Sept. 24, 2003 | Last December, at
his three-day God and World Peace event, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon drew
a notable slate of political figures, from Sen.
Richard Lugar, R-Ind., to Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., and, perhaps most
notably, James Towey, director of the White House
Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who offered
some respectful opening remarks to Moon's Unification
Church faithful. Moon followed, and called for all religions
to come together in support of the Bush plan
for faith-based initiatives.
Coming from Moon that made perfect sense, because
he already believes all religions will come together -- under him.
"The separation between religion and politics,"
he has observed on many occasions, "is what Satan likes most." His gospel:
Jesus failed because he never attained worldly
power. Moon will succeed, he says, by purifying our sex-corrupted culture,
and that includes cleaning up gays ("dung-eating
dogs," as he calls them) and American women ("a line of prostitutes").
Jews had better repent, too. (Moon claims that
the Holocaust was payback for the crucifixion of Christ: "Through the
principle of indemnity, Hitler killed 6 million
Jews.") His solution is a world theocracy that will enforce proper sexual
habits in order to bring about heaven on earth.
What sort of proper sexual habits? According to
Moon, in order to restore blood purity, very specific practices are prescribed.
Sex before marriage is out of the question, and
when sexual consummation does happen, it must adhere to very specific
instructions. First, a photograph of Moon must
be nearby, so that everything occurs under the reverend's watchful eye.
After two nights of woman-on-top sex, the couple
reverse positions, whereupon the man, according to Moon, restores
dominion over Eve, via the proper missionary
position. Then, according to the instructions attributed to the U.C.'s
American
Blessed Family Department, "after the act of
love, both spouses should wipe their sexual areas with the Holy Handkerchief"
--referring to the church-supplied washcloth
-- which must "be kept individually labeled and should never be laundered
or mixed up."
Incredibly, it now appears that under the new
priorities of the budding Faith Based Initiative, the federal government
has given Moon disciples its imprimatur -- and
funding.
Last summer, the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services gave a $475,280 grant to fund Free Teens USA, an after-school
celibacy club in urban New Jersey. Free Teens
USA, like other Moon civic organizations, claims it has no ties to the
Unification
Church. But according to documents obtained by
Salon under the Freedom of Information Act, the director and chief finance
officer of the Free Teens USA club, as well as
others listed on the group's board of directors, are former or present
high-ranking
Unification Church officials who omitted those
leadership roles from their applications for the federal grant.
The small success of Free Teens' government funding
is just a small indication of the remarkable transformation of the billionaire
Moon.
A man who once inspired considerable public horror
in the 1970s when his church faced a congressional inquiry and battled
accusations
of coercive recruitment and mind control, not
to mention his own criminal conviction for tax fraud and conspiracy to
obstruct justice,
now goes about his business generally unnoticed.
(The Unification Church would not return calls for this story.) Along the
way, he has
been able to gain acceptance by the most powerful
people in the country, surely with the help of his media mini-empire --
including the
UPI wire service and the right-wing newspapers
Tiempos del Mundo, in South America, and the Washington Times, which he
runs at
losses well into the tens of millions every year.
His exorbitant spending on politicians, largely conservative, hasn't hurt
either; his
Washington Times foundation gave $1 million to
the George H.W. Bush presidential library and has paid the former president
untold amounts in speaking fees.
And Moon has also made impressive headway into
the current Bush White House. Other administration officials have attended
Moon events, including then-incoming Attorney
General John Ashcroft, who attended Moon's Inaugural Prayer Luncheon for
Unity and Renewal, just before George W. Bush
took office. And perhaps more important, other former and current members
of his Unification faithful have ascended to
high levels of the Bush administration.
There are many other signs suggesting the Unification
Church keeps close tabs on Free Teens USA as providential work for Moon.
In a remarkable 2000 sermon titled "God's Tylenol",
Tyler Hendricks, president of Moon's Family Federation for World Peace
and
Unification, praises the group, along with other
Moon nonprofits, as helping to treat the "three headaches of God." For
headaches
No. 1 and 2 ("the disunity of Christianity" and
"the scourge of Communism," respectively) Hendricks claims Moon brought
God
"Tylenol" in the form of his charitable, confusingly
named organizations. For headache No. 3 -- youthful immorality –- Hendricks
says that Moon prescribed the medicine of the
Pure Love Alliance, Free Teens USA, and two other groups. Indeed, he said,
alumni of the seminary that's uniting Christianity
are, even now, "on the frontline for the relief of God's third headache,
the
decline of youth morality and the family."
In its grant application to the Department of
Health, Free Teens identifies Martin Porter as the group's central figure.
Porter -- who
has a Ph.D. and an MBA from Century University,
a correspondence school that was in California until it fled the state
in the late
'80s to avoid new regulations -- discloses that
he was CEO of the "Tongil Trading Company" in Toronto from 1977 to 1983.
But Porter
was also Moon's chief lieutenant in Canada from
1977 to 1983, and his face appeared throughout Toronto on promotional posters
that
called him "Moon's Man in Canada," according
to published church history. (Tongil, a Korean word for "unification,"
sold ginseng tea
and vases, and it was also affiliated with Moon's
fleet of tuna fishing boats.)
In the Summer 1987 issue of the Church publication
Blessing Quarterly, Porter testified to a series of supernatural visions
he received
in 1968 that led him to Moon. "I was sitting
in my car, thinking about Father and what he may be doing. I was unaware
that on that
particular day the Blessing would take place.
Suddenly I saw little pink hearts appear in the car all around me!" he
wrote. "Spiritual
experiences were so common in those days, that
if several days went by without one, we thought there must be something
wrong."
Similarly, the application does not mention that
director Richard Panzer was head of the Unification Church of Rhode Island
in the
1980s, as well as the special projects director
for Moon's morality lobbying group, the American Freedom Coalition.
Free Teens' directors are also solidly Unificationist
-- with the notable exception of New Jersey state assemblyman and Baptist
pastor
Alfred E. Steele. (According to the Unification
News, Steele did once introduce Moon as a leader sent by God at a 2001
revival stop
in Newark organized by Free Teens director David
Konn. Steele, listed as the president of Free Teens, didn't return calls
for this story.)
Of Free Teens' other eight directors, at least
seven are close to the Moon organization. Among them:
Director Eric Holt, at one time comptroller of
the Unification Church, lists an address just down the block from Moon's
secluded
East Garden estate, 40 minutes north of New York
City.
The working address of another director, Anthony
Appia, has doubled as the offices of the Blessed Family Department, as
well as
Washington Times owners One Up Enterprises, the
Unification Thought Institute, and dozens of other Moon religious projects
-- according to various litanies of "front groups"
compiled by outside observers of the church. One lists Appia's 481 Eighth
Ave.
address no fewer than 66 times.
David Konn is identified, in a lawsuit against
the gun company Kahr Arms, as the president of Kahr's Moon-owned parent
company
Saeilo, whose Web site advertises "Absolute Concealed
Power." (Here, Konn is shown brandishing 9 mm pistols.)
Directors William Gaigg and Bjorn Ottosson both
work with Moon's jewelry company, Christian Bernard. Ottosson is also a
former
vice president of Moon's campus group CARP (Collegiate
Association for the Research of Principles).
Panzer bristles at the idea that Free Teens --
which celebrates "Gen Xers ... rebelling against their divorced baby boomer
parents
and seek[ing] lasting love relationships" --
in any way encourages a lasting love relationship with the True Father
of the Unification
Church. He will not be made a part of a "conspiracy
theory," he told Salon.
"If groups founded by Catholics receive abstinence
funding, as there surely are, is that a sign the pope is infiltrating the
White House
with his pro-chastity beliefs and influence?"
he said.
Panzer maintains that Free Teens is his idea, and his life's work.
But Free Teens was first alleged to be a Moon
operation in 1995, when a Free Teens program was dropped from private Catholic
and Protestant schools on Long Island. Despite
the bad press, the club has enjoyed the approval of the state of the New
Jersey,
whose $100,000 grant in 2001 was one step along
the club's journey to federal funding. The organization is based in three
New
Jersey cities and Westchester City, N.Y., employing
about 25 people, according to its tax forms, and claims to operate in 38
states.
The group boasts a "reality centered" approach
toward sex education, summed up by a fairly simple message: Don't have
sex
before marriage, or you will probably die.
Free Teens hosted a contest at Marshall High School,
Wis., in 1999, where teens were asked to compile a top-10 list of reasons
not to have sex. The winning entries, celebrated
on a Unification-affiliated Web site, included "If you don't want to kick
the bucket,
don't knock the boot," (No. 3) and "Two words:
Brighter future" (No. 1).
Similarly, the specter of death hovers over the
Free Teens Web site. There are grim morality tales: "Mary" testifies --
with diction
and grammar so uneven it seems scripted -- that
"[m]y son has not seen his father since the day he was born and i could've
prevented
that had I waited until I was married. I would
not give up my son for the world but i will never be able to give him the
world, and every
child deserves that. So if you care about your
future children you will wait."
Perhaps fearful her message will be misconstrued,
Mary adds: "And don't think that protection works, cause i used protection
and
it obviously didn't. good luck!"
Another place on the site features Magic Johnson
and interprets his tale of HIV survival to mean that even the most healthy-looking
sex partners might be carrying the seeds of death.
It's even hinted that not even French-kissers are safe from HIV. The site
also
heavily spins a 2001 study from the National
Institutes of Health, saying that the "U.S. Gov Now DOUBTS Condoms!" And,
in a
slogan reminiscent of Moon's emphasis on the
“blood lineage” that binds the biblical Adam to the True Father, Free Teens
implores
its subjects with the message: "It's not just
your body, it's your whole lineage forever."
Free Teens recommends a classroom exercise in
which teenagers spit into a cup, then are asked to trade with another student
and drink out of it. The lesson: Sex is even
more intimate, and it should be approached with all the vigilance of drinking
a warm cup of spit.
Panzer, in an e-mail interview, writes of the
cup exercise, "[W]e picked up this activity at a national abstinence conference
several
years ago from another abstinence group that
was using it." As for its success, Free Teens cites a New Jersey trial
showing that
teenagers who participate in their program are
two-thirds more likely to agree with the statement "Sexual intercourse
can cause
problems for people of my age" and that one-third
were making plans to abstain from sex.
The men of Free Teens are not the only ones with
Moon affiliations to benefit from Bush largesse. Josette Shiner, who rose
up
through the Moon organization first as a Washington
Times reporter and Moon disciple and later as editor of that newspaper,
was named deputy trade representative earlier
this year. In 1982 she told the Washington Post, "I joined the church full
well
knowing it is something not yet understood by
society." In the 1990s, she claimed to have broken ties with Moon and to
have
become an Episcopalian. Her press secretary,
Richard Mills, refused to comment on whether Shiner had rethought Moon's
political views.
And in December of last year, Bush appointed David
Caprara, a top official for Moon in Washington, to head the War on Poverty
program AmeriCorps VISTA. Caprara had been director
of Moon's American Family Coalition and was one of the Unification
Church's top political operatives.
A former aide to Jack Kemp, Caprara founded a
pro-faith policy group called the Empowerment Network. It claimed Sens.
Rick
Santorum and Joseph Lieberman as leaders, though
their names recently disappeared from the site. (Lieberman's spokesperson
told Salon the senator had never been formally
affiliated with the Empowerment Network; Santorum's office didn't return
calls.)
The site's Resources Directory section includes
links to both Free Teens USA and the Pure Love Alliance -- a now seemingly
defunct, openly Moonie entity that was discovered
in 2000 to be operating in 61 Chicago public schools before being shut
down.
And Caprara, according to a report on another
Unification-affiliated site, is involved in the "effort to reach ministers"
as well as
"educating political leaders" about Moon's beliefs.
Asked whether Caprara is presently opening doors for Moon, AmeriCorps
spokesman Sandy Scott replies: "The premise of
your question is wrong, and the answer to your question is no."
Moon has managed to forge powerful relationships through a cause that trumps most concerns: politics.
In 1996, Moon praised communism for producing
obedient followers "trained under totalitarianism," who are "trained to
follow
once an order came from above," unlike wayward
Americans ("individualism is what God hates most," went his refrain in
a
1987 speech). And today his business holdings
include an automotive company in U.S.-sanctioned North Korea. But before
the
fall of the Berlin Wall he was the sworn enemy
of communism, having formed an aversion to it in a prison camp of the brutal
Kim Il
Sung regime. Later, he would play a key role
in the Iran-Contra affair when the Washington Times created a fund that
contributed
the first $100,000 to Oliver North's Nicaraguan
Freedom Fund. His followers still take credit for it as a blow to the Reds.
Now he has found common ground with the religious
right on sexual abstinence. The alliance is financial, too. In 1995, it
came to
light that a debt-ridden Jerry Falwell (who told
Esquire in 1978 that Moon was "like the plague: he exploits boys and girls")
had
quietly accepted $3.5 million from Moon's Women's
Federation for World Peace IWFWP) to bail out his Liberty University.
Another important Moon contact is President Bush
(the father), who has spoken to Moonie-run causes abroad. The elder Bush
defended his closeness with Moon strictly on
philosophical grounds, telling the Post through a spokesman that "this
group is about
strengthening the family and that's what President
and Mrs. Bush are deeply focused on."
The question is, do Bush and Moon mean the same thing when they talk about family values?
In the past, Moon has taken out full-page advertisements
in newspapers, transcribing his communications with the Spirit World,
where figures from Confucius to former U.S. President
James Buchanan have vouched that he is, indeed, the savior of humanity.
Earlier this month, a two-page testimonial in
the Washington Times quoted the 36 former U.S. presidents "from the vantage
point
of heaven" (Moon, according to George Washington,
is "the messiah").
This year, claiming instructions from the True
Father himself, Unificationists announced that a new stage had begun in
the raising
of Cheon Il Guk ( or heaven on earth). Believing
that the crucifix could be the last obstacle keeping America from accepting
Moon
as the messiah, they have held conferences across
the country with banners reading "Tear Down the Walls/Who is Rev. Moon?"
culminating in a final crucifix-burying ceremony.
Moon's Family Federation for World Peace Web site describes the inspiration
as
a vision that the True Father first made public
last year at the 20th anniversary party of his Washington Times. (The speech,
in
which Moon said, "The Washington Times will become
the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world," sent many
reporters to the bar for a drink, the Post reported.)
But while Moon's anti-cross rhetoric would surely
turn off many of his friends on the religious right, he remains invisible
in the media.
Even though his rhetoric far surpasses Louis
Farrakhan's in vitriol towards Jews and gays, he goes unnoticed by groups
like the ADL,
whose Web site highlights the Nation of Islam
as a hate group, while its only mention of Moon comes in a warning about
the violent
threats of extremist rabbi Meir Kahane (who in
1976 "declared war" on Moon missionaries, vowing none "would walk the street
safely").
Disciples insist it is a mistake to take Moon's
words literally, out of the context of the broader Divine Principle. They
hasten to add
that the massive archives of speeches online
are hastily written translations and are trustworthy only in the original
Korean.
But at his Unification.net FAQ, webmaster Damian Anderson warns of any politically correct dilution of, for example, Moon's attack on Jews.
"The fact is that the Jewish people committed
a grievous sin in rejecting the Lord, and the world is today committing
a grievous
sin in rejecting the Lord," he writes. "I will
not water down what Father said to please liberal constituencies within
his own church."
Within his church, his entreaties to cherish and
punish your "love organ" (with pliers if necessary, he suggested in 2001)
manage to
find an audience. On Blessed Children World,
an online message board for kids of Unification families, there is much
discussion
of church beliefs. "I hate gay people," one B.C.
observes. Other B.C.'s ask whether it's a sin to go to the prom and debate
a
church doctrine that rape victims are considered
impure. "Kill yourself before you ARE raped," one posts. "Bite out your
tongue
and choke on your own blood if you need to. (No
joke, that was in Father's speech from some time ago). Anyhow, I know it
sounds totally NAZI of us to say/think/believe
such things..."
That frank admission has since been deleted from
a Nov. 1, 2002, message thread titled "I cannot accept rape = fall," in
which
other posts contend sexual purity is "worth dying
for." But the sentiment, at least, seems to be supported by Moon's speeches.
"If someone is trying to invade you, you would
rather kill yourself than go through the fall. At least you won't go to
hell that way ...
this means love comes before life," he told an
audience in 1992. For at all costs, women in Moon's view must not reenact
the
primal wrong, the perversion Moon sees as responsible
for the Fall. "There is nothing more important than the new lineage."
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About the writer
John Gorenfeld's last story for Salon, "The Dictator
Who Snagged Me," was about Kim Jong-Il's monster movie.