By Mike Martinez
STAFF WRITER

OAKLAND -- More than 1,500 people packed the Oakland Convention Center to hear a church leader do more of what he's done the past 30 years: stir up controversy.

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who in the early 1970s was accused of running a cult and brainwashing America's youth, is currently on a 50-state tour titled "We Will Stand," designed to tear down walls between people of all faiths and race, church leaders said.

He told the crowd, comprised primarily of Asian Americans, African Americans and young adults, that all the world's problems would be solved if everyone accepted God.

Speaking in his native Korean Hongul and using an interpreter, the magnetic speaker pounded the podium, waved and pointed his finger and raised his voice. He sprinkled selected words in English and made sexual innuendoes.

Moon said man and woman are only half a person, and only when they come together to procreate do they make a whole human being.

He said God gave man and woman "love organs" to give him grandchildren.

"You must be able to produce children," the interpreter said.

"(Hello) San Francisco," Moon said waiving towards the city across the Bay, a thinly veiled jab at homosexuals in a mix of Hongul and English.

He later took aim at women without children.

"If you don't give birth, you are disqualified as a woman," Moon told the crowd, eliciting gasps and shaking heads.

Moon also said the roughly 6 billion people on earth were the descendants of the devil, who first ravished Eve in the Garden of Eden. Humankind needs a messiah that will bring the message of God, arriving as a "true parent," he said.

"I am (that) true parent to humankind," he said.

Pastor Kenneth Hughes, of Bibleway Church in Oakland, said he has been associated with the Unification Church since 1988 and attends Moon's speaking engagements whenever he is in town.

"I can't say that I agree with all the policies or ideologies, but I respect the lessons they preach," Hughes said.

Gundula Helmdach of Berkeley said she has been a member of Moon's church for the past eight years. With the founder getting up in age, Helmdach said she just wanted to hear him speak publicly once.

"I've never seen him before, and now that he's 82, this is probably his last speaking trip," she said. "I just really wanted to see him. He's a very charismatic speaker."

Moon, a Seoul businessman, was born in what is now North Korea in 1920. Around Easter in 1935, according to a biography distributed by the church, Jesus appeared to the young Moon and asked him to continue his work.

He was imprisoned and tortured by Communists there for three years during the Korean War, according to the church. He escaped when the prison camp was bombed by U.N. troops in 1950, the day before he was scheduled for execution.

He fled to South Korea, where he established the Unification Church in 1954, which spread rapidly through Southeast Asia.

Church missionaries arrived in the United States in 1959 with Moon himself coming to New York in 1971. The following year, church members established centers in all 50 states in the hopes of uniting other denominations.

During that time, Moon's movement was plagued by accusations of brainwashing, and attempts at deprogramming by angry parents that sparked lawsuits and countersuits.

Dubbed "Moonies," his followers were often seen standing on street corners with chalkboards and selling candy or flowers. They were alleged to have solicited on behalf of known charities and given the money to Moon.

New York Daily News reporter John Colter infiltrated the group for four days in 1975, saying Moon's followers were trained through sleep deprivation and working 19-hour days.

Moon spent time in prison in the early 1980s on federal tax evasion charges. At the trial, the CIA cited national security in refusing a subpoena to turn over its dossier on Moon, claiming it would damage relations between the U.S. and South Korea.

--->In November 1997, Moon married 28,000 couples in Washington during a mass wedding, which was part of a larger ceremony to bless married couples of all faiths around the world. He married 15,000 more the following June, many of whom he paired together after examining their photographs.

The Sunshine Schools, one each in Berkeley and Hayward, are still run by his followers, who also operate a 500-acre retreat in the Napa Valley.

Correspondent Cynthia Nelson contributed to this report.