The Dude Abides
Last year, for the first time in its 57 years of existence, angry protests greeted the seemingly innocuous National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., an event that has been attended by every sitting president since Dwight D. Eisenhower — including Barack Obama.
This year’s Prayer Breakfast, scheduled for Thursday morning, will convene under a disturbing pall cast by the Jan. 26 murder of David Kato, a well-known gay activist who was bludgeoned to death in his home in Kampala. Earlier this year, Kato was targeted publicly by a Ugandan newspaper in a front-page article identifying him and dozens of other Ugandans as a “known homos” under the headline, “Hang Them.”
The National Prayer Breakfast, held for years at the Washington Hilton hotel, is a schmooze fest where more than 3,000 religious and political leaders from the U.S. and abroad network, glad hand and pray together. The breakfast drew the ire of human rights activists last year for its alleged ties to a bill introduced in the Ugandan legislature in 2009 that would make some homosexual activity a crime punishable by death.
The Ugandan anti-gay bill was drafted by MP David Bahati, a Ugandan participant in the shadowy evangelical Christian organization known as the Fellowship (or the Family), which sponsors the annual Prayer Breakfast in Washington. (The Ugandan parliament has not yet passed the bill, but it remains viable and is expected to be voted on in the near future, according to media reports and sources familiar with the issue.)
The Ugandan bill proposes life sentences for those convicted of engaging in homosexual sex, jail sentences of up to three years for heterosexuals who fail to report homosexual activity to police, and Ugandans engaging in homosexual sex overseas may be subject to extradition for prosecution. If those convicted of having homosexual sex are HIV-positive, in a position of “authority” over their sex partner or if the “victim” of the sex act is under 18 years of age, the penalty is death.
While a number of high-profile Prayer Breakfast and/or Fellowship participants have repudiated the proposed Ugandan legislature — Obama, who is expected to attend Thursday’s breakfast, called it “odious” during his address last year — many human rights activists and other critics remain convinced of the Fellowship’s role in catalyzing support for the proposed draconian laws targeting homosexuals in Uganda.
The Fellowship keeps a very low profile. Its participants and leadership are media shy and it maintains no official Web site, membership roster or official spokesperson. Writing on ChristianityToday.com in August 2009, U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and former Congressman and U.S. ambassador Tony Hall defended the Fellowship, saying it is not “a secretive organization — such as a Christian mafia — with a plan to do anything other than help people follow Jesus.” (Read ChristianityToday.com’s May 2009 take out on The Fellowship and its spiritual leader, Doug Coe, written by Grove City College (Penn.) psychology professor Warren Throckmorton by clicking on this LINK.)
The Fellowship serves as an “administrative umbrella” for more than 200 ministries in the United States and abroad, including the well-known Congressional Prayer Groups, where lawmakers meet privately (and confidentially) for prayer and encouragement. “The essence of their teaching is to encourage love for God and others, always in keeping with biblical principles,” Wolf and Hall wrote.As they did last year, human rights advocates are planning protests for Thursday outside the Washington Hilton and elsewhere. For Obama and other guests to attend the Prayer Breakfast is tantamount to them giving a (divine and tacit) imprimatur to Uganda’s persecution of homosexuals, they argue.
“My sources within the group last year said they felt the bad press surrounding the Uganda affair … and the prospect of protests at the breakfast — presented the greatest threat to the breakfast’s success in its history,” journalist Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, based on his investigative reporting on the group — including time spent undercover in one of the group’s training cadre — told me Tuesday in an email exchange.
“The Family was vocal in distancing itself from Bahati — though a spokesman would scold me in furious terms every time I described their maneuvers as ‘distancing,’” Sharlet said. “Bahati offered condolences, which he explained to me in the context of understanding that Kato ‘should be remembered as a troubled soul who worked long and hard to destroy the future of marriage and the future of our children.’ He told me that he was opposed to extrajudicial violence, but that ‘the invasion must be stopped.’ The invasion, that is, of foreign ‘homosexual influence’ — he’s used the murder to call for an investigation of foreign funding of human rights and LGBT groups in Uganda.” (Read Sharlet’s complete comments to me by clicking this link: sharlet on NPB 2011 via email)
Some critics lay the blame for Kato’s murder squarely at the feet of the Fellowship and three American evangelical leaders who spoke in March 2009 at a three-day Kampala seminar (that Bahati attended) billed as a forum to “expose the truth behind homosexuality and the homosexual agenda.” More than a few critics claim the 2009 seminar was the catalyst for Ugandan lawmakers proposal of harsh anti-homosexuality punishments.
“David’s death is a result of the hatred planted in Uganda by U.S. evangelicals in 2009,” Val Kalende, a gay rights activist in Uganda, told the New York Times on Jan. 27. “The Ugandan government and the so-called U.S. evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood!”
The three U.S. evangelical leaders who spoke at the Kampala anti-homosexuality seminar were Scott Lively, head of the conservative Christian group Defend the Family International and author of The Pink Swastika, in which he claims homosexual men orchestrated the Holocaust; Caleb Lee Brundridge, a self-proclaimed “former” gay man and “sexual reorientation coach” at the International Healing Foundation; and Don Schmierer, author of An Ounce of Prevention: Preventing the Homosexual Condition in Today’s Youth, whose ministry involves helping people “recover” from homosexuality.
In an interview with the Times last week, Schmierer called Kato’s murder “horrible,” then proceeded to defend his part in that 2009 Kampala seminar. He wasn’t promoting anti-gay violence, he was talking about parenting skills, he said, and subsequently has been the recipient of hundreds of “hate” emails for being tied to Uganda’s virulent anti-homosexuality efforts. “Naturally, I don’t want anyone killed but I don’t feel I had anything to do with that,” Schmierer said. “I spoke to help people … and I’m getting bludgeoned from one end to the other.”
Ugandan police are investigating Kato’s murder and its possible motives — an early report said he may have been killed in a robbery as several items were found missing from his home. In a post on the Defend the Family Web site, Limley cautioned against presuming Kato’s death was a hate crime and suggested that he may have been killed “by a ‘gay’ lover, as was the case with another homosexual activist two weeks ago in New York. Carlos Castro was castrated with a corkscrew by his boyfriend and bled to death in his hotel room.” (There is no apparent connection between Kato and Castro’s murders beyond the fact that both victims were openly gay and violently killed.)
“It is not wrong to speak against homosexuality any more than it is wrong to speak against other behavioral disorders such as alcoholism and bulimia,” Limley wrote. “To take such criticism as permission to hurt another person is simply crazy and you can’t silence all legitimate criticism of a social problem because some crazy person might misconstrue it.”
Schmierer began his 2009 seminar address by cautioning his audience about how they speak to their children. Epithets such as “sissy” or “faggot” can injure a child’s psyche and may, he argued, plant the seeds for embracing a “homosexual lifestyle.” In the two years since, however, his words have taken on a dramatically different meaning.
“Death and life,” Schmierer told his Kampala audience, “are in the power of the tongue.”
(LISTEN TO THE AUDIO OF SCHIEMERER’S ’09 SPEECH AT THE KAMPALA SEMINAR HERE.)
A version of this column first appeared via Religion News Service.
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