Maybe some of you know this already, but I found it shocking that this hasn't been more widely reported.
Barbara Ehrenreich writes today in the Huffington Post that Hillary Clinton has been an active member and participant in "The Family," since 1993. The Family is a cult-like organization that worships Jesus, but refrains from the word Christian. Their recent membership includes, or has included, James Inhofe, Ed Meese, Rick Santorium, and John Ashcroft.
Ehrenreich writes:
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 rightwing 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.
She then quotes from a report by Jeff Sharlet in Harper's in 2003:
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.
Apparently, Clinton fell in with the group in 1993, when she joined a prayer group mainly composed of wives of conservative politicians like James Baker and Jack Kemp.
When she ascended to the senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, the Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."
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.
There's a new book coming about the group coming out in May by Jeff Sharlet, who wrote the Harper's piece and joined one of the sect's male only group homes to learn more about them.
The whole thing is deeply disturbing and worth reading. Link again is here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...