Trump speaks on Faith Based Adoption.
Trump briefly mentions a legal situation of a Faith Based adoption agency in Michigan.
Trump speaks upon human trafficking around the world.
Trump states that we are going to stop "Modern Day Slavery".
Trump talked about the sanctity of birth over abortion.
Will media talk about this?
Will "The Elected Ones" talk about trafficking tiny humans?
Will DOJ & FBI finally stand up and end modern day slavery?
I believe so.
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| #FreeMarieButina |
It shouldn’t. As Jeff Sharlet, an associate professor of English at Dartmouth, has pointed out, the National Prayer Breakfast has long offered “a backdoor to American power.” And America’s homegrown Christian nationalists have evinced an admiration for Russia’s authoritarian leader that appears to have grown apace with his brutality.
On Tuesday, Maria Butina, a 29-year-old Russian whose name was spelled Mariia in court papers, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy and acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the Russian Federation. According to the complaint unsealed on Monday, Ms. Butina’s promotional activities for Russian political interests included attending the National Prayer Breakfast twice.
The National Prayer Breakfast was initiated in 1953 by a Methodist minister, Abraham Vereide, who had been leading Congressional prayer groups for a decade. The annual breakfast now attracts close to 4,000 participants and is hosted by members of Congress. But the real force behind the event remains Mr. Vereide’s Fellowship Foundation, also known as “The Family,” whose fundamental mission is to create a ruling consortium of Christ-centered political and community leaders.
“The Family considers #nationalprayerbreakfast a recruiting device,” Mr. Sharlet, who has published two books about the group, tweeted on Monday.
Lobbyists and foreign governments look forward to the event as a way to meet powerful people without, as Mr. Sharlet has reported, having to go through the State Department and normal vetting processes.
“It’s not just the breakfast — The Family organizes a week of de facto lobbying events,” Mr. Sharlet explained on Twitter. “#MariaButina used them to maximize impact.”
On Oct. 5, 2016, with one National Prayer Breakfast under her belt, Ms. Butina direct messaged a Russian official on Twitter: “We made our bet. I am following our game. I will be connecting the people from the prayer breakfast to this group.”
After the election, Ms. Butina informed someone the complaint called “U.S. person number one” that she would be bringing along some “VERY influential” Russians to the breakfast. After the event — which President Trump attended, just as previous presidents have — Ms. Butina emailed one of its organizers to thank him for “the gift” of his “precious time during the National Prayer Breakfast week — and for the very private meeting that followed. A new relationship between two countries always begins better when it begins in faith.”
It also should not be surprising that at least some in the breakfast crowd were positively disposed to the Russian visitors. The bond between America’s Christian nationalists and the Russian government goes back a long way, long before anyone conceived of the possibility of a Trump administration.
Paul Weyrich belongs on any shortlist of the individuals who created the religious right as we know it today. He was a central figure in the founding of numerous conservative organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, the Moral Majority and the Council for National Policy. In the 1970s, Mr. Weyrich was one of the strategists who first conceived of outreach to evangelical churches in order to recruit activists to socially conservative causes. He was also among the first to grasp the potential for an alliance with religious conservatives in Russia and Eastern Europe.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Mr. Weyrich made dozens of trips to Russia, eventually becoming a strong supporter of closer relations. By the time of his death in 2008, Mr. Weyrich was writing and speaking frequently in defense of Russia and facilitating visits between American conservatives and Russian political leaders.
Another religious conservative who pursued the Russian connection was Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage. In 2013, Mr. Brown testified before the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, in support of legislation opposing adoption by gay couples. “What I realized was that there was a great change happening in the former Soviet Union,” Mr. Brown told The Washington Post. “There was a real push to re-instill Christian values in the public square.”
Joining the National Organization for Marriage in the budding alliance were a number of other religious right groups, including the activist groups International Organization of the Family, also directed by Mr. Brown, and Family Watch International, an Arizona-based group that promotes an anti-LGBT and anti-abortion agenda around the world. In 2016, the World Congress of Families, a group that formed in Russia in 1997, held an event in Tbilisi, capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Participants cast President Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Orthodox Church as defenders of “Christian civilization” against a secular, decadent West.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, the passion for Russian values among America’s religious extremists grew still more ardent. In 2013, Bryan Fischer, then a spokesman for the American Family Association, called Mr. Putin a “lion of Christianity.” In 2014, Franklin Graham — the politically influential evangelist and vocal Trump supporter — defended Mr. Putin for his efforts “to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda,” even as he lamented that Americans have “abdicated our moral leadership.” In December 2015, Mr. Graham met privately with Mr. Putin for 45 minutes.
Although the religious right’s affection for Mr. Putin appears to center on a shared disgust with “the homosexual agenda” and other so-called family issues, it is impossible to overlook the attraction that the Russian leader’s authoritarian style has for his American admirers. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mike Pence hailed Mr. Putin as “a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country.”The attraction appears to be mutual — even if it is almost certainly not symmetrical. More than 50 Russians attended the most recent National Prayer Breakfast in February.
At the same time that it has been infiltrating the political system of the United States, the Russian government has sought to cultivate and influence far-right groups in Europe. It turns out that anti-L.G.B.T. politics are an effective tool in mobilizing religious nationalists everywhere, which is in turn an excellent way to destabilize the Western alliance and advance Russia’s geopolitical interests.
Anti-L.G.B.T. politics are in this respect no different from the “gun rights” advocacy that Ms. Butina is accused of using to build a bridge between Russian and American leaders via the National Rifle Association. No serious observer believes that Mr. Putin cares a fig about our Second Amendment (or the rest of the Constitution). For him, America’s fabled gun culture is just a weakness to be exploited for the sake of Russia’s national interest.
Which really ought to give pause to those who imagine that Russia is sincere in its supposed desire to unite with America’s religious conservatives over a putatively shared variety of Christian values.
Why would anyone assume that Mr. Putin means what he says about spiritual matters?
The religious right thinks that it’s using Mr. Putin to advance its aims. But a far more plausible interpretation is that he is using the religious right — to infiltrate, divide and weaken our country.
http://beverlytran.blogspot.com/search?q=mariia+butina#axzz5egWbwTZU
http://beverlytran.blogspot.com/search?q=mariia+butina#axzz5egWbwTZU
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