[update: also see my new interview on The Gathering, with Jay Michaelson, just published by the Daily Beast: The $1-Billion-a-Year Right-Wing Conspiracy You Haven’t Heard Of (sub-heading: "Are you female, gay, non-Christian, or otherwise interested in the separation of church and state? Get to know The Gathering, a shadowy, powerful network of hard-right funders meeting Thursday in Florida."]



"The church and other leaders have done a lot to brainwash people, and all the community now is readily spitting fire against homosexuality. They are planning to kill or panga [machete] us. We have been running from house to house because when a neighborhood learns about your orientation, then you should expect mob justice anytime" -- gay Ugandan LGBT rights activist Peter Yiga (as quoted by journalist Jody May-Chang), on the climate of anti-LGBT hatred in Uganda driven in part, as I have been documenting at length for Twocare.org Center Against Religious Extremism (see: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) by funding from The Gathering "Maturity is moving from the close-up to the landscape, focusing less on your own supposed strengths and weaknesses and more on the sea of empathy in which you swim, which is the medium necessary for understanding others, one's self, and survival." -- David Brooks, featured The Gathering 2014 speaker.

New York Times op-ed writer and frequent National Public Radio commentator David Brooks has been criticized by his own NYT op-ed colleagues, such as economist Paul Krugman, for a recent column in which Brooks chided America's "Bonfire of The Vanities" crowd with, "Wealthy people have an obligation to try to follow a code of seemliness. No luxury cars for college-age kids. No private jet/ski weekends." This flap has followed on the heels of the controversy engendered by a Sunday NYT column that referred to television producer Shonda Rhimes as an "angry black woman".

Completing the trifecta, this Saturday September 27th, at a luncheon hosted by the Orlando, Florida luxury Ritz Carlton Hotel, David Brooks will regale a crowd of mostly white multimillionaire and billionaire financial patrons of the eliminationist anti-LGBT religious right (also see this Twocare.org story), whose funded concerns include the ministry of a white South African evangelist who characterizes the late, assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King,. Jr. as "Just a sexual degenerate with a Marxist agenda" who fronted a conspiracy to impose a "racial mixing program on America". So what's not to like for the Grey Lady's thoughtful, moderately conservative 'Bobo in Paradise' ?

And, in line with Brooks' cautionary advice, the would-be plutocrats of The Gathering are anything but ostentatious. Indeed, a survey commissioned by The Gathering, Inc. which hosts the event has shown that many participants consider The Gathering to be a "secret society". Proper wealth, it would seem, knows the value of discretion. Bonfires of the Vanities are fine, sure, but best held behind locked doors, protected by high hedges. And safely esconced in private Orlando luxury hotel compounds.

This Thursday, September 25th will commence The Gathering 2014, the biggest funding confab of the Protestant religious right. It's very likely that a number of billionaires will be present. Helping lead a presentation Thursday evening will be Terry Parker, co-founder of the National Christian Foundation which - as I've been documenting in my capacity as Director of the Center Against Religious Extremism (a project of Truth Wins Out) - is probably the biggest anti-LGBT funder in America.

Parker was listed, on the FRC's 2013 990 tax form, as a board member of the Family Research Council, designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT hate group. Also giving a presentation Thursday evening will be Fieldstead and Company, the unincorporated philanthropic vehicle of billionaire Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., one of the most dedicated and strategic anti-LGBT rights funders in America.

Anti-LGBT 'greatest hits' of The Gathering "[H]omosexuality is wrong, unhealthy, should be illegal, and, frankly, is un-American -- because of its inherent selfish character and obviously self-destructive tendencies... ...gay politics or, in other words, organized homosexuality, is a group manifestation of the homosexual's pathological need to justify his existence. It's nothing more." -- speaker at anti-LGBT presentation at The Gathering 1997, organized by Howard Ahmanson's Fieldstead & Company, on how to combat "organized homosexuality". "I think we're at great threat, externally, from radical Islamists who want to destroy us and our way of life... The second greatest threat I think this nation faces is internally, and it's from the radical homosexuals that want to destroy the underpinnings of our nation." -- Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, speaking at The Gathering 2006. Perkins' FRC is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an antigay hate group. "[I]n the course of the now hundreds of cases the Alliance Defense Fund has now fought involving this homosexual agenda, one thing is certain: there is no room for compromise with those who would call evil 'good.' " -- From speech by Alliance Defending Freedom President Alan Sears presented to the anti-LGBT World Congress of Families VI, Madrid 2012. Sears was a featured speaker at The Gathering 2013. According to Human Rights Campaign Vice President Fred Sainz, the ADF is "easily the most active antigay legal group".

Recently, government-encouraged outbreaks of mob violence against LGBT persons in countries from Uganda to Russia, and draconian new anti-gay legislation in those countries too, have gained growing media notice - some of which has focused on the role American evangelicals have played in inciting such hatred.

But the American culprits are not being funded from the margins. Tens of millions (possibly evens hundreds of millions) of dollars for that project is coming from the foundations whose representatives assemble yearly at an event known as The Gathering, where multimillionaire and billionaire evangelical funders of the culture wars from the families DeVos, Coors, Prince, Maclellan, Friess, Ahmanson, and others, and heads of the mammoth National Christian Foundation - gather, dine, and strategize.

This Thursday September 25th, at the luxury Ritz Carlton hotel in Orlando, Florida, an evening series of briefings will kick off the premier funding event of the evangelical right in America, a four-day annual conference known as The Gathering. Scheduled to speak at the conference are David Brooks of the New York Times (also a National Public Radio commentator) and Michael Gerson of the Washington Post.

It's an invite-only event, reserved for speakers and heads of evangelical foundations that dole out over $200,000 a year. Foundations associated with The Gathering now dole out upwards of $1 billion dollars annually.

Giving a presentation at the Thursday evening kickoff will be Terry Parker, a board member of the nonprofit that hosts The Gathering and also a co-founder of the National Christian Foundation, which is now the 12th biggest charity in America by one ranking and whose anti-LGBT funding pattern is so extensive that I've written a small encyclopedia to profile some of the more egregious anti-gay groups NCF bankrolls.

Another Thursday evening briefing will be hosted by Fieldstead & Company, the unincorporated funding vehicle of billionaire Howard F. Ahmanson - one of the original members of The Gathering and who spent $1,395,000 (the second biggest donor, behind the Knights of Columbus) to pass California's anti-same sex marriage Proposition 8. Until 1995, Ahmanson was the principal financial benefactor of the Christian Reconstructionism movement whose leaders advocate imposing pre-Talmudic bibical law, including the death penalty for a range of offenses including adultery, homosexuality, idolatry, and witchcraft.

In 2004, Ahmanson - one of the most dedicated and strategic anti-LGBT rights funders in America [see: 1, 2, 3, 4] told the Orange County Register that "I don't think it's at all a necessity" to "stone people for the same thing that people in ancient Israel were stoned" but that "It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things"

Judging by its website and roster of event speakers, The Gathering might seem to the average onlooker to be a politically moderate, forward looking gathering of concerned evangelicals who simply want to make the world a better place. Not to this observer.

As Director of Truth Wins Out's new project, the Center Against Religious extremism, I've been closely studying The Gathering, including listening to audio recordings of The Gathering conference sessions going back to 1996 - audio that was wiped from The Gathering early in 2014.

Through that audio record, The Gatherings' still-available trove of newsletters, and from my background of ten years' intensive study of the American religious right, I've pieced together a radically different profile of what's going on at the event.

Over a half century ago, folk singer Bob Dylan penned the song line, "The executioner's hand is always well hidden", and it's as true now as it was when Dylan wrote the immortal line.

Could leading New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio columnists and commentators really be planning to speak at an annual event that, in financial and legal terms, is probably the epicenter of anti-gay rights evangelical activism from the U.S. to Uganda to Russia ? The answer is yes.

Are they aware of what they're participating in (and implicitly supporting by lending their names to the event) or have they been conned ? We may never know the truth but we can safely assume the answers will lie on the "ignorance" side of the dilemma.

But such high profile mainstream media patronization of The Gathering raises the question: if such esteemed NYT, All Things Considered and Washington Post columnists and commentators - who have been granted their big and influential media platforms because of their supposed penetrating level of insight, can't parse mainstream evangelicalism from what's going on at The Gathering, why should we - or Washington and New York elites - pay attention to their opinions on religion and politics ?

read more on this story, NYT's David Brooks, WaPo's Michael Gerson to Speak at Top Antigay Funding Confab, at TwoCare.org.