World Congress of Theocrats: Extremist Group Meets to Denounce LGBT Rights
Brownback loves theocracy.
An obscure Religious Right group met this week in Salt Lake City, Utah, to outline its fundamentalist vision for the United States.
The World Congress of Families (WCF), which meets every few years on no particular schedule, is a project of Hillsdale College professor Allan C. Carlson’s Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society. This year, it boasted Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) and Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) among its more prominent speakers.
As I previously reported for Church & State magazine, the WCF advocates policies that are extreme even by fundamentalist standards. Their platform, as outlined by Carlson and his associate, Paul T. Mero, in their publication “The Natural Family: A Manifesto” articulates demands to end same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, abortion rights, contraception access and, puzzlingly, “the aggressive state promotion of androgyny.”
But never fear. Carlson and Mero don’t just want to repeal things. No, they have suggestions too—like “encouraging” employers to pay a “family wage to heads of households.” Those heads of households, of course, are male. The authors lauded 19th century laws that allocated one wage per family paid out to fathers. The policies devised by Carlson and Mero would effectively ban women from working.
There’s a distinctly anti-federalist tone to the WCF and its materials, too. Carlson and Mero define the family as “the first and fundamental unit of society.” They define this in a political sense, and place it first in a strange governmental hierarchy.
“Just political life also flows out of natural family homes. True sovereignty originates here. These homes are the source of ordered liberty, the fountain of real democracy, the seedbed of virtue,” they wrote, adding that Theodore Roosevelt said, “Even a nation is ‘nothing but the aggregate of the families within its borders.’”
The WCF’s disdain for the concept of a strong federal government didn’t deter Brownback and Herbert from speaking at the event, but both governors attempted to distance themselves from the values of its organizers.
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