The C-Street Family: Sexual Affairs and the Chosen

Just when you think you have heard it all, along comes this gang of "chosen" idiots! This should be enough to scare the hell out of decent, patriotic American who are believers in our constitution. I believe it was JFK who said that there is no place for secret societies in our Democratic Republic. This revelation just proves that point, again.

I read something about this gang of loony tunes several years back. Admittedly I found it hard to believe then, but so much has happened since, it's difficult to not believe anything, no matter how insane it sounds.

Our nation is going to hell in a collection plate!



By Mark Karlin


Kudos to Rachel Maddow for latching on to the captivating and chilling story about not just the lascivious and potentially illegal activities of some of the "C Street" Family, but -- more importantly -- focusing on their belief that they are chosen by God to lead and infiltrate our government.


And she hasn't stopped pursuing this startling story, defying the normal news cycle of a nano-second of coverage unless it's Michael Jackson's death or a blonde white girl disappearing in Aruba.


What gets lost in the disgusting details of Ensign's adulterous affair, Mark Sanford's (an associate member of the Family) lust for an Argentine, and former Congressman Chip Pickering's adulterous bonking on-site at the C Street "Christian fellowship house" is something that Maddow has repeatedly come back to: these men don't believe they are responsible to moral or governmental laws. If they deviate from the "righteous path," God is only testing their strength, because they are the ones divinely chosen to lead -- and it is weakness to succumb to remorse about one's "misbehavior." That is why Mark Sanford said he won't resign and compared himself to King David, who slept adulterously with Bathsheba and then had her husband killed.


The low-key author, Jeff Sharlet, of "The Family:The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" is a credible chronicler of this cabal that is like a dagger in democracy. He writes:

Family leaders consider their political network to be Christ's avant garde, an elite that transcends not just conventional morality but also earthly laws regulating lobbying. In the Family's early days, they debated registering as "a lobby for God's Kingdom." Instead, founder Abraham Vereide decided that the group could be more effective by working personally with politicians. "The more invisible you can make your organization," Vereide's successor, current leader Doug Coe preaches, "the more influence you can have." That's true -- which is why we have laws requiring lobbyists to identify themselves as such.

But David Coe, Doug Coe's son and heir apparent, calls himself simply a friend to men such as John Ensign, whom he guided through the coverup of his affair. I met the younger Coe when I lived for several weeks as a member of the Family. He's a surprising source of counsel, spiritual or otherwise. Attempting to explain what it means to be chosen for leadership like King David was -- or Mark Sanford, according to his own estimate -- he asked a young man who'd put himself, body and soul, under the Family's authority, "Let's say I hear you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?" The man guessed that Coe would probably think that he was a monster. "No," answered Coe, "I wouldn't." Why? Because, as a member of the Family, he's among what Family leaders refer to as the "new chosen." If you're chosen, the normal rules don't apply.

Yes, you read that right, the son of Doug Coe, the "spiritual leader" of the Family and his heir apparent, would consider a Family member raping a child a test of the member's closeness and to be resolved inside of the fellowship, without reporting it to the law authorities, it appears.

This is how dangerous they are. They apparently believe even child rape is something that God wants them to keep secret amongst themselves!


And the heroes held up for the Family are the likes of great tyrants as Sharlet writes:

If the Family men who stood over John Ensign as he wrote a baldly insincere breakup letter to his mistress were naive about hearts that want what they want, they don't claim ignorance about the strongmen with whom they build bonds of prayer and foreign aid. They admire them. Counseling Rep. Tiahrt, Doug Coe offered Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden as men whose commitment to their causes is to be emulated. Preaching on the meaning of Christ's words, he says, "You know Jesus said 'You got to put Him before mother-father-brother sister? Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that's what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn't murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom."

Sen. Ensign, facing calls for an investigation of what may have been felony abuses of campaign funds in his attempt to cover up his affair, might not get there. Then again, the Family's preview of a "new kingdom" -- a private club of men protecting each others' secrets -- doesn't sound so different from the old kingdom. That's the awful secret behind the closed doors of the C Street House, the Family's authoritarian rhetoric, and even the Family's real mission: business as usual, fortified by faith in more power for the powerful and privilege itself a form of piety.

The Family on C Street includes Dr. Tom "Execute Abortionists" Coburn who grilled Sonya Sotomayor during her Judiciary Committee hearings -- and who counseled Ensign on his ongoing adulterous affair with a staffer who is the wife of another staffer.

These are dangerous men to the Republic. They think that they are members of some modern Skull and Bones of Sparta, selected by God to inflict a deranged "Christian" government upon the democracy of America -- and for whom immorality and breaking the law are only acts in which God is testing them -- and for which they hold no public responsibility in their hearts and minds.

Keeping secret one of the members who might admit to child rape!


God help us all -- but not their God, who is merely a monstrous, self-serving excuse in their own minds for evading the laws, ethics, and responsibilities of living a civilized and legal life.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (July, 2009 Paperback Edition). Available by clicking here from BuzzFlash.com

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Should Jenny Sanford Get A Skill-saw?

In a word, NO!

Not unless she wants to spend the rest of her life in prison or get the death penalty.

Adultery, no matter how humiliating to one's spouse, is not yet against the law. If it were left to the same Christian-right who helped elect Sanford, it would be a major crime and Sanford might be on his way to the gallows or the dungeon for the rest of his life.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to see Sanford in prison or executed. I think that he will have suffered enough by the time this unholy mess is over-with. I'm just pointing out that the very people who elected him want to put the 10 commandments in every southern state capitol, if not codify the ten commandments and other selected parts of the Bible as American law. 

I would like to hear Governor Sanford speak to how stupid that would be in our Democratic Republic with a constitution that forbids an official religion.

 

Jenny Sanford's tough-minded response

Mary Schmich

June 26, 2009

It's safe to say that Jenny Sullivan Sanford, wife of South Carolina's governor, will not be appearing on "I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!"

But overnight Jenny Sanford has turned into a celebrity, yet another woman forcibly inducted into the sorority of famously aggrieved political wives. She has to wish she could get out of that.

One poignancy of the Sanford story is that, like so many wives brazenly humiliated by the politicians they married, Sanford is as smart, maybe smarter, than her husband.

She grew up in Winnetka, the granddaughter of the founder of Chicago's Skil Corp., maker of power tools. When she and her husband met, she was a vice president at Lazard Freres, the investment firm. When he ran for Congress and then governor, she managed his campaigns.

Mary Schmich Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

An heiress who shops at Wal-Mart (as the press likes to point out), she is known for her iron intelligence.

"It may be relatively easy to get 'one up' on the governor," a South Carolina blogger noted a while back, "but you don't mess with Jenny Sanford, people."

Mark Sanford has messed mightily with Jenny Sanford. After disappearing for several days, he resurfaced this week and confessed that he'd spent Father's Day in Argentina with another woman.

He claims to love that woman -- this was not just a sexual exploit! -- which may make his behavior less tawdry but is likely to make it even more hurtful to his wife.

So once again we, the public, step eagerly into our roles as marriage counselors.

Should Jenny Sanford join the long line of political wives who stand by their man?

Or should she have at him with a Skill-saw?

She didn't stand next to him when he stood up at a press conference Wednesday. Instead she issued a statement saying she still loved him and was open to reconciliation but had asked him two weeks ago for a trial separation.

"We reached a point," she said, "where I felt it was important to look my sons in the eyes and maintain my dignity, self-respect, and my basic sense of right and wrong."

Sanford's response struck me as sensible, subtle and strong. She stood up for herself and corrected him without lashing out.

Tina Brown, publisher of The Daily Beast, a Web site, however, declared that the first lady of South Carolina "blew it."
 
(Ain't none of Tina's business, but whatever!)

Instead of "a pious manifesto that lets the governor off the hook," Brown wrote, Sanford should have "set the table for a big-ticket matrimonial lawyer to have a payday on behalf of all the humiliated political wives -- ashen Mrs. Eliot Spitzer; pulverized Dina Matos McGreevey; quietly imploding Mrs. Larry Craig; fuming deity Elizabeth Edwards."

But it's not Jenny Sanford's job to do anything on behalf of those other wives, or on behalf of a public that's affronted by sexually wayward politicos. Her job is to care for herself and her family.


AMEN!!!

And, really, a lot of the public outrage at the politicians isn't about the politicians. It's about us, our own experience of love or betrayal, our own fears for our relationships or the fate of women. When we proclaim what Jenny Sanford should do, we're really pondering what we, in that situation, might do.



Mostly, what it is all about for me and my friends is hypocrisy in the extreme! I have actually read the gospels and I seem to remember that Jesus of Nazareth was much more concerned with hypocrisy than adultery.

But no two relationships are precisely the same. Walking out isn't the only good answer to the insult of infidelity. As Hillary Clinton has shown, it may not even be the best revenge.

Revenge is a damned poor reason to do anything; stay, go, implode, explode, run for political office or invade and occupy another nation. 

Revenge is a form of mental illness or it is a crime. Most of us know that today in a way that we did not 100 years ago or less.

mschmich@tribune.com


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Let The Sun Shine In......