God's Senator Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback [hello theocracy]
stoney
God's Senator
Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback
Nobody in this little church just off Times Square in Manhattan thinks
of themselves as political. They're spiritual -- actors and athletes and
pretty young things who believe that every word of the Bible is inerrant
dictation from God. They look down from the balcony of the Morning Star,
swaying and smiling at the screen that tells them how to sing along.
Nail-pierced hands, a wounded side. This is love, this is love! But on
this evening in January, politics and all its worldly machinations have
entered their church. Sitting in the darkness of the front row is Sam
Brownback, the Republican senator from Kansas. And hunched over on the
stage in a red leather chair is an old man named Harald Bredesen, who
has come to anoint Brownback as the Christian right's next candidate for
president.
Over the last six decades, Bredesen has prayed with so many presidents
and prime ministers and kings that he can barely remember their names.
He's the spiritual father of Pat Robertson, the man behind the
preacher's vast media empire. He was one of three pastors who laid hands
on Ronald Reagan in 1970 and heard the Pasadena Prophecy: the moment
when God told Reagan that he would one day occupy the White House. And
he recently dispatched one of his proteges to remind George W. Bush of
the divine will -- and evangelical power -- behind his presidency.
Tonight, Bredesen has come to breathe that power into Brownback's
presidential campaign. After little more than a decade in Washington,
Brownback has managed to position himself at the very center of the
Christian conservative uprising that is transforming American politics.
Just six years ago, winning the evangelical vote required only a veneer
of bland normalcy, nothing more than George Bush's vague assurance that
Jesus was his favorite philosopher. Now, Brownback seeks something far
more radical: not faith-based politics but faith in place of politics.
In his dream America, the one he believes both the Bible and the
Constitution promise, the state will simply wither away. In its place
will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the
social fabric of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security,
welfare -- will be privatized or simply done away with. There will be no
abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead
families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church
will take care of all.
Bredesen squints through the stage lights at Brownback, sitting
straight-backed and attentive. At forty-nine, the senator looks taller
than he is. His face is wide and flat, his skin thick like leather,
etched by windburn and sun from years of working on his father's farm
just outside Parker, Kansas, population 281. You can hear it in his
voice: slow, distant but warm; a baritone, spoken out of the left side
of his mouth in half-sentences with few hard consonants. It sounds like
the voice of someone who has learned how to wait for rain.
"He wants to be president," Bredesen tells the congregation. "He is
marvelously qualified to be president." But, he adds, there is something
Brownback wants even more: "And that is, on the last day of your earthly
life, to be able to say, 'Father, the work you gave me to do, I have
accomplished!'" Bredesen, shrunken with age, leans forward and glares at
Brownback.
"Is that true?" he demands.
"Yes," Brownback says softly.
"Friends!" The old man's voice is suddenly a trumpet. "Sam . . . says .
. . yes!"
The crowd roars. Those occupying the front rows lay hands on the
contender.
Brownback takes the stage. He begins to pace. In front of secular
audiences he's a politician, stiff and wonky. Here, he's a preacher, not
sweaty but smooth, working a call-and-response with the back rows. "I
used to run on Sam power," he says.
"Uh-uh," someone shouts.
To quiet his ambition, Brownback continues, he used to take sleeping
pills.
"Oh, Lord!"
Now he runs on God power.
"Hallelujah!"
He tells a story about a chaplain who challenged a group of senators to
reconsider their conception of democracy. "How many constituents do you
have?" the chaplain asked. The senators answered: 4 million, 9 million,
12 million. "May I suggest," the chaplain replied, "that you have only
one constituent?"
Brownback pauses. That moment, he declares, changed his life. "This" --
being senator, running for president, waving the flag of a Christian
nation -- "is about serving one constituent." He raises a hand and
points above him.
From the balcony a hallelujah, an amen, a yelp. From Bredesen's great
white head, now peering up from the front row, Brownback wins an
appreciative nod.
This boy, Bredesen thinks, may be the chosen one.
* * *
Back in 1994, when Brownback came to Congress as a freshman, he was so
contemptuous of federal authority that he refused at first to sign the
Contract With America, Newt Gingrich's right-wing manifesto -- not
because it was too radical but because it was too tame. Republicans
shouldn't just reform big government, Brownback insisted -- they should
eliminate it. He immediately proposed abolishing the departments of
education, energy and commerce. His proposals failed -- but they quickly
made him one of the right's rising stars. Two years later, running to
the right of Bob Dole's chosen successor, he was elected to the Senate.
"I am a seeker," he says. Brownback believes that every spiritual path
has its own unique scent, and he wants to inhale them all. When he ran
for the House he was a Methodist. By the time he ran for the Senate he
was an evangelical. Now he has become a Catholic. He was baptized not in
a church but in a chapel tucked between lobbyists' offices on K Street
that is run by Opus Dei, the secretive lay order founded by a Catholic
priest who advocated "holy coercion" and considered Spanish dictator
Francisco Franco an ideal of worldly power. Brownback also studies Torah
with an orthodox rabbi from Brooklyn. "Deep," says the rabbi, Nosson
Scherman. Lately, Brownback has been reading the Koran, but he doesn't
like what he's finding. "There's some difficult material in it with
regard to the Christian and the Jew," he tells a Christian radio
program, voice husky with regret.
Brownback is not part of the GOP leadership, and he doesn't want to be.
He once told a group of businessmen he wanted to be the next Jesse Helms
-- "Senator No," who operated as a one-man demolition unit against
godlessness, independent of his party. Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist, a man with presidential ambitions of his own, gave Brownback a
plum position on the Judiciary Committee, perhaps hoping that Brownback
would provide a counterbalance to Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican
who threatened to make trouble for Bush's appointees. Instead, taking a
page from Helms, Brownback turned the position into a platform for a
high-profile war against gay marriage, porn and abortion. Casting Bush
and the Republican leadership as soft and muddled, he regularly turns
sleepy hearings into platforms for his vision of America, inviting a
parade of angry witnesses to denounce the "homosexual agenda,"
"bestiality" and "murder."
He is running for president because murder is always on his mind: the
abortion of what he considers fetal citizens. He speaks often and
admiringly of John Brown, the abolitionist who massacred five
pro-slavery settlers just north of the farm where Brownback grew up.
Brown wanted to free the slaves; Brownback wants to free fetuses. He
loves each and every one of them. "Just . . . sacred," he says. In
January, during the confirmation of Samuel Alito for a seat on the
Supreme Court, Brownback compared Roe v. Wade to the now disgraced
rulings that once upheld segregation.
Alito was in the Senate hearing room that day largely because of
Brownback's efforts. Last October, after Bush named his personal lawyer,
Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court, Brownback politely but thoroughly
demolished her nomination -- on the grounds that she was insufficiently
opposed to abortion. The day Miers withdrew her name, Sen. John McCain
surprised the mob of reporters clamoring around Brownback outside the
Senate chamber by grabbing his colleague's shoulders. "Here's the man
who did it!" McCain shouted in admiration, a big smile on his face.
Brownback is unlikely to receive the Republican presidential nomination
-- but as the candidate of the Christian right, he may well be in a
position to determine who does, and what they include in their platform.
"What Sam could do very effectively," says the Rev. Rob Schenck, an
evangelical activist, is hold the nomination hostage until the Christian
right "exacts the last pledge out of the more popular candidate."
The nation's leading evangelicals have already lined up behind
Brownback, a feat in itself. A decade ago, evangelical support for a
Catholic would have been unthinkable. Many evangelicals viewed the Pope
as the Antichrist and the Roman Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon.
But Brownback is the beneficiary of a strategy known as co-belligerency
-- a united front between conservative Catholics and evangelicals in the
culture war. Pat Robertson has tapped the "outstanding senator from
Kansas" as his man for president. David Barton, the Christian right's
all-but-official presidential historian, calls Brownback
"uncompromising" -- the highest praise in a movement that considers
intransigence next to godliness. And James Dobson, the movement's
strongest chieftain, can find no fault in Brownback. "He has fulfilled
every expectation," Dobson says. Even Jesse Helms, now in retirement in
North Carolina, recognizes a kindred spirit. "The most effective
senators are those who are truest to themselves," Helms says. "Senator
Brownback is becoming known as that sort of individual."
* * *
As he gathers the forces of the Christian right around him, however,
Brownback has broken with the movement's tradition of fire and
brimstone. His fundamentalism is almost tender. He's no less intolerant
than the angry pulpit-pounders, but he never sounds like a hater. His
style is both gentler and colder, a mixture of Mr. Rogers and monkish
detachment.
Brownback doesn't thump the Bible. He reads obsessively, studying
biographies of Christian crusaders from centuries past. His learning
doesn't lend him gravitas so much as it seems to free him from gravity,
to set him adrift across space and time. Ask him why he considers
abortion a "holocaust," and he'll answer by way of a story about an
eighteenth-century British parliamentarian who broke down in tears over
the sin of slavery. Brownback believes America is entering a period of
religious revival on the scale of the Great Awakening that preceded the
nation's creation, an epidemic of mass conversions, signs and wonders,
book burnings. But this time, he says, the upheaval will give way to a
"cultural springtime," a theocratic order that is pleasant and balmy.
It's a vision shared by the mega-churches that sprawl across the
surburban landscape, the 24-7 spiritual-entertainment complexes where
millions of Americans embrace a feel-good fundamentalism.
When Brownback travels, he tries to avoid spending time alone in his
hotel room, where indecent television programming might tempt him. In
Washington, though, he goes to bed early. He doesn't like to eat out.
Indeed, it sometimes seems he doesn't like to eat at all -- his staff
worries when the only thing he has for lunch is a communion wafer and a
drop of wine at the noontime Mass he tries to attend daily. He lives in
a spartan apartment across from his office that he shares with Sen. Jim
Talent, a Republican from Missouri, and he flies home to Topeka almost
every Thursday. On the wall of his office, there's a family portrait of
all seven Brownbacks gathered around two tree stumps, each Brownback in
black shoes, blue jeans and a black pullover. The oldest, Abby, is
nineteen; the youngest, Jenna, abandoned on the doorstep of a Chinese
orphanage when she was two days old, is seven.
Brownback's house in Topeka perches atop a hill, shielded from the road
behind a great arc of driveway in a nameless suburb so new that the
grass has yet to sprout on nearby lawns. On a recent Sunday, Brownback
sits in the kitchen, looking relaxed in jeans and an orange sweatshirt
that says HOODWINKED, the name of his oldest son's band. Hoodwinked
members drift in and out, chatting with the senator. When the band
starts practice in the basement, Brownback walks downstairs, opens the
door, jerks his right knee in the air and half windmills his arm.
Hoodwinked shout at him to leave them alone.
When he was a boy, Brownback didn't belong to any rock bands. He grew up
in a white, one-story farmhouse in Parker, where his parents still live.
Brownback likes to say that he is fighting for traditional family
values, but his father, Bob, was more concerned about the price of
grain, and his mother, Nancy, had no qualms about having a gay friend.
Back then, moral values were simple. "Your word was your word. Don't
cheat," his mother recalls. "I can't think of anything else."
Her son played football ("quarterback" she says, "never very good") and
was elected class president and "Mr. Spirit." "He was talkative," she
adds, as if this were an alien quality. Like most kids in Parker, Sam
just wanted to be a farmer. But that life is gone now, destroyed by what
the old farmers who sit around the town's single gas station sum up in
one word -- "Reaganism." They mean the voodoo economics by which the
government favored corporate interests over family farms, a "what's good
for big business is good for America" philosophy that Brownback himself
now champions.
In 1986, just a few years after finishing law school, Brownback landed
one of the state's plum offices: agriculture secretary, a position of no
small influence in Kansas. But in 1993, he was forced out when a federal
court ruled his tenure unconstitutional. Not only had he not been
elected, he'd been appointed by people who weren't elected -- the very
same agribusiness giants he was in charge of regulating.
The following year, he squeaked into Congress, running as a moderate.
But in Washington, in the midst of the Gingrich Revolution, Brownback
didn't just tack right -- he unzipped his quiet Kansan costume and
stepped out as the leader of the New Federalists, the small but potent
faction of freshmen determined to get rid of government almost entirely.
When he discovered that the Republican leadership wasn't really
interested in derailing its own gravy train, Brownback began spending
more time with his Bible. He began to suspect that the problem with
government wasn't just too many taxes; it was not enough God.
Brownback's wife, Mary, heiress to a Midwest newspaper fortune, married
Sam during her final year of law school and boasts that she has never
worked outside the home. "Basically," she says, "I live in the kitchen."
From her spot by the stove, Mary monitors all media consumed by her
kids. The Brownbacks block several channels, but even so, innuendos slip
by, she says, and the nightly news is often "too sexual." The children,
Mary says, "exude their faith." The oldest kids "opt out" of sex
education at school.
Sex, in all its various forms, is at the center of Brownback's agenda.
America, he believes, has divorced sexuality from what is sacred. "It's
not that we think too much about sex," he says, "it's that we don't
think enough of it." The senator would gladly roll back the sexual
revolution altogether if he could, but he knows he can't, so instead he
dreams of something better: a culture of "faith-based" eroticism in
which premarital passion plays out not in flesh but in prayer. After
Janet Jackson's nipple made its surprise appearance at the 2004 Super
Bowl, Brownback introduced the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act,
raising the fines for such on-air abominations to $325,000.
On Sundays, Brownback rises at dawn so he can catch a Catholic Mass
before meeting Mary and the kids at Topeka Bible Church. With the
exception of one brown-skinned man, the congregation is entirely white.
The stage looks like a rec room in a suburban basement: wall-to-wall
carpet, wood paneling, a few haphazard ferns and a couple of electric
guitars lying around. This morning, the church welcomes a guest preacher
from Promise Keepers, a men's group, by performing a skit about golf and
fatherhood. From his preferred seat in the balcony, Brownback chuckles
when he's supposed to, sings every song, nods seriously when the
preacher warns against "Judaizers" who would "poison" the New Testament.
After the service, Brownback introduces me to a white-haired man with a
yellow Viking mustache. "This is the man who wrote 'Dust in the Wind,'"
the senator announces proudly. It's Kerry Livgren of the band Kansas.
Livgren has found Jesus and now worships with the senator at Topeka
Bible. Brownback, one of the Senate's fiercest hawks on Israel, tells
Livgren he wants to take him to the Holy Land. Whenever the senator met
with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to talk policy, he insisted that they
first study Scripture together. The two men would study their Bibles,
music playing softly in the background. Maybe, if Livgren goes to Israel
with Brownback, he could strum "Dust in the Wind." "Carry on my . . ."
the senator warbles, trying to remember another song by his friend.
* * *
One of the little-known strengths of the Christian right lies in its
adoption of the "cell" -- the building block historically used by small
but determined groups to impose their will on the majority. Seventy
years ago, an evangelist named Abraham Vereide founded a network of
"God-led" cells comprising senators and generals, corporate executives
and preachers. Vereide believed that the cells -- God's chosen,
appointed to power -- could construct a Kingdom of God on earth with
Washington as its capital. They would do so "behind the scenes," lest
they be accused of pride or a hunger for power, and "beyond the din of
vox populi," which is to say, outside the bounds of democracy. To
insiders, the cells were known as the Family, or the Fellowship. To most
outsiders, they were not known at all.
"Communists use cells as their basic structure," declares a confidential
Fellowship document titled "Thoughts on a Core Group." "The mafia
operates like this, and the basic unit of the Marine Corps is the
four-man squad. Hitler, Lenin and many others understood the power of a
small group of people." Under Reagan, Fellowship cells quietly arranged
meetings between administration officials and leaders of Salvadoran
death squads, and helped funnel military support to Siad Barre, the
brutal dictator of Somalia, who belonged to a prayer cell of American
senators and generals.
Brownback got involved in the Fellowship in 1979, as a summer intern for
Bob Dole, when he lived in a residence the group had organized in a
sorority house at the University of Maryland. Four years later, fresh
out of law school and looking for a political role model, Brownback
sought out Frank Carlson, a former Republican senator from Kansas. It
was Carlson who, at a 1955 meeting of the Fellowship, had declared the
group's mission to be "Worldwide Spiritual Offensive," a vision of manly
Christianity dedicated to the expansion of American power as a means of
spreading the gospel.
Over the years, Brownback became increasingly active in the Fellowship.
But he wasn't invited to join a cell until 1994, when he went to
Washington. "I had been working with them for a number of years, so when
I went into Congress I knew I wanted to get back into that," he says.
"Washington -- power -- is very difficult to handle. I knew I needed
people to keep me accountable in that system."
Brownback was placed in a weekly prayer cell by "the shadow Billy
Graham" -- Doug Coe, Vereide's successor as head of the Fellowship. The
group was all male and all Republican. It was a "safe relationship,"
Brownback says. Conversation tended toward the personal. Brownback and
the other men revealed the most intimate details of their desires,
failings, ambitions. They talked about lust, anger and infidelities, the
more shameful the better -- since the goal was to break one's own will.
The abolition of self; to become nothing but a vessel so that one could
be used by God.
They were striving, ultimately, for what Coe calls "Jesus plus nothing"
-- a government led by Christ's will alone. In the future envisioned by
Coe, everything -- sex and taxes, war and the price of oil -- will be
decided upon not according to democracy or the church or even Scripture.
The Bible itself is for the masses; in the Fellowship, Christ reveals a
higher set of commands to the anointed few. It's a good old boy's club
blessed by God. Brownback even lived with other cell members in a
million-dollar, red-brick former convent at 133 C Street that was
subsidized and operated by the Fellowship. Monthly rent was $600 per man
-- enough of a deal by Hill standards that some said it bordered on an
ethical violation, but no charges were ever brought.
Brownback still meets with the prayer cell every Tuesday evening. He and
his "brothers," he says, are "bonded together, faith and souls." The
rules forbid Brownback from revealing the names of his fellow members,
but those in the cell likely include such conservative stalwarts as Rep.
Zach Wamp of Tennessee, former Rep. Steve Largent of Oklahoma and Sen.
Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma doctor who has advocated the death penalty for
abortion providers. Fellowship documents suggest that some 30 senators
and 200 congressmen occasionally attend the group's activities, but no
more than a dozen are involved at Brownback's level.
The men in Brownback's cell talk about politics, but the senator insists
it's not political. "It's about faith and action," he says. According to
"Thoughts on a Core Group," the primary purpose of the cell is to become
an "invisible 'believing' group." Any action the cell takes is an
outgrowth of belief, a natural extension of "agreements reached in faith
and in prayer." Deals emerge not from a smoke-filled room but from a
prayer-filled room. "Typically," says Brownback, "one person grows
desirous of pursuing an action" -- a piece of legislation, a diplomatic
strategy -- "and the others pull in behind."
In 1999, Brownback worked with Rep. Joe Pitts, a Fellowship brother, to
pass the Silk Road Strategy Act, designed to block the growth of Islam
in Central Asian nations by bribing them with lucrative trade deals.
That same year, he teamed up with two Fellowship associates -- former
Sen. Don Nickles and the late Sen. Strom Thurmond -- to demand a
criminal investigation of a liberal group called Americans United for
Separation of Church and State. Last year, several Fellowship brothers,
including Sen. John Ensign, another resident of the C Street house,
supported Brownback's broadcast decency bill. And Pitts and Coburn
joined Brownback in stumping for the Houses of Worship Act to allow
tax-free churches to endorse candidates.
The most bluntly theocratic effort, however, is the Constitution
Restoration Act, which Brownback co-sponsored with Jim DeMint, another
former C Streeter who was then a congressman from South Carolina. If
passed, it will strip the Supreme Court of the ability to even hear
cases in which citizens protest faith-based abuses of power. Say the
mayor of your town decides to declare Jesus lord and fire anyone who
refuses to do so; or the principal of your local high school decides to
read a fundamentalist prayer over the PA every morning; or the president
declares the United States a Christian nation. Under the Constitution
Restoration Act, that'll all be just fine.
Brownback points to his friend Ed Meese, who served as attorney general
under Reagan, as an example of a man who wields power through backroom
Fellowship connections. Meese has not held a government job for nearly
two decades, but through the Fellowship he's more influential than ever,
credited with brokering the recent nomination of John Roberts to head
the Supreme Court. "As a behind-the-scenes networker," Brownback says,
"he's important." In the senator's view, such hidden power is sanctioned
by the Bible. "Everybody knows Moses," Brownback says. "But who were the
leaders of the Jewish people once they got to the promised land? It's a
lot of people who are unknown."
* * *
Every Tuesday, before his evening meeting with his prayer brothers,
Brownback chairs another small cell -- one explicitly dedicated to
altering public policy. It is called the Values Action Team, and it is
composed of representatives from leading organizations on the religious
right. James Dobson's Focus on the Family sends an emissary, as does the
Family Research Council, the Eagle Forum, the Christian Coalition, the
Traditional Values Coalition, Concerned Women for America and many more.
Like the Fellowship prayer cell, everything that is said is strictly off
the record, and even the groups themselves are forbidden from discussing
the proceedings. It's a little "cloak-and-dagger," says a Brownback
press secretary. The VAT is a war council, and the enemy, says one
participant, is "secularism."
The VAT coordinates the efforts of fundamentalist pressure groups,
unifying their message and arming congressional staffers with the data
and language they need to pass legislation. Working almost entirely in
secret, the group has directed the fights against gay marriage and for
school vouchers, against hate-crime legislation and for "abstinence
only" education. The VAT helped win passage of Brownback's broadcast
decency bill and made the president's tax cuts a top priority. When it
comes to "impacting policy," says Tony Perkins of the Family Research
Council, "day to day, the VAT is instrumental."
As chairman of the Helsinki Commission, the most important U.S. human
rights agency, Brownback has also stamped much of U.S. foreign policy
with VAT's agenda. One victory for the group was Brownback's North Korea
Human Rights Act, which establishes a confrontational stance toward the
dictatorial regime and shifts funds for humanitarian aid from the United
Nations to Christian organizations. Sean Woo -- Brownback's former
general counsel and now the chief of staff of the Helsinki Commission --
calls this a process of "privatizing democracy." A dapper man with a
soothing voice, Woo is perhaps the brightest thinker in Brownback's
circle, a savvy internationalist with a deep knowledge of Cold War
history. Yet when I ask him for an example of the kind of project the
human-rights act might fund, he tells me about a German doctor who
releases balloons over North Korea with bubble-wrapped radios tied to
them. North Koreans are supposed to find the balloons when they run out
of helium and use the radios to tune into Voice of America or a South
Korean Christian station.
Since Brownback took over leadership of the VAT in 2002, he has used it
to consolidate his position in the Christian right -- and his influence
in the Senate. If senators -- even leaders like Bill Frist or Rick
Santorum -- want to ask for backing from the group, they must talk to
Brownback's chief of staff, Robert Wasinger, who clears attendees with
his boss. Wasinger is from Hays, Kansas, but he speaks with a Harvard
drawl, and he is still remembered in Cambridge twelve years after
graduation for a fight he led to get gay faculty booted. He was
particularly concerned about the welfare of gay men; or rather, as he
wrote in a campus magazine funded by the Heritage Foundation, that of
their innocent sperm, forced to "swim into feces." As gatekeeper of the
VAT, he's a key strategist in the conservative movement. He makes sure
the religious leaders who attend VAT understand that Brownback is the
boss -- and that other senators realize that every time Brownback
speaks, he has the money and membership of the VAT behind him.
VAT is like a closed communication circuit with Brownback at the switch:
The power flows through him. Every Wednesday at noon, he trots upstairs
from his office to a radio studio maintained by the Republican
leadership to rally support from Christian America for VAT's agenda. One
participant in the broadcast, Salem Radio Network News, reaches more
than 1,500 Christian stations nationwide, and Focus on the Family offers
access to an audience of 1.5 million. During a recent broadcast
Brownback explains that with the help of the VAT, he's working to defeat
a measure that would stiffen penalties for violent attacks on gays and
lesbians. Members of VAT help by mobilizing their flocks: An e-mail sent
out by the Family Research Council warned that the hate-crime bill would
lead, inexorably, to the criminalization of Christianity.
Brownback recently muscled through the Judiciary Committee a proposed
amendment to the Constitution to make not just gay marriage but even
civil unions nearly impossible. "I don't see where the compromise point
would be on marriage," he says. The amendment has no chance of passing,
but it's not designed to. It's a time bomb, scheduled to detonate
sometime during the 2006 electoral cycle. The intended victims aren't
Democrats but other Republicans. GOP moderates will be forced to vote
for or against "marriage," which -- in the language of the VAT
communications network -- is another way of saying for or against the
"homosexual agenda." It's a typical VAT strategy: a tool with which to
purify the ranks of the Republican Party.
* * *
Eleven years ago, Brownback himself underwent a similar process of
purification. It started, he says, with a strange bump on his right
side: a melanoma, diagnosed in 1995.
Brownback is sitting in the Senate dining room surrounded by
back-slapping senators and staffers, yet he seems serene. His press
secretary tries to stop him from talking -- he considers Brownback's
cancer epiphany suitable only for religious audiences -- but Brownback
can't be distracted. His eyes open wide and his shoulders slump as he
settles into the memory. He starts using words like "meditation" and
"solitude." The press secretary winces.
The doctors scooped out a piece of his flesh, Brownback says, as if
murmuring to himself. A minor procedure, but it scared him. In his mind,
he lost hold of everything. He asked himself, "What have I done with my
life?" The answer seemed to be "Nothing."
One night, while his family was sleeping, Brownback got up and pulled
out a copy of his resume. Sitting in his silent house, in the middle of
the night, a scar over his ribs where cancer had been carved out of his
body, he looked down at the piece of paper. His work, the laws he had
passed. "This must be who I am," he thought. Then he realized: Nothing
he had done would last. All his accomplishments were humdrum
conservative measures, bureaucratic wrangling, legislation that had
nothing to do with God. They were worth nothing.
Brownback turns, holds my gaze. "So," he says, "I burned it."
He smiles. He pauses. He's waiting to see if I understand. He had
cleansed himself with fire. He had made himself pure.
"I'm a child of the living God," he explains.
I nod.
"You are, too," he says. He purses his lips as he searches the other
tables. Look, he says, pointing to a man across the room. "Mark Dayton,
over there?" The Democratic senator from Minnesota. "He's a liberal."
But you know what else he is? "A beautiful child of the living God."
Brownback continues. Ted Kennedy? "A beautiful child of the living God."
Hillary Clinton? Yes. Even Hillary. Especially Hillary.
Once, Brownback says, he hated Hillary Clinton. Hated her so much it
hurt him. But he reached in and scooped that hatred out like a cancer.
Now, he loves her. She, too, is a beautiful child of the living God.
* * *
After his spiritual transformation, Brownback began traveling to some of
the most blighted regions in the world. At times his motivation appeared
strictly economic. He toured the dictatorships of Central Asia, trading
U.S. support for access to oil -- but he insists that he wanted to
prevent their wealth from falling into "Islamic hands." Oil may have
spurred his interest in Africa, too -- the U.S. competes with China for
access to African oil fields -- but the welfare of the world's most
afflicted continent has since become a genuine obsession for Brownback.
He has traveled to Darfur, in Sudan, and he has just returned from the
Congo, where the starving die at a rate of 1,000 a day. Recalling the
child soldiers he's met in Uganda, his voice chokes and his eyes fill
with horror.
When Brownback talks about Africa, he sounds like JFK, or even Bono.
"We're only five percent of the population," he says, "but we're
responsible for thirty percent of the world's economy, thirty-three
percent of military spending. We're going to be held accountable for the
assets we've been given." His definition of moral decadence includes
America's failure to stop genocide in the Sudan and torture in North
Korea. He wants drug companies to spend as much on medicine for malaria
as they do on feel-good drugs for Americans, like Viagra and Prozac. Ask
him what drives him and he'll answer, without irony, "widows and
orphans." It's a reference to the New Testament Epistle of James:
"Religion that God our father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to
look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from
being polluted by the world."
Brownback is less concerned about the world being polluted by people.
His biggest financial backer is Koch Industries, an oil company that
ranks among America's largest privately held companies. "The Koch
folks," as they're known around the senator's office, are among the
nation's worst polluters. In 2000, the company was slapped with the
largest environmental civil penalty in U.S. history for illegally
discharging 3 million gallons of crude oil in six states. That same year
Koch was indicted for lying about its emissions of benzene, a chemical
linked to leukemia, and dodged criminal charges in return for a $20
million settlement. Brownback has received nearly $100,000 from Koch and
its employees, and during his neck-and-neck race in 1996, a mysterious
shell company called Triad Management provided $410,000 for last-minute
advertising on Brownback's behalf. A Senate investigative committee
later determined that the money came from the two brothers who run Koch
Industries.
Brownback has been a staunch opponent of environmental regulations that
Koch finds annoying, fighting fuel-efficiency standards and the Kyoto
Protocol on global warming. But for the senator, there's no real divide
between the predatory economic interests of his corporate backers and
his own moral passions. He received more money funneled through Jack
Abramoff, the GOP lobbyist under investigation for bilking Indian tribes
of more than $80 million, than all but four other senators -- and he
blocked a casino that Abramoff's clients viewed as a competitor. But
getting Brownback to vote against gambling doesn't take bribes; he would
have done so regardless of the money.
Brownback finds the issue of finances distasteful. He refuses to discuss
his backers, smoothly turning the issue to matters of faith. "Pat got me
elected," he says, referring to Robertson's network of Christian-right
organizations. Sitting in his corner office in the Senate, Brownback
returns to one of his favorite subjects: the scourge of homosexuality.
The office has just been remodeled and the high-ceilinged room is almost
barren. On Brownback's desk, adrift at the far end of the room, there's
a Bible open to the Gospel of John.
It doesn't bother Brownback that most Bible scholars challenge the idea
that Scripture opposes homosexuality. "It's pretty clear," he says,
"what we know in our hearts." This, he says, is "natural law," derived
from observation of the world, but the logic is circular: It's wrong
because he observes himself believing it's wrong.
He has worldly proof, too. "You look at the social impact of the
countries that have engaged in homosexual marriage." He shakes his head
in sorrow, thinking of Sweden, which Christian conservatives believe has
been made by "social engineering" into an outer ring of hell. "You'll
know 'em by their fruits," Brownback says. He pauses, and an awkward
silence fills the room. He was citing scripture -- Matthew 7:16 -- but
he just called gay Swedes "fruits."
Homosexuality may not be sanctioned by the Bible, but slavery is -- by
Old and New Testaments alike. Brownback thinks slavery is wrong, of
course, but the Bible never is. How does he square the two? "I've
wondered on that very issue," he says. He tentatively suggests that the
Bible views slavery as a "person-to-person relationship," something to
be worked out beyond the intrusion of government. But he quickly
abandons the argument; calling slavery a personal choice, after all, is
awkward for a man who often compares slavery to abortion.
* * *
Although Brownback converted to Catholicism in 2002 through Opus Dei, an
ultraorthodox order that, like the Fellowship, specializes in
cultivating the rich and powerful, the source of much of his religious
and political thinking is Charles Colson, the former Nixon aide who
served seven months in prison for his attempt to cover up Watergate. A
"key figure," says Brownback, in the power structure of Christian
Washington, Colson is widely acknowledged as the Christian right's
leading intellectual. He is the architect behind faith-based
initiatives, the negotiator who forged the Catholic-evangelical unity
known as co-belligerency, and the man who drove sexual morality to the
top of the movement's agenda.
"When I came to the Senate," says Brownback, "I sought him out. I had
been listening to his thoughts for years, and wanted to get to know him
some."
The admiration is mutual. Colson, a powerful member of the Fellowship,
spotted Brownback as promising material not long after he joined the
group's cell for freshman Republicans. At the time, Colson was holding
classes on "biblical worldview" for leaders on Capitol Hill, and
Brownback became a prize pupil. Colson taught that abortion is only a
"threshold" issue, a wedge with which to introduce fundamentalism into
every question. The two men soon grew close, and began coordinating
their efforts: Colson provides the strategy, and Brownback translates it
into policy. "Sam has been at the meetings I called, and I've been at
the meetings he called," Colson says.
Colson's most admirable work is Prison Fellowship, a ministry that
offers counseling and "worldview training" to prisoners around the
world. Many of his programs receive federal funding, and Brownback is
sponsoring a bill that would make it easier for more government dollars
to go to faith-based programs such as Colson's. Social scientists debate
whether such programs work, but politicians consider them undeniable
evidence of the existence of compassionate conservatism.
And yet compassionate conservatism, as Colson conceives it and Brownback
implements it, is strikingly similar to plain old authoritarian
conservatism. In place of liberation, it offers as an ideal what Colson
calls "biblical obedience" and what Brownback terms "submission." The
concept is derived from Romans 13, the scripture by which Brownback and
Colson understand their power as God-given: "Whosoever therefore
resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that
resist shall receive to themselves damnation."
To Brownback, the verse is not dictatorial -- it's simply one of the
demands of spiritual war, the "worldwide spiritual offensive" that the
Fellowship declared a half-century ago. "There's probably a higher level
of Christians being persecuted during the last ten, twenty years than .
. . throughout human history," Brownback once declared on Colson's radio
show. Given to framing his own faith in terms of battles, he believes
that secularists and Muslims are fighting a worldwide war against
Christians -- sometimes in concert. "Religious freedom" is one of his
top priorities, and securing it may require force. He's sponsored
legislation that could lead to "regime change" in Iran, and has proposed
sending combat troops to the Philippines, where Islamic rebels killed a
Kansas missionary.
Brownback doesn't demand that everyone believe in his God -- only that
they bow down before Him. Part holy warrior, part holy fool, he preaches
an odd mix of theological naivete and diplomatic savvy. The faith he
wields in the public square is blunt, heavy, unsubtle; brass knuckles of
the spirit. But the religion of his heart is that of the woman whose
example led him deep into orthodoxy: Mother Teresa -- it is a kiss for
the dying. He sees no tension between his intolerance and his
tenderness. Indeed, their successful reconciliation in his political
self is the miracle at the heart of the new fundamentalism, the fusion
of hellfire and Hallmark.
"I have seen him weep," growls Colson, anointing Brownback with his
highest praise. Such are the new American crusaders: tear-streaked
strong men huddling together to talk about their feelings before they
march forth, their sentimental faith sharpened and their man-feelings
hardened into "natural law." They are God's promise keepers, His
defenders of marriage, His knights of the fetal citizen. They are the
select few who embody the paradoxical love promised by Christ when he
declares -- in Matthew 10:34 -- "I did not come to bring peace, but a
sword."
Standing on his back porch in Topeka, Brownback looks down into a dark
patch of hedge trees, a gnarled hardwood that's nearly unsplittable. The
same trees grow on the 1,400 acres that surround Brownback's childhood
home in Parker; not much else remains. When the senator was a boy, there
were eleven families living on the land. Now there are only the
Brownbacks and a friend from high school who lives rent-free in one of
the empty houses. When the friend moves on, Brownback's father plans to
tear the house down. The rest of the homes are already taking care of
themselves, slowly crumbling into the prairie. The world Brownback grew
up in has vanished.
In its place, Brownback imagines another one. Standing on his porch, he
thinks back to the days before the Civil War, when his home state was
known as Bloody Kansas and John Brown fought for freedom with an ax. "A
terrorist," concedes Brownback, careful not to offend his Southern
supporters, but also a wise man. When Brown was in jail awaiting
execution, a visitor told the abolitionist that he was crazy.
"I'm not the one who has 4 million people in bondage," Brownback
intones, recalling Brown's response. "I, sir, think you are crazy."
This is another of Brownback's parables. In place of 4 million slaves,
he thinks of uncountable unborn babies, of all the persecuted Christians
-- a nation within a nation, awaiting Brownback's liberation. Brownback,
sir, thinks that secular America is crazy.
The senator stares, his face gentle but unsmiling.
He isn't joking.
JEFF SHARLET
Posted Jan 25, 2006 1:09 PM
Copyright 2006 Rolling Stone
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a cornucopia of splinters.
Richo
stoney wrote:
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9178374/gods_senator?rnd=1142140225190&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1212
>
> God's Senator
> Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback
>
Seriously scary.
(Like Bush and co were not scary enough...)
I fear for the future.
Mark.
Yang, AthD (h.c), Kicking AWOL's Cocaine Snorting Ass
>http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9178374/gods_senator?rnd=1142140225190&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1212
>
>God's Senator
>Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback
I say we piss him off and call one of the hills in Kansas "Brownback
Mountain" :-)
-----
Yang
a.a. #28
AthD (h.c.) conferred by the regents of the LCL
a.a. pastor #-273.15, the most frigid church of Celcius nee Kelvin
EAC Econometric Forecast and Sorcery Division
Proudly plonked by Lani Girl and Crazyalec (aka olek...@yahoo.com aka Yang's little poltregeist bitch)
The Bush 'balanced' budget: 2 trillion and worsening
The Bush 'economic' policy: 12.5 million FEWER jobs than Clinton and counting
The Bush Iraq lie: -2306 GIs, one friend's co-worker's son and mounting
Having Bush fuck up my country: Worthless
-----
"Ahhhhhh, yessssssss, ummmmmmm - Alito, Alito, Alito"
-duke (duck...@cox.net), aka PedophilEarl J Weber, 59
year old mateless, heirless biological failure
of Afton Oaks Apartment, Baton Rouge,who pussied
out of the Vietnam draft, showing his gay side
despite his avowed anti-gay bigotry
Contact duke's priest and ask
him why duke is such a racist:
http://www.stpatrickbr.org/
Father Gerard "Jerry" Martin
stpatrickbr<AT>bellsouth<DOT>net
Saint Patrick Catholic Church
12424 Brogdon Lane
Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70816
The Chief Instigator
>stoney wrote:
>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9178374/gods_senator?rnd=1142140225190&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1212
I'd say stock up on ammo. If Brownback gets that high up the ladder, the
country I was born in will no longer exist, and it'll be open season on
theocrats.
--
Patrick "The Chief Instigator" Humphrey (pat...@io.com) Houston, Texas
chiefinstigator.us.tt/aeros.php (TCI's 2005-06 Houston Aeros)
LAST GAME: Omaha 6, Houston 1 (March 12)
NEXT GAME: Wednesday, March 15 at Chicago, 7:05
Witziges Rätsel
>>> Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback
>
>>Seriously scary.
>>(Like Bush and co were not scary enough...)
>
>>I fear for the future.
>>
>
> country I was born in will no longer exist, and it'll be open season on
> theocrats.
Wasn't the acceptance of Christianity instrumental in destroying
the Roman empire?
The Chief Instigator
It did touch off the long slide into oblivion...and I have no desire to be
ruled by idiot (and dishonest, to boot) theocrats.
stoney
stoney
stoney
Cocaine Snorting Ass" <eacmole@/*AWOLBUSH*/mail.com> wrote in
alt.atheism
>On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 20:49:38 -0800, stoney <sto...@the.net> wrote:
>
>>http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9178374/gods_senator?rnd=1142140225190&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1212
>>
>>God's Senator
>>Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback
>
>
>I say we piss him off and call one of the hills in Kansas "Brownback
>Mountain" :-)
Just piss *on* him.
Richo
stoney wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 23:00:33 -0800, "Yang, AthD (h.c), Kicking AWOL's
> Cocaine Snorting Ass" <eacmole@/*AWOLBUSH*/mail.com> wrote in
> alt.atheism
>
> >On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 20:49:38 -0800, stoney <sto...@the.net> wrote:
> >
> >>http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9178374/gods_senator?rnd=1142140225190&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1212
> >>
> >>God's Senator
> >>Who would Jesus vote for? Meet Sam Brownback
> >
> >
> >I say we piss him off and call one of the hills in Kansas "Brownback
> >Mountain" :-)
>
> Just piss *on* him.
>
...unless he is on fire!
8-)
Mark.
stoney
in alt.atheism
>
There is that, yes.