GOP Sex Scandal Exposes Secretive Conservative Religious Group — ‘The Family’
Thursday, July 16th, 2009 by RLRFrom AlterNet
By Rachel Maddow
The following is a transcript from The Rachel Maddow Show on Washington D.C.’s “C Street House,” which is now at the center of a media firestorm. Now GOP Senator Tom Coburn, sex-scandal embroiled GOP leaders Senator John Ensign and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford have been tied to the C Street House, which is registered as a church and provides substantially lower than market rate rent. Coburn and Ensign have lived at the C Street house, while Sanford has participated in its Bible study group.
We start with a mystery — a mystery that’s unfolding alongside the two major political scandals of the summer. It’s a mystery that concerns this house at 133 C Street Southeast in Washington, D.C. I’m calling it a house because that’s what it looks like to me and people do live there.
But if you consult this building’s financial paper trail, you will find that it’s actually considered to be a church. That designation makes C Street a convenient tax-free haven for the secretive organization that runs it, an organization known as the Family. It also makes for some awkward tax and income questions for the at least five, probably seven members of Congress who live at the house, in exchange for what appears to be substantially below market rent.
As explained by our guest last night, Jeff Sharlet, who secretly infiltrated the family to write a book about them, the C Street house is a former convent. It’s used as a sort of subsidized, really upscale dorm for members of Congress who are associated with this powerful, poorly understood religious group.
The Family and the house at C Street have ended up reluctantly in the headlines now because of the two major politicians’ sex scandals that are embroiling the Republican Party this summer and that have taken two of their reported 2012 presidential hopefuls out of political contention.
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