Earlier today, Dark Christianity reported on an attempt by three dominionists to disrupt the first ever Hindu invocation of Congress and the arrest of the individuals responsible.

In part due to a tip by a poster in the previous thread, I decided to do a little bit of background research on the persons arrested. Needless to say, the results are interesting...

Ante Pavkovic is linked with FIRE Ministries (a neopentecostal "Joel's Army" church which (among other things) explicitly targets Jewish people for conversion to "Messianics", has a bibolatrous statement of faith that mentions in part that the reason for the targeting of Jewish people is to make Jesus "hurry up and come back", promotes cell churches, has close links with a youth group that protested Michael Schiavo being allowed to execute his wife's end-of-life wishes that may be connected to Maranatha/Morning Star International/Every Nation, and uses a classic Joel's Army "codeword" as its name) and apparently works a lot with Operation Save America in clinic harassment as well as harassment of LGBT people and stumping for banning gay/straight alliances in schools. He's also been known to get into pissing matches with Calvinists on various religious forums. (Among other things, DailyKos has reported on his involvement with OSA.)

Kathy Pavkovic is apparently Ante's wife and also specialises in clinic harassment with Operation Save America. The Pavkovics have also worked with Repent America and Elijah Ministries; the first is a virulently anti-gay group run by Michael Marcavaige (and operates hand-in-hand with American Family Association of Pennsylvania), and the latter is a particularly nasty Joel's Army group that explicitly calls for the formation of a dominionist theocracy.

Kristen Sugar is also associated with Operation Save America, and is apparently a regular columnist for this group.

Of note, Operation Save America is in full spin mode in trying to create a martyr complex around the three parties arrested.

For those unfamiliar with Operation Save America, they are essentially Operation Rescue 2.0 (in that they have expanded their focus to things beyond abortion, including targeting LGBT people and in fact the entirety of secular society) but in some ways they are actually MORE extreme than the 1980's era Operation Rescue; their links page promotes some explicit domestic terrorism supporters (notably: Missionaries to the Preborn, which has close links to "Christian Patriot" militias and the Army of God domestic terrorist network and whose leader (Matthew Trewhella) has promoted the concept of "Christian Patriot" militia groups himself--he is furthermore known to have signed the "Justifiable Homicide" declaration supporting assassination of clinic workers; Life and Liberty Ministries, known to also have very close links to Army of God domestic terrorists; and the Minutemen militia groups, known to have links to racist organisations and "Christian Patriot" militias).

Knowing now that the arrestees were members of one of the scariest dominionist groups out there...we ARE lucky nobody got killed in this. :P

EDIT 13 July:

Operation Save America is still ramping up the martyr-engines, and Election Central is reporting that the now-infamous disruption was planned by the Operation Save America operatives on the spur of the moment (they were originally in Washington to protest a bill that would add hate crimes against LGBT people to federal laws mandating additional sentencing for hate crimes; dominionist groups have been falsely claiming the proposed bill would essentially outlaw dominionist churches that didn't care for LGBT people).

The head of Operation Save America has praised their actions, whilst even the hardline anti-LGBT American Family Association became a bit uncomfortable re their actions (the AFA has claimed they "didn't organise or encourage anything like that"--this is largely spin, seeing as the AFA actively encouraged its members to letter-spam Congress to get the invocation cancelled; AFA and Operation Save America have also been all too willing to participate jointly in tributes to Army of God assassin Paul Hill and the AFA has reportedly provided legal representation for OSA during aforementioned tribute (in which OSA leader Flip Benham burned a copy of the Quran, among other things)).

The Times of India has now reported on the disruption in a decidedly unfavourable light; dominionist groups already have a very poor image in India (partly because of problems with neopente and SBC pastors sneaking into the country without obtaining religious missionary visas--essentially entering the country as illegal aliens, in other words (yes, the US requires religious groups doing missionary work here to also obtain missionary visas, too, specifically the B-1 visa; it's a common practice worldwide to have a specialised category of worker's visa for religious workers)--and because of some controversies regarding forced conversions in parts of India (in particular, in Nagaland where fundamentalist Baptist and neopentecostal groups have literally forced villages to convert at gunpoint, are attempting to set up a bona-fide dominionist theocracy in the state of Manipur, and have forced the government of India to declare states of emergency in that state; there are reports of similar instances of forced conversions and dominionist secessionist movements in several other Indian states).