Behind the closed doors on C Street

I saw this comment on Crooks and Liars about C Street. Hilarious:

C Street: The Studio 54 for the aging GOP adulterer

It's a lot more about C street than just the two lawmakers that room there at C street that had extramarital affairs.

On Wednesday, the author of a book about The Family was interviewed on KNPR-FM’s public affairs show “State of Nevada.” Author Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor to Harper’s and Rolling Stone magazines, lived with The Family in early 2002. His book, “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” was published last year by HarperCollins.
The following is an account of the State of Nevada interview, conducted by host Dave Berns. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Dave Berns: Scandals involving John Ensign and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford placed a spotlight on The Family. The group’s town house in Washington is a former convent with a chapel and, according to federal tax records, is registered as a church. Tenants pay below market rent.

We asked Sharlet which is the bigger story: the sex scandals, or the public conversation about The Family.

Jeff Sharlet: The story begins with these scandals. The question is, do you make the bigger connection? The real issue is not who Ensign or Sanford sleep with, but the organizations with which they pursue their policies and the sources to which they turn for moral and religious authority.

I think that is starting to come out, particularly with Ensign, because we see the role The Family plays in the cover-up. Doug Hampton said The Family had a role in moving money around for the affair, which I think a lot of outsiders look at as hypocritical. Knowing The Family, I understand that that’s not hypocritical from its perspective — that it’s actually a form of doing God’s work.

Berns: Talk about the relationship between members of The Family — they are men, not women — and the role they play as a larger group.

Sharlet: The Family began with this idea that God does not work through churches but rather through those whom The Family calls the “New Chosen.”

They believe they’re chosen by God. They can’t be expected to pray with the rest of us. They need to pray in private with people of equal status.

When you join one of these prayer groups, you give these men veto power over your life, over every aspect of your life. Wives involved with The Family have said, “In my husband’s life, his brothers come first, I come second.”
We saw that happening with the men Doug Hampton went to see. They were exercising veto power over Ensign’s life.

A lot of us might think that sounds fine, they were helping him stay on the straight and narrow. But when we look at the people exercising this veto power, in particular David Coe, who has been in the news as sort of working with Ensign, you have some really questionable moral authority.

Berns: Doug Hampton said that after members of The Family confronted Ensign, the senator wrote a letter saying he would end the relationship. Did that sound familiar to you?

Sharlet: Absolutely. I start my book out with the story of the month I spent living with The Family, during which I got to spend time at the house on C Street.

I was invited into The Family by a man who had dropped everything and moved to Washington to work with them. While he was there, his fiancee was raped. He wanted to jump on the next airplane to be with her, and his brothers in Christ decided to exercise their veto power. They said, “What was your fiancee doing in a bar without you? Perhaps this was God’s way of telling you that you are not supposed to be with this woman.”

They called her a Jezebel. They told him, “You are not to go and see your fiancee.”

Thank God this man did not listen, broke with The Family and went to his fiancee.
Read on.