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Friday, July 31, 2009

This Sam is no Uncle of mine

brownback1018.jpg picture by colincurtisksMany of us at Everyday Citizen have been keeping you up to date on all the C street news, as we get it. On Sunday, Sarah posted about Kansas Rep Jerry Moran. On Monday, I postedabout my interview with Jeff Sharlet, author of The Familyand what he told me about Kansas Congressman Todd Tiahrt and his involvement in the Conservative Cult know as "The Family". One of the more well known Kansas elected officials believed to be involved with "The Family" is Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, who happens to also be running for Kansas Governor in 2010.

Through out my interview with Jeff Sharlet, one Kansas elected official came up substantially more than the others, Sen. Sam Brownback.

Sam Brownback out there (in Kansas) is one of the politicians who I would say is more intimately involved than most and I think has a bit of a leadership role.

Since the controversy about C Street has emerged many politicians involved would like the public to believe that it is simply a group of people coming together with a common religious believe, however Jeff told me a different story.

The Bible is not the main purpose of the organization; never has been. You can look through 600 boxes of documents, they're public anyone can see them. Very few of them have to do with Bible study that is not what this group is designed to do. From the very first day when the formed the group in Seattle in 1935, it was because they wanted to break the bind of organized labor, they thought "The New Deal" was a devilish type of thing. So nineteen leading businessmen in Seattle got together and said we need one of us to run for office, and everyone else will put their money behind them. That's the kind of work they've always been doing.

These "C Streeter's" travel around the world on "The Family" dime, doing lobbying work. A lot of times the Bible studies don't even involve the Bible. I wanted to ask Sen. Brownback about some of the Bible verses he uses to justify is position against homosexuality. When I asked him about it, he just looked at me with a blank stare. He didn't know what those verses were, he said Jesus had just laid it on his heart personally. Someone laid it on his heart, because when I interviewed his parent's back in Kansas they said they had no idea where he had gotten that from.

So what you really see is these powerful guys getting together talking about their personal issues and political issues, someone may quote a word from the Bible sometimes but in the meetings I sat in on, I sat in on a meeting with Ed Meese, the Bible was never opened.

KillingTheBuddha.com, winner of an Utne/Alternative Press Award, which in 2004 led to a book coauthored with Peter Manseau, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible. In 2006, Jeff Sharlet wrote an article in Rolling Stone on Sen. Brownback. In the article, Sharlet sheds some light on what Sen. Brownback is really after.

After little more than a decade in Washington, Brownback has managed to position himself at the very center of the Christian conservative uprising that is transforming American politics. Just six years ago, winning the evangelical vote required only a veneer of bland normalcy, nothing more than George Bush's vague assurance that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. Now, Brownback seeks something far more radical: not faith-based politics but faith in place of politics. In his dream America, the one he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise, the state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security, welfare -- will be privatized or simply done away with. There will be no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church will take care of all.

Brownback believes that every spiritual path has its own unique scent, and he wants to inhale them all. When he ran for the House he was a Methodist. By the time he ran for the Senate he was an evangelical. Now he has become a Catholic. He was baptized not in a church but in a chapel tucked between lobbyists' offices on K Street that is run by Opus Dei, the secretive lay order founded by a Catholic priest who advocated "holy coercion" and considered Spanish dictator Francisco Franco an ideal of worldly power. Brownback also studies Torah with an orthodox rabbi from Brooklyn. "Deep," says the rabbi, Nosson Scherman. Lately, Brownback has been reading the Koran, but he doesn't like what he's finding.

Brownback turned the position into a platform for a high-profile war against gay marriage, porn and abortion. Casting Bush and the Republican leadership as soft and muddled, he regularly turns sleepy hearings into platforms for his vision of America, inviting a parade of angry witnesses to denounce the "homosexual agenda," "bestiality" and "murder."

Brownback doesn't demand that everyone believe in his God -- only that they bow down before Him.

In my interview with Sharlet, I asked him what he could tell me about Sen. Brownback and his experience with him, as well as what he really thought about Sen. Brownback after spending so much time with him.

I've spent a lot of time with Brownback, both in Washington and in Kansas. I had been wanting to go to church with Brownback in Topeka and he kept saying "no". Once Brownback discovered I had already written about "The Family" for Harper's Magizine he said I could come with him. He seemed to think that if I could just understand what he was all about I could be converted. The more I learned what he was about the more I think he's very sincere about his politics but I think he is very clueless in his understanding of Democracy.
During our talk about Sen. Brownback, Sharlet also revealed to me another Kansan connected to "The Family" back some time ago. Sen. Frank Carlson, also known as "The no deal dealer".
I asked Brownback about his connection to Carlson (Sen. Frank Carlson). Early on in his (Brownback's) career in politics he drove out to Sen. Carlson's house in, I believe, Concordia, KS and sat with the old Senator on the porch and asked him about his religious work over the years and modeled himself after that.
Most the media attention lately has seemed to be focused on Congressman Tood Tiahrt (partially because of his asking of what if Obama's mother had had an abortion on the House floor) and even Kansas Rep. Jerry Moran has been linked to the scandal. Sen. Brownback has managed to not have to speak on this much and I think it is time we start asking him about his true involvement with "The Family" and not let a conservative cult take over Kansas in the next election cycle.

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