Sun Myung Moon is this really weird religious leader (well, cult leader is probably more accurate) who has a tremendous amount of power in the United States, but not a lot of people are aware of it. He is the founder of the Unification Church (here’s wikipedias entry on it), which though it has bona fide tax exempt status as a religion in the US is largely denounced as a cult and the perpetrator of enormous fraud. The Japanese Supreme Court even decreed against them on the charges of fraud in 1997, and from what I understand, he’s not welcome in the European Union either.

You see, Sun Myung Moon claims to be the second coming of the Messiah, here to finish Jesus’s mission on earth. But oddly enough, the messiah also owns the Washington Times newspaper, UPI (the second largest newswire source) and a variety of extremely successful commercial enterprises, including various fishing fleets. He is considered to be among the strongest forces in South Korean politics and wields strange influence in Washington, DC as well.

Especially strange was an event which occurred last year, where Moon was essentially crowned as the Messiah at a public ceremony in a senate building by Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-IL. Wikipedia says about this:

Moon announced that he would save everyone on Earth as he had saved the souls of even such murderous dictators as Hitler and Stalin — who had been born again through him. Moon said the reformed Hitler and Stalin vouched for him from the spirit world, calling him “none other than humanity’s Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent”.

As if Hitler and Stalin weren’t good enough testimonials, he has also received endorsements from “representatives of the five major religions — as well as several dozen dead U.S. presidents communicating from the Spirit World.” Moon also has been forming extremely close ties with Evangelicals and other fundamentalist Christian groups. He even loaned Jerry Falwell $3.5 million at some point to help out with religious projects. Moon last year also went on a “Take Down the Cross” campaign to small poor churches around the country, urging them to remove the cross, since it prevents churches from uniting, or something confusing like that.

In the 70’s the Unification Church got into hot water because they were allegedly using high-pressure brainwashing techniques to separate impressionable college students from their family. “Moonies” as their followers were called were forced to sell roses and other trinkets on the streets to financially support the church.

Another fun activity of the Unification Church is that they have been going around to schools, volunteering to teach sexual abstinence courses. Here’s an article about that. And here is an article written by a former member of the Unification Church, with an excerpt from his thoughts on their abstinence policy:

I believe that focusing on sexual conduct serves many purposes for someone trying to maintain control over members of a totalistic group. By turning natural biological and emotional drives into something shameful, it creates guilt, confusion, self doubt, and a sense of sinfulness, which in turn creates a need for salvation and a dependence on your savior, usually the group leader. It diverts attention away from other conduct in the group which might be seen as immoral such as deception, emotional abuse, exploitation, etc. It also serves to create a sense of self righteousness in the members - after all, if they are not “doing it”, they can view themselves as superior, pure and “undefiled”. It serves the group to channel that sexual energy into the “mission”. This was the case in George Orwell’s “1984″, where the authoritarian police state had it’s “chastity patrol”. In fact, it could be argued that a totalistic group must control it’s members sex and love life, for their compelling and powerful nature make them the biggest threat to the groups control over the members lives.

There is also a more drastic article for the conspiratorially-minded on Moon and his church on Lyndon LaRouche’s website. Here’s an excerpt:

Today, this lunatic leader of a mass cult is the titular head of a multitrillion-dollar, worldwide apparatus of government influence-peddling and control that knows no equal. Moon literally owns whole countries in South America and Asia. His apparatus is rapidly buying up the U.S. Congress, the Presidency, and all potential opposition forces of left, right, and center. Moon’s stock-in-trade is cash and sex—lots of it. The cash comes from the worldwide drug- and gun-running operations, part of which came to the surface in the Iran-Contra scandal: cocaine from the South American trade run under cover of the Moon-linked CAUSA group; heroin from Afghanistan and the Far East, laundered through dirty-money operations of the Moon cult that overlapped Ollie North’s extracurricular activities while at the National Security Council.

The sex is a specialty of Moon’s own Gnostic “family” cult. Remember the Congressional Madam scandals of the 1970s, featuring Tong Sun Park and Suzy Park Thomson? That was just the tip of the iceberg of “The Reverend” Moon’s sexual-favors operation. Military intelligence officers who investigated Unification Church operations in Washington in the 1970s and ’80s, report that the recruitment device used on ranking, conservative political and military officials was to hold weekly orgies, arranged by Col. Bo Hi Pak, the Unification Church official who was a top officer of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA).

It really only gets better from there, but I’ll let you read the rest yourselves. Let’s see what else we have here as far as links for further research:

1. A weblog which seems to be dedicated to tracking Moon’s activities.
2. Disinfopedia’s entry on him
3. An article about him on Salon and his links to George W. Bush
4. Rotten.com’s entry on him

Actually wait, that link on Rotten has a really good quote by him about sex. Let me paste it in here for your edification:

Case in point: an April 2001 appearance at a Methodist church in Las Vegas. It was just another typical sermon by Reverend Moon. There were about 600 people in the congregation when the sermon began. But for some reason, people kept walking out, well before he got on a roll about schlongs:

“The head of the love organ is shaped exactly like a poisonous rattlesnake. And just like a rattlesnake, it’s always looking for a hole.”

Oh yes, there was more. He went on to explain that 70% of all divorces result from the wife’s inappropriate feelings of entitlement toward her husband’s genitals. As Moon explained it, a man’s “love organ” can only serve its master, and the spouse just needs to get used to it. He told the audience that these women, along with childless couples and homosexuals, are destroying the fabric of society. Offended churchgoers left in droves; some of them even heckled him on their way out. And this was by no means an isolated incident. He’s been spouting that snake-genitalia lunacy for years and years. In April 1996, Moon preached:

“The Bible refers to the origin of free sex by using the image of a snake. Woman’s sexual organ is like the open mouth of a snake filled with poison. Man’s sexual organ is like the head of a snake. If you think of fallen love action in these terms you feel disgusted and so you should. It is poison to humanity.”

See now, I bet HE has a micropenis, even if he IS the second coming of the Messiah. Oh, and I forgot. He also tried to get everybody to forgive Nixon after Watergate.