Rep. Pryor (D-Ark) spokesman calls Jeff Sharlet "Nut Job", denies Pryor is in C Street's'The Family'

[Shallah Kali]

Mark Pryor, 'Family' man UPDATE
http://www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2009/07/mark_pryor_family_man.aspx

It's interesting on its own. But here comes the Arkansas angle, in the Family's membership list:

{Quoting Sharlet's Salon piece here http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/07/21/c_street/ } Today's roll call is just as impressive: Men under the Family's religio-political counsel include, in addition to Ensign, Coburn and Pickering, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham, both R-S.C.; James Inhofe, R-Okla., John Thune, R-S.D., and recent senators and high officials such as John Ashcroft, Ed Meese, Pete Domenici and Don Nickles. Over in the House there's Joe Pitts, R-Penn., Frank Wolf, R-Va., Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., Ander Crenshaw, R-Fla., Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., and John R. Carter, R-Texas. Historically, the Family has been strongly Republican, but it includes Democrats, too. There's Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, for instance, a vocal defender of putting the Ten Commandments in public places, and Sen. Mark Pryor, the pro-war Arkansas Democrat responsible for scuttling Obama's labor agenda. Sen. Pryor explained to me the meaning of bipartisanship he'd learned through the Family: "Jesus didn't come to take sides. He came to take over." And by Jesus, the Family means the Family.

PS -- Hillary Clinton fell in with this group once upon a time. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/7/12/752573/-Hillarys-Association-With-The-Family

UPDATE: Pryor's spokesman Michael Teague disputes any characterization of Pryor as a member of the Family (though the record is clear that he has co-chaired the Family-sponsored National Prayer Breakfast.) Says Teague:

Unless you’ve forgotten when you ran a profile piece on Sen. Pryor last August, this issue was addressed and put to rest (August 7, 2008, page 11). As I said then, Jeff Sharlet and those who believe his stories also read The DaVinci Code and believe it’s true. For the record, Senator Pryor is not a member of this group. Additionally, we have no record of Sen. Pryor ever being interviewed by Jeff Sharlett. Lastly, as I said before Jeff Sharlet is a nut job.

UPDATE: Sharlet responds angrily in a telephone message that he has indeed talked to Pryor. He said it was an interview about evangelicals in politics for the Rolling Stone and anybody who says otherwise is a liar.

more links to articles on The Family here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=385&topic_id=340921&mesg_id=340921

hm. Sharlet has a piece on his blog about how Pryor opposed Card Check here:
Card Check Religion http://killingthebuddha.com/ktblog/card-check-religion/

[MisterP]

1. and doesn't Wal-Mao have strong connections to fundamentalism

as well as to anti-unionism? I smell another "nexus" like the 80s one between the Moonies, conservaDems, and Pentagon-CIA reactionaries

[Ikonoklast]

2. Good. Make them deny it in public.

Now that the bright lights are getting shined on that political power-hungry money-generating freak-show hiding behind a veneer of religion, the cockroaches are scurrying to the corners.

Make all of them deny it.

Better yet, ask them if they attend the orgies scheduled for every Friday night.

Some people say...

[Shallah Kali]

3. ""by the late 1940s, their {The Family} membership was equal parts business and political elite"

http://killingthebuddha.com/ktblog/card-check-religion/

I first encountered Pryor a few years back when I was researching a story about Battlecry { http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_002836.php } , a militant right youth evangelical movement. Its leader, Ron Luce, explained to me that regulating the market made a mockery of God’s invisible hand, and that unions were a form of idolatry, a substitution of worldly solidarity for the only fellowship that matters, that of Jesus Christ. Luce, such a fierce opponent of “pornography” — a category in which he included not just Playboy but R-rated movies and magazines such as the one I was working for at the time, Rolling Stone — that he was willing to bend his free market fundamentalism in order to ban it all, proposed Wal-Mart, which censors material sold in its stores, as an example of a company following a godly path even without government help. Then he surprised me by naming as one of his chief allies Senator Pryor from Arkansas — Wal-Mart’s home state.

When I called Pryor to ask him about Luce’s claim, he volunteered a deeper association as his real Christian involvement: He was a member of the Family, a group I just happened to be writing a book about at the time.

Luce is a bit of a buffoon; the Family has been fighting organized labor since its formation as a union-busting coalition of Christian business executives in 1935, at the height of the New Deal. The Depression, they believed, was a punishment from God for the nation’s turn toward socialism. By the late 1940s, their membership was equal parts business and political elite, the leadership of the National Association Manufacturers — deeply involved in lobbying against EFCA today — and free market fundamentalists in Congress who united to roll back many of the rights of labor to organize won during the New Deal. Corporate greed wasn’t part of their calculations–at least, not explicitly. They believed then–and now–that business tycoons must be free to lead with their hearts, unbound by regulations or contracts with union. They called their approach “biblical capitalism,” an economic theology I discuss on Bloggingheads.tv { http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/11164?in=00:19:53&out=00:31:32 } with Will Wilkinson from the conservative Cato Institute, who names it for what it really is: “self-interest by proxy.”

Pryor, a past organizer of the group’s National Prayer Breakfast, is no radical deregulator. A conservative Democrat, he’s still a Democrat, which is to say, he votes along party lines when doing so won’t seriously challenge the interests of big business. The Family doesn’t dictate his politics. But the group does shape them. He credits the organization with helping him to see that the wall between church and state has grown too high and encouraging him to view ostensibly secular issues in religious terms. “People separate out,” the group’s leader, Doug Coe, preaches { http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/0079525 } . “’Oh, okay, I got religion, that’s private.’ As if Jesus doesn’t know anything about building highways, or Social Security. We gotta take Jesus out of the religious wrapping.”

Then again, maybe the matter isn’t theological for Pryor, who inherited his seat from his father. Nobody ever accused him of being the sharpest knife in the drawer, a fact Pryor actually offered in his own defense when Bill Maher asked him to explain his belief in the “literacy” of the Bible (sic) and his anti-evolution views for his film Religulous. Maher can be a bully, and his understanding of religion lacks subtlety, to say the least, but when Pryor, stumped, declares “you don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate,” { http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fliFcvGAKk } even Maher seems to feel sorry him.

Pity the poor man no more. Today, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which declares the Employee Free Choice Act a “firestorm bordering on Armageddon,” awarded Senator Pryor { http://arkansasmatters.com/content/fulltext/news?cid=204721 } its Spirit of Enterprise Award.