Last night, Rachel Maddow noted that out of the 26 House Democrats who voted for the Stupak-Pitts amendment and against the House health reform bill, eight are proven or reported to be members of the fundamentalist Washington, DC association known as the Family [ 2008 NBC story on the group ]. While Bart Stupak is closely tied to the Family (see my new story, linked below) Republican Joe Pitts is, as Jeff Sharlet told Rachel Maddow, one of the Family's "core members."
"Congressman Pitts is what the Family calls a 'core member.' This is a little bit like being on the board of directors. You can go online and find video of him talking about how the objective of the group is to create a 'God-led government.' He has worked over the years to prevent not only abortion but AIDS education overseas and so on. This his been a lifelong project for him going back years and years and years."
In an October 29, 2009 story (reposted here October 30), I described Bart Stupak's likely oversized role in the upcoming House fight over healthcare, and I revealed that Stupak's fellow "C Street" GOP housemates have led some of the most dedicated and virulent opposition to the health care reform effort:
While Rep. Stupak has been careful to avoid giving the impression that he is categorically opposed to any health care reform bill, his associates and housemates in the powerful, secretive, and anti-democratic Washington Christian fundamentalist association known as The Family, or The Fellowship, have led much of the GOP's most virulent opposition to health care reform.
Along with his health care amendment co-sponsor Joe Pitts ( R-PA ) Bart Stupak is a longtime member of the mainly-Republican radical free-market, union-busting theocratic fundamentalist group, which runs the "C Street House" that is registered as a church, where Bart Stupak has enjoyed Christian fellowship and cheap rent for years. Stupak's former "C Street" housemate Senator James DeMint (R-S. Carolina) has vowed to make the fight against health care reform President Barack Obama's "Waterloo".
As I detail in a new Talk To Action story, Bart Stupak, Family 'Minister', Wrapped in C Street Like a Bug in a Rug, 990 tax returns from the Fellowship Foundation, the Family's core nonprofit, indicate that residents of Family group houses are in the Family's "ministry." In 2002 Stupak told the LA Times that "We sort of don't talk to the press about the house" but in July 2009, as a trio of GOP sex scandals drew attention to the "C Street House," Rep. Stupak denied, to Michigan Messenger's Ed Brayton, that he knew anything at all about the house he'd been living at for at least 7 years.
As I wrote yesterday at the Daily Kos,
First came Representative Bart Stupak, blindsiding Democrats in the House. Now, as the Senate takes up the health care debate, Senator Ben Nelson stands poised, holding a key vote that might pass a health care reform bill or else set back current reform efforts months, even years, and so set the stage, some warn, for a GOP resurgence in 2010...
Stupak's anti-abortion House health care bill amendment would, reproductive rights groups maintain, cut the already limited access American women have to abortion services...
In a July 17th conference call Bart Stupak's fellow C Street Housemate Jim DeMint told conservative activists that "...if we're able to stop Obama on this [health care] it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."
Whether purely out of conscience - out of opposition to abortion, in conjunction with Family strategy, or a bit of both Bart Stupak and Ben Nelson are playing a decisive role that risks proving DeMint's words prophetic."
As Ben Nelson has just told ABC News,
"...first of all, it has more than a robust public option, it's got a totally government-run plan, the costs are extraordinary associated with it, it increases taxes in a way that will not pass in the Senate and I could go on and on and on,"
But there's at least one thing, notes ABC, that Ben Nelson likes about the House Bill - the strict ban on abortion coverage.
How is it that well-positioned conservative Democrats, associated with a group that promotes falsified American history and wants Christian theocratic government, whose long time leader is on film celebrating the leadership lessons of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao, may be able to sabotage and perhaps block what could be the most significant piece of liberal legislation to come out of Washington in decades ? The Family has been an open secret for decades, and the group has worked hard to advance the fiction that it is bipartisan. That is clearly not the case.
What is truly astonishing is the fact that Family Democrats such as Bart Stupak were telegraphing, for weeks before the House health care battle, their plans and no one, neither among Democratic party strategists or on the activist left, could figure out a way to use the scandalous aspects of the Family to put pressure on Family Democrats such as Stupak, who recently withdrew, after a single phone call and letter from Americans United For Separation of Church and State, unconstitutional legislation that would have gifted Coast Guard land to a Michigan Christian school.
As I've suggested in my recent story Blindsided By Politicized Religion. Again. And 2010 Looms, if Democrats can't figure out how to leverage shocking material such as the footage in the NBC exclusive, below, the outcome of the next two national elections may not be favorable for the left.
[below: NBC special report on the Fellowship/Family]
Jeff Sharlet has just weighed in on the issue, with a new Salon.com article, The Democrats' new "Family" values,
These Family ties don't mean that Stupak-Pitts is a plot hatched at C Street. The Family offers politicians a "worldview," not a vote machine. ...the Family's prayer groups don't take direct action but rather facilitate the behind-the-scenes relationships that lead to action. "One person grows desirous of pursuing an action," Sen. Sam Brownback, a Family man and former C Street resident, explained the process to me, "and others pull in behind."
Which raises the question: Who's pulling whom? Did backbencher Bart Stupak really come up with the bluff that led pro-choice Democrats to abandon not one but two compromises, one of which Stupak himself seemed to be signing off on earlier this summer? Or was it Pitts, an abortion-wars warrior since the 1970s, and a longtime leader of the House Values Action Team -- an off-the-record caucus of religious right organizations and members of Congress -- who drew up the blueprint?
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