For years, the National Prayer Breakfast program has featured a falsified George Washington quote that's apparently been doctored to bolster the claim that the United States was founded as a 'Christian nation.'
The National Prayer Breakfast is the signature yearly public event of the otherwise reclusive theocratic fundamentalist Washington DC influence peddling association known as "The Family."
While Family members mainly come from the Republican Party, the group claims to be bipartisan and includes a number of Congress and Senate members from the Democratic Party.
Two of those Family Democrats have emerged to trouble efforts to reform the American health care system and provide health care to the tens of millions of Americans who lack coverage - and so die by the tens of thousands each year.
First came Representative Bart Stupak, blindsiding Democrats in the House. Now, as the Senate takes up the health care debate, Senator Ben Nelson stands poised, holding a key vote that might pass a health care reform bill or else set back current reform efforts months, even years, and so set the stage, some warn, for a GOP resurgence in 2010.
Against a considerable body of contrary evidence, Bart Stupak has claimed to know nothing at all about the Family - whose group mansion, registered as a church, he's enjoyed subsidized rent (and female maid service) at for the better part of a decade.
Stupak's anti-abortion House health care bill amendment would, reproductive rights groups maintain, cut the already limited access American women have to abortion services.
Now, Family member and Democratic Senator Ben Nelson, who in 2004 enjoyed the coveted role of co-hosting the Family's yearly National Prayer Breakfast (along with GOP Senator James Inhofe), holds a key vote that could swing the Senate health care reform fight either way.
In a July 17th conference call Bart Stupak's fellow C Street Housemate Jim DeMint told conservative activists that "...if we're able to stop Obama on this [health care] it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."
Whether purely out of conscience - out of opposition to abortion, in conjunction with Family strategy, or a bit of both Bart Stupak and Ben Nelson are playing a decisive role that risks proving DeMint's words prophetic.
They don't call themselves a "Christian mafia" for nothing.