Obama, Clinton criticize Ugandan anti-gay legislation at National Prayer Breakfast sponsored by extremist theocratic group that sponsored Ugandan anti-gay legislation

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I think we'd all be better off without those stupid National Prayer Breakfasts, just as we'd certainly all be better off without "The Family" (aka The Fellowship), the extremist theocratic group that sponsored yesterday's stupid breakfast and that includes in its ranks high-ranking Republicans like Mark Sanford and John Ensign -- and that runs the infamous C Street House in Washington.

Stupid? No, dangerous is more like it. To me, such politico-religious events have no place in a free and democratic society.

Still, I must praise President Obama and Secretary Clinton for using the occasion to criticize Uganda's awful anti-homosexual legislation, which the president called "unconscionable" and "odious."

That legislation, you see, was backed by... The Family/Fellowship. Indeed, it was a member of "The Family" who introduced the bill in the Ugandan Parliament. As I wrote back in November:

It's telling that a major force behind the Republican Party, and American conservatism generally, backs such appalling legislation. These people seem to have more in common with Uganda, Saudi Arabia, and other such illiberal places that they do with their own country and its liberal democratic principles. But then, for all their pro-American jingoism, they're actually quite un-American in terms of what they would like to do to America, and to the world, which is to remake it in the image of their own fundamentalism, including at the expense of basic human rights.

And yet, why is a so-called "National Prayer Breakfast" organized by these Christianist thugs -- thugs who think gays should be executed -- a major event in Washington? Why is it so significant that Obama, Clinton, and so many other major figures attend?

Uganda's legislation is appalling, but so too is "The Family" -- and so too is the ongoing political influence of "The Family" in Washington, and indeed at the highest levels of American politics.

For more, via Bilerico (with a must-read post on Uganda, "The Family," and the National Prayer Breakfast), here's Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, on Rachel Maddow last year: