MSNBC's Rachel Maddow recently reported on a Christian boardinghouse in Washington that serves as a dorm, meeting and praying place for conservative Christian Republican politicians. But it seems that the occupants and members of this prayer house are busy doing a lot more than praying. According to Maddow's reports, the religious boardinghouse is also a safe haven for adulterers. But this is not the only unholy activity that has pervaded this so-called Christian establishment. According to a separate report written by Gail Collins of The New York Times the founder of the religious group that owns the boardinghouse had organized a movement of those who were united against President Roosevelt's New Deal during the Great Depression.
It is interesting to remember that the Republicans of 2009 are locked into the same old ideology of the 1930's and Richard Nixon's southern strategy of the 1970's that still exists today. Southern Republicans such as John Cornyn, Jeff Session and Lindsay Graham made this blatantly clear during their relentless grilling of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor over a statement she made about wise Latina women.
I guess we should know better than to think the old dog Republican racists, xenophobes and chicken hawks can or even want to learn new tricks. In their narrow world folks unlike them are "others" who are undeserving and should be "kept in their place." The unemployed are "lazy" and "shiftless" who deserve to be poor. Now, if a conservative right winger is out of work the blame is shifted to the evil doings of the federal government or some other entity loathed by the right.
Collins' piece includes an interesting and amusing quiz. Below are a couple of excerpts from her
Fellowship Quiz.
(One can take the entire quiz by clicking on the link above.)
The Prayer House is a Washington nickname for a rowhouse where some conservative Christian members of Congress go for meals and religious study groups. It is also the place(check one):
Where Gov. Mark Sanford got counseling during his affair.
Where Senator John Ensign lived during his affair.
Where Chip Pickering lived during his affair.
All of the above.
As we know by the now, the answer is D.
Question 2:
The Prayer House is owned by a secretive evangelical group known as the Fellowship. According to Jeff Sharlet's book, "The Family," the Fellowship was founded in 1935 to fight the New Deal by a minister who said that God had appeared to him in the guise of (check one):
An angel.
A blinding light.
Wendell Wilkie.
The president of U.S. Steel.
The answer is surprise, surprise, drums rolling....... D!
A Christian movement whose agenda was/is to obstruct social services and economic life lines for the unemployed and the economically disadvantaged? This doesn't sound very Christian principled to me.
Rachel Maddow's report follows below.
Congressmen Zach Wamp criticized Maddow for revealing statements he made in his hometown newspaper. These folks must be losing their minds. Wamp acts as if Maddow is making his statements stuff up. I guess he figured no one outside his home town would read his local newspaper.
Last week Raw Story.com reports that C Street also housed a third Republican adulterer. This guy's wife sued her ex-husband's mistress claiming it is the girlfriend's fault that her husband left her and destroyed his political career.
Allen notes, "In an 'alienation of affection' lawsuit, former Rep. Charles W. Pickering Jr.'s estranged wife, Leisha, alleges that he carried on an extramarital affair with a onetime college sweetheart while he lived at a house at 133 C Street in Southeast Washington. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., and Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., both of whom admitted to cheating on their wives in recent weeks, are members of the Christian fellowship of lawmakers known as 'C Street' for the address of the house where several of the members live at any given time."
This is merely the tip of the iceberg in the realm of right wing psycho babble. Mark Sanford recently said his affair was a gift from God.
Indeed, right wingers like Sanford will always find a way to twist, pervert and distort the ugly truths surrounding and pervading them.
At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall observes, "You remember the C Street Group, the combo Bible fellowship and group home for members of Congress up on Capitol Hill. But it's been occurring to us that the C Street Group, which is an emanation of a shadowy religious outfit called 'the Family', might not be a religious fellowship at all so much as a covert 12 Step Group from Republican Hound Dogs, womanizers and sex addicts trying to get clean during their tenure in the hallowed halls of Congress."
It would be amusing to portray the religious boardinghouse as an animal frat house for Republican adulterers and sinners, but I think the organization's mission is far more sinister than a few straying Republican self-righteous hypocrites who can't keep their pants zipped and their hands out of their state's or the federal piggy banks. What I find most disturbing about these so-called Christian conservative Republicans is their mission to undermine, obstruct and destroy any progressive agenda possible.
Fortunately today morally bankrupted lawmakers who are devoid even a mere modicum of integrity are unable to push their anti-people, pro-business/special interests/donors agenda as readily and as easily as they had in the past.
As Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote in her piece:
Pharisees on the Potomac
Like cats that have lost their whiskers, the Republicans seem off balance now that they have lost their talent for hypocrisy.
They are still practicing the ancient political art of Tartuffery, of course, just without their former aplomb.
Who can forget the glory years, when the Gipper invoked God but never went to church? When Arlen Specter accused Anita Hill of perjury to distract from Clarence Thomas's false witness? When Newt Gingrich and other conservatives indulged in affairs with young Washington peaches as they pushed to impeach Bill Clinton?
No one had more flair than W. and Cheney, crowing about making us safe as they made the world more dangerous, and bragging about fiscal restraint while they spent us into oblivion.
Now when Republicans get caught flouting the principles they dictate, they are not able to practice hypocrisy with such impunity.
Impunity indeed. Impunity is quickly becoming a DOA blast from the past. Thank heavens.
Update: Salon.com published an interesting article on the C Street House today.
If sexual license was all the Family offered the C Street men, however, that would merely be seedy and self-serving. But Family men are more than hypocritical. They're followers of a political religion that embraces elitism, disdains democracy, and pursues power for its members the better to "advance the Kingdom." They say they're working for Jesus, but their Christ is a power-hungry, inside-the-Beltway savior not many churchgoers would recognize. Sexual peccadilloes aside, the Family acts today like the most powerful lobby in America that isn't registered as a lobby -- and is thus immune from the scrutiny attending the other powerful organizations like Big Pharma and Big Insurance that exert pressure on public policy.
The organization's roots:
The Family likes to call itself a "Christian Mafia," but it began 74 years ago as an anti-New Deal coalition of businessmen convinced that organized labor was under the sway of Satan. The Great Depression, they believed, was a punishment from God for what they viewed as FDR's socialism. The Family's goal was the "consecration" of America to God, first through the repeal of New Deal reforms, then through the aggressive expansion of American power during the Cold War. They called this a "Worldwide Spiritual Offensive," but in Washington, it amounted to the nation's first fundamentalist lobby. Early participants included Southern Sens. Strom Thurmond, Herman Talmadge and Absalom Willis Robertson -- Pat Robertson's father. Membership lists stored in the Family's archive at the Billy Graham Center at evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois show active participation at any given time over the years by dozens of congressmen.
The article pretty much reveals just who these holy conservatives really are and what they are all about.
