I think you can guess my point.
As noted in the Wall Street Journal, Kansas gubernatorial candidate Sam Brownback is again coming under fire for his association with evangelist Lou Engle, who describes the Biblical God as an "avenger of blood," calls the Abrahamic deity a "terrorist," and predicts that legalized abortion will lead to a second American civil war.
The growing controversy over Brownback's ties to Engle has been picked up by the Wall Street Journal, AP News (which story ran in the Wichita-Eagle), and the Topeka, Kansas newspapers, the Capital-Journal and the Lawrence Journal-World.
Former US Senator Brownback told the Topeka, Kansas Lawrence Journal-World, "He [Engle] said a number of things that I'm troubled by," and Brownback added, "I haven't had much association with him for some period of time."
Brownback's characterization elides his long association with Lou Engle. As I broke in late December 2009, Lou Engle says he and Sam Brownback lived together for 7 months in a rented Washington DC condominium. And, in footage from Brownback's 2007 appearance at Lou Engle's Nashville TheCall rally, evangelist Dutch Sheets stated that Brownback, whom Sheets called a personal friend to both Sheets, Lou Engle, and other mutual associates, had already attended four of Lou Engle's TheCall events.
[video, below - Lou Engle calls God an "avenger of blood" and predicts a second civil war.]
Lou Engle claims that homosexuals are possessed by demons and has been widely criticized for staging, in the Spring of 2010, one of Engle's signature TheCall events, which often feature antigay themes, in Uganda where an internationally denounced bill before the Ugandan parliament threatens to imprison or execute Uganda's gay population.
The Kansas Democratic Party has created a boiled-down, impressionistic video short that derives from my video work on Lou Engle but the partisan nature detracts, in my opinion, from the deeper issue here - which transcends traditional left/right political distinctions.
As video documentarist Michael W. Wilson captured at Lou Engle's November 2008 San Diego TheCall event, the capstone event of the 2008 election push for California's now-overturned anti-gay marriage Proposition Eight, Engle's events have included calls for Christian martyrdom.
[video, below - Lou Engle calls for acts of Christian martyrdom]
On an equally telling note, as Current TV's correspondent for the Vanguard documentary series, Mariana van Zeller, describes, during Lou Engle's May 2010 TheCall rally in Kampala, Uganda,
"Engle surrounded himself with some of the key backers of Uganda's anti-gay legislation, including Pastor Julius Oyet, Minister of Ethics and Integrity Nsaba Buturo and the bill's author, MP David Bahati."
Will Kansas voters choose to elect a governor who arguably has been quite close to an evangelist accused of helping incite a climate in Uganda that some critics fear may erupt into the next great world genocide, a candidate whose rhetoric resembles rhetoric used during the 1990's to incite the American domestic terrorism group The Army of God? In the months leading up to assassination of late-term abortion doctor George Tiller, Lou Engle made a post on his personal website comparing Tiller to an Auschwitz death camp worker.
But, in turn, antigay legislation already on the books in Uganda rivals any comparable legislation passed in pre-WW2 Germany and the proposed, so-called Ugandan "kill the gays" law that Lou Engle seems (at the very least) to tacitly support goes far beyond any law the Nazis promulgated.
To what extent should Sam Brownback answer for the actions and political allegiances of his former roommate Lou Engle, whose events Brownback used to attend with great enthusiasm? As the Huffington Post reports, Brownback is backpedaling fast.