Sam Brownback is trying to distance himself from Engle even though the two appeared together as recently as December 2009, in a nationally telecast event. Brownback's disavowals elide his long association with Lou Engle. As I broke in a late December 2009 story , Lou Engle says that about a decade ago he and Sam Brownback lived together for 7 months in a rented Washington DC condominium.

The relationship seems to have continued - in footage from Brownback's 2007 appearance at Lou Engle's Nashville TheCall rally, evangelist Dutch Sheets stated that Brownback, whom Sheets called a personal friend to both Sheets, his colleague* Lou Engle, and other mutual associates, had already attended four of Lou Engle's TheCall events.

The growing controversy over Brownback's ties to Engle has been picked up by the Wall Street Journal, AP News (which story ran in the Wichita-Eagle), and the Topeka, Kansas newspapers, the Capital-Journal and the Lawrence Journal-World.

Former Senator Brownback told the Topeka, Kansas Lawrence Journal-World, "He [Engle] said a number of things that I'm troubled by," and Brownback added, "I haven't had much association with him for some period of time." In Sam Brownback's lexicon, 'some period of time' would have to mean 'at least ten months' because back in December 2009 Brownback could be found up onstage with Lou Engle, who led the Family Research Council's nationally broadcast "Prayercast" against health care reform.

[video, below: Sam Brownback was happy to appear alongside Lou Engle during the December 16, 2009 "Prayercast" against health care reform.]

[video, below - Lou Engle calls God an "avenger of blood" and predicts a second civil war.]

Lou Engle claims that homosexuals are possessed by demons and has been widely criticized for staging, in the Spring of 2010, one of Engle's signature TheCall events, which often feature antigay themes, in Uganda where an internationally denounced bill before the Ugandan parliament threatens to imprison or execute Uganda's gay population.

The Kansas Democratic Party has created a boiled-down, impressionistic video short that derives from my video work on Lou Engle but the partisan nature detracts, in my opinion, from the deeper issue here - which transcends traditional left/right political distinctions.

As video documentarist Michael W. Wilson captured at Lou Engle's November 2008 San Diego TheCall event, the capstone event of the 2008 election push for California's now-overturned anti-gay marriage Proposition Eight, Engle's events have included calls for Christian martyrdom.

[video, below - Lou Engle calls for Christian martyrs to stop gay marriage and legalized abortion]

On an equally telling note, as Current TV's correspondent for the Vanguard documentary series, Mariana van Zeller, describes, during Lou Engle's May 2010 TheCall rally in Kampala, Uganda, "Engle surrounded himself with some of the key backers of Uganda's anti-gay legislation, including Pastor Julius Oyet, Minister of Ethics and Integrity Nsaba Buturo and the bill's author, MP David Bahati."

Will Kansas voters choose to elect a governor who arguably has been quite close to an evangelist accused of helping provoke a climate in Uganda that some critics fear may erupt into the next great world genocide, a candidate whose rhetoric resembles rhetoric used during the 1990's to incite the American domestic terrorism group The Army of God?

To what extent should Sam Brownback answer for the actions and political allegiances of his former roommate Lou Engle, whose events Brownback used to attend with great enthusiasm? As the Huffington Post reports, Brownback is backpedaling fast. But I'd prophesy that, barring a sudden, freakish tornado of media conscience, Sam Brownback's vigorous walkback will soon lead to the Sunflower State governor's office.

* [footnote] Along with Sarah Palin's longtime friend and prayer leader Mary Glazier, Lou Engle is on the elite Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders (ACPE), a charismatic leadership group of little more than two dozen that regularly issues prophetic statements. Another ACPE member, along with Engle and Glazier, has been Dutch Sheets who, along with Lou Engle, claims Sam Brownback as a personal friend. Along with the International Coalition of Apostles (ICA), ACPE is one of the main entities in C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation. Leadership of Wagner's movement is currently in transition, with leadership of the ICA in process of transitioning from Wagner to John P. Kelley.