>
Hillary Clinton’s proficiency in this innermost sanctum has unnerved some of the capital’s most exalted religious conservatives. “You’re not talking about some tree-hugging, Jesus-is-my-Buddha sort of stuff,” says David Kuo, a former Bush official in the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who worked with Clinton to promote joint legislation and who, like Brownback, has apologized to her for past misdeeds. “These are powerful evangelicals she’s meeting with.” Like many conservatives, they are caught between warring dictates of their faith: the religious one, which requires them to embrace a fellow Christian, and the political one, more powerful in some, which causes them to instinctively distrust the motives of a Clinton. Everyone in Washington experiences their dilemma at one time or another—the lack of an Archimedean point from which to judge Hillary Clinton.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200611/green-hillary

[Leo 9]

19. I'm cross-posting these to kick the threads.

Hope you don't mind. :)


Is there a chance Wright is right?

By David Sirota

Syndicated Columnist

snip

It is polite pinstriped prejudice shrouding bigotry in feigned outrage against extremism — the operative word being "feigned." After all, John McCain solicited the endorsement of John Hagee — the pastor who called the Catholic Church "a great whore." Similarly, according to Mother Jones magazine, Hillary Rodham Clinton belongs to the "Fellowship" — a secretive group "dedicated to 'spiritual war' on behalf of Christ." She is also friendly with Billy Graham, the reverend caught on tape spewing anti-Semitism. But while Wright's supposed "extremism" blankets the news, McCain's and Clinton's relationships with real extremists receive scant attention.

Why is it "controversial" for one pastor to address the black community, racism and blowback, but OK for another pastor to slander an entire religion? Why is it news that one candidate knows a sometimes-impolitic clergyman, but not news that his opponent associates with an anti-Semite? Does the double standard prove the dominant culture despises a black man confronting taboos, but accepts whites spewing hate? Does the very reaction to Wright show he's right about racism?

Clinton seems to think so. Her aides have been calling the states they believe Obama will lose their political "firewall." That's campaign-speak for "race wall" — one built with bricks like Pennsylvania and Indiana. These aren't the near-purely white states where racial politics is often muted (and Obama won). They are the slightly diverse states where racial politics simmers and where the black vote is too small to offset a motivated racist vote. This race wall is now being fortified.

ABC News reports that Clinton's campaign is "pushing the Wright story" ahead of the Pennsylvania and Indiana primaries. The crass tactic is designed to motivate the racist vote by reminding whites of Obama's connection to the African-American community. Put another way, Clinton's message has become simply: Obama Is Black.

snip

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2004313756_sirota31.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=5357139&mesg_id=5357139

[bhikkhu]

13. Another link to Barbara Ehrenreich's blog

http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/barbaras_blog/

Its not bad, fairly calm and reflective and balanced. Sometimes when you dig into the sources you find unpleasantness, but this one seems fines.

[Leo 9]

17. Hillary's Nasty Pastorate (cbsnews.com)

Hillary's Nasty Pastorate

The Nation: When It Comes To Unsavory Religious Affiliations, Clinton Is A Lot More Vulnerable Than Obama

March 21, 2008

The Nation) This column was written by Barbara Ehrenreich.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's a reason 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.

snip

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, Sharlet joined The Family's home for young men, forswearing 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.

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 right-wing 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.

snip

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/20/opinion/main3955108.shtml