All in the family: former Christian Coalition official sues group.

The Christian Coalition's former human resources director and legislative consultant is suing the organization, claiming it has cheated him out of more than $123,000 in back pay.

Tracy E. Ammons says he was promised $6,000 a month for his work on behalf of the Coalition. He claims the money ended up going to a consulting firm, Millenium Consulting, set up by Michele Ammons, at the time his wife. Michele Ammons is the daughter of Christian Coalition President Roberta Combs.

Tracy Ammons contends that the Coalition's refusal to pay him stems from an acrimonious divorce he went through with Michele Ammons in July of 2003. He told The Washington Times that he was fired by the Coalition one day after a judge determined how much he would have to pay to support the son he and Michele Ammons had. He said Combs and Michele Ammons then had him jailed when he was unable to pay the support due to having no income.

"I never got a penny," Tracy Ammons said of the money that was promised him. "It was to Millenium." Before the divorce, he said, his wife paid some of his bills.

He also asserted that Combs made him sign a prenuptial agreement stating that in the event of a divorce, he could not sue Millenium Consulting, which is wholly owned by Michele Ammons.

Tracy Ammons' attorney, Jonathon Moseley, told The Times that he believes the relationship between the Coalition and Millenium is a violation of federal tax law, which prohibits the family members of those who control non-profit groups from receiving financial benefits in excess of $600 per year.

In other news about the Religious Right:

* The Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association (AFA) has issued an alert warning parents about Dreamworks Studios' film release "Shark Tale." According to the AFA, the animated movie is thinly disguised propaganda designed to brainwash children into believing that it's OK to be gay.

The group notes that the plot centers around Oscar, an outcast fish in the urban metropolis of the reef, and Lenny, a shark who doesn't quite fit in with his family of mafia-style hoodlums.

"It is when "Shark Tale' turns its attention to Lenny that it veers toward an undercurrent of approval for homosexuality," warned Ed Vitagliano, news editor of the AFA Journal. "While it is difficult to prove intent when a film does not explicitly make a character 'gay,' the story and dialogue demonstrate an implicit approval of homosexuality."

Lenny's mannerisms and voice, it seems, tend towards the effeminate but "that's not the worst of it," wrote Vitagliano. Masculinity in this shark culture depends on meat eating, and Vitagliano notes that Lenny is a vegetarian--an obvious allegorical stand-in for homosexuality.

* On the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, decided to trot out that old charge that church-state separation is a communist idea.

Praising President Ronald Reagan as the "architect" of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, Perkins in an e-mail bulletin advised his supporters that there is an effort to build a similar wall here in the United States: "a wall between church and state."

"If this effort succeeds," he warned, "the U.S. may follow the Soviet Union into the ash heap of history. We must all work to tear down this perilous wall and allow freedom to truly ring."