Sharlet on NPR’s “Fresh Air” today

I’ll be a guest on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross today, airing on your local NPR affiliate at various times around the nation. The interview began as a follow-up to my short conversation with Gross last July about my book on the Family, the secretive religious conservative organization that runs the C Street house that was the heart of three political sex scandals this summer. But there was so much news to cover that Gross is giving the story a full hour. We’ll be going far beyond scandal, following the ideas and the money of the Family to their real-world impact in American legislation like the Stupak-Pitts anti-abortion amendment and, in Uganda — a major recipient of American aid — the most extreme anti-gay legislation in the world, a bill that could condemn a gay man to death for buying his lover a drink and send his parents to prison for failing to report him. Advocating for same-sex marriage? Life in prison. And who’s behind this bill? David Bahati, one of the Family’s key men in Uganda, the organizer of their American-funded leadership program.

Such leaders within the Family are sometimes called “Core.” Another Core man is former Reagan attorney-general Ed Meese. Gossip site Gawker, out front with tough religion news as always, reports on Ed’s latest notions.