April 2007

Although the stated intent to ban abortion is one of the Religious Right’s litmus tests for presidential candidates, the leading Republicans have each been accused of apostasy: Mitt Romney touted his pro-choice convictions as recently as his 2002 campaign, Giuliani’s position continues to come under fire from the Right, and while McCain recently switched his position on Roe v. Wade, he’s still in hot water from anti-abortion groups over campaign finance reform. Even Sam Brownback has had to face reports that he was a Johnny-come-lately to the anti-abortion cause.

Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore has been struggling to establish himself as a viable candidate, and his strategy has been to repeatedly claim that he is the only “committed conservative” in the race. So it won’t help that some blogs and LifeNews.com are referring to him as a “pro-abortion” candidate. LifeNews.com’s coverage of Gilmore’s official announcement emphasized that “he backs legalized abortion up to eight weeks into pregnancy”:

Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore officially tossed his hat in the ring on Friday, saying he is a full-fledged candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2008. Gilmore, who trails most of the candidates in the polls, says he's entering the race because it needs an authentic conservative, but he takes a pro-abortion position.

It appears as if D. James Kennedy’s Center for Reclaiming America is undergoing a bit of “streamlining”:

The Center for Reclaiming America has closed, halting its conservative activism and throwing the future of its signature annual conference in doubt.

An undisclosed number of employees were laid off on Thursday at the center's headquarters in Fort Lauderdale and its congressional chaplaincy office in Washington, D.C., in what its parent organization, Coral Ridge Ministries, called a "streamlining."

The closures put a stop to day-to-day actions such as e-mail and petition drives against abortion, pornography and same-sex marriage.

"We're getting back to our core competency, the production of media," said Brian Fisher, executive vice president at Coral Ridge Ministries, founded by the Rev. D. James Kennedy. "Our heart and soul is the teaching of Dr. Kennedy, and getting it to more people than those who come to church."

Fisher wouldn't divulge how many workers were laid off but said Coral Ridge Ministries still has more than 120 employees. The organization produces TV and radio programs and publishes books by Kennedy, pastor at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. It reported a budget of more than $37 million in 2005, according to spokesman John Aman.

Hopefully, Coral Ridge’s decision to focus on “production of media” means we can expect more videos from them like the one explaining how Charles Darwin was directly responsible for the Nazi Holocaust.  

By pushing Alito, Roberts. “[T]here may be as many as three vacancies” next term. Christian Defense Coalition: “impossible” for Dems decrying ruling to be seen as “people of faith.”

Mark your calendars, because on May 5, former child star Kirk Cameron and “best-selling author Ray Comfort” are going to “prove God's existence, absolutely, scientifically, without mentioning the Bible or faith.” Cameron has, like others on the Right, blamed school shootings on the teaching of evolution:

ABC … will host a debate in New York City on May 5, 2007. Moderated by Martin Bashir, the debate will be streamed LIVE on their website and will also be filmed for "Nightline."

Cameron ("Growing Pains" sitcom and Left Behind movies) will speak on what he believes is a major catalyst for atheism: Darwinian evolution. The popular actor stated, "Evolution is unscientific. In reality, it is a blind faith that's preached with religious zeal as the gospel truth. I'm embarrassed to admit that I was once a naïve believer in the theory. The issue of intelligent design is extremely relevant at the moment. Atheism has become very popular in universities--where it's taught that we evolved from animals and that there are no moral absolutes. So we shouldn't be surprised when there are school shootings.”….

"Most people equate atheism with intellectualism," Comfort added, "but it's actually an intellectual embarrassment. I am amazed at how many people think that God's existence is a matter of faith. It's not, and I will prove it at the debate - once and for all. This is not a joke. I will present undeniable scientific proof that God exists.

If Cameron and Comfort think that evolution – the basis of much modern science – is unscientific, what kinds of “scientific” arguments are we likely to hear from them?  Maybe something like this, which just happens to be the second most viewed clip on GodTube:

Scarborough. ADF lawyer: “criminalize[s] thought or emotion or even speech.”

And his alliance with virulently anti-gay activists.

“Marriage Protection Caucus (TM)” formed to ratify federal anti-gay marriage amendment.

According to American Spectator.

“"What are they trying to prove? There's no level of discrimination,” says Sheldon of effort to protect gays in the workplace:

Commenting on proposals by an interfaith pro-choice group on how to address the trend of health providers refusing to provide medical services over “conscience” issues, the Catholic League declared that the group’s effort to confront the issue from the platform of religious morality constituted an assault on “the religious conviction of Roman Catholics”:

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, told Cybercast News Service he considers it "so unchristian for these people to call into question the religious conviction of Roman Catholics ... it smacks of bigotry."

While this is a strange criticism to make against the report, it is even stranger coming from Donohue, who has made questioning the religious conviction of Roman Catholics his own political stock in trade. From Catholics for a Free Choice to Catholic senators opposing recent Supreme Court nominees, Donohue has pulled the “anti-Catholic bigot” card on countless of his coreligionists when it suits his political aims. Just last week, Donohue issued a press release calling into question the religious conviction of a Catholic lawmaker he disagrees with:

“We need more, not fewer, Catholics on the Supreme Court. But not of the Ted Kennedy kind. We need more loyal sons and daughters.”

Now that he has officially launched his presidential bid, Sen. John McCain’s campaign is hoping to get a fresh start.  And the first step in that effort is, apparently, to try and downplay his various recent attempts to ingratiate himself to the Right by suggesting that his heart wasn’t really in it:

McCain's problems in the party stem from other factors. He has sought to repair relations with parts of the conservative base, particularly religious conservatives, whose leaders he attacked during his 2000 campaign. He spent time last year courting such leaders as the Rev. Jerry Falwell, but much of the party's conservative base remains suspicious of him.

GOP strategists said that McCain's efforts were half-hearted, and that he sought rapprochement with Falwell but not with the Rev. Pat Robertson. They also said he made a tactical error in declining to speak at meetings of high-profile conservative groups over the past several months.

…

[McCain's advisers] argue that it was never McCain's hope to become the darling of social and religious conservatives -- only to get enough votes among those Republicans to win the nomination. "McCain's goal wasn't to become their candidate," a campaign official said.

While McCain may not have reached out to Robertson directly, he did appear pretty eager to impress David Brody of Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network last month, displaying his right-wing bona fides by reminding Brody that he had met Richard Land and Jerry Falwell and trying to get past his infamous “agents of intolerance” remark, explaining that “sometimes you say things in anger that you don't mean.”

But while McCain may now be pursing a new, slightly less obsequious campaign strategy, his Republican opponents most certainly are not: 

Sometime between the pan-roasted filet of salmon and Rich Little’s dusty impressions, Presidential candidate Mitt Romney strode over to Pat Robertson’s table.

“He’s going to have to do what John F. Kennedy did down to the Houston Baptists,” Mr. Robertson told The Observer after the two had talked. “Once he said where he stood, then he allayed their fears.

“I don’t know if Romney can do that,” said Mr. Robertson of the lone Mormon candidate, while adding that “he’s an extraordinarily attractive person.”

But the table of the Christian Broadcasting Network was a magnet for Republican Presidential candidates.

“Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Romney and Mike Huckabee—just to name four that have come by the table already,” said Mr. Robertson.

To ban same-sex marriage. (Ken Connor feeling vindicated?) New Mexico cited.

“It isn't about ‘crimes’ … it's about speech,” she insists.

After American Family Radio and Chuck Norris paved the way, the floodgates have apparently opened for religious-right commentators to blame the tragic mass shooting at Virginia Tech on their political bugbears, such as (in Norris’s words) the “secular progressive agenda.”

In an op-ed in the Greeley, Colorado Tribune, local pastor Steven Grant meditates on “the deeper questions and overall trend patterns” surrounding the shooting and traces the “[e]scalation of violence and a number of other social ills” to a single point: the 1961 Supreme Court case that banned government-run prayer in public schools. For evidence, Grant turns to David Barton, the GOP operative and crackpot pseudo-historian whom Grant laughably calls “perhaps the nation’s leading historian.”

As the Federation for American Immigration Reform and a number of radio talk-show hosts convene their anti-immigrant rally in Washington, D.C. this week, organizers were hoping to feature a convoy of truckers riding around the Beltway (Interstate 495) to protest illegal immigration and the mythical “North American Union.” The stunt, planned by bicyclist and author Frosty Wooldridge of the Save American Fund, was supposed to cause “a complete backup of traffic” by “encouraging truckers to form side-by-side convoys and circle the highway at the posted 55 mph speed limit.” A spokesman for the Maryland State Police didn’t sound too worried, saying “We have no problem with that, we want them to do the speed limit.”

Although the truckers apparently didn’t make it out today, one has to wonder about the feasibility of such an endeavor. Making it up to 55 on the Beltway during the excruciating rush hour would be impressive indeed.

Sen. John McCain “is far and away the most consistently anti-abortion of all the top contenders” for the Republican presidential ticket, according to Charlotte Allen in The

Weekly Standard, yet many anti-abortion advocates won’t have any truck with him. “The aversion to McCain is often visceral,” wrote Fred Barnes recently in the same magazine, citing James Dobson’s promise never to support McCain. Allen reports that McCain’s far-right position on abortion has, for some anti-abortion activists, taken a back seat to his legislation on campaign finance:

McCain has a major problem with the nation's largest and most influential anti-abortion advocacy organization, the National Right to Life Committee. And the source of that problem is . . . not abortion at all. It's the McCain-Feingold Act, that set of restrictions on political advertising during election seasons that McCain (along with a number of Democrats) started pushing in 1995 and succeeded in enacting into federal law in 2002.

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) regards McCain-Feingold as a major hindrance to its mission of pro-life advocacy--and, pari passu, McCain himself as something close to a personal enemy. A so-far-successful constitutional challenge to a key portion of McCain-Feingold mounted by an NRLC affiliate, Wisconsin Right to Life, is pending in the Supreme Court, with oral argument set for Wednesday, April 25.

There have been a range of responses from the Right to the tragic shootings last week at Virginia Tech. Some were moderate and respectful, while others were … less so. Among those seeking to lay blame, they have managed to fault everything from the Devil to evolution and the lack of school prayer.

For his part, Chuck Norris declares that the victims of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech were “martyrs” in the culture war, “caught in a head-on clash with our culture's values, denials and degradation.”

Though one can point to Cho's own psychotic behavior and our graphic slasher media as potential contributors to his deplorable murder spree, we must also hesitate to consider how we as a society are possibly contributing to the growth of these academic killing fields.

Norris singles out ““those who wield the baton of the secular progressive agenda” and “our graphic slasher media,” which must not include the more wholesome and uplifting violence of the Norris oeuvre, such as “Missing in Action,” “The Hitman,” “Forced Vengeance”  and “Lone Wolf McQuade”

As we noted repeatedly over the last several years, the president’s power to nominate individuals to federal court and most importantly, the Supreme Court is an issue of paramount importance to the nation and control over the process has long been the number one political priority for the Right.  

The nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito were met with jubilation by the Right and with the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, President Bush appears to have delivered on their demands for reliable,  hard-line ideologues:   

Vision America

What a vivid reminder this is that Christians must remain politically active -- as it was Values Voters who are responsible for this first step toward overturning Roe v. Wade … This should be a stark reminder to Christians of what’s at stake in the next election.

Traditional Values Coalition

The 5-4 decision, which included Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, clearly shows the importance of having strong judicial conservatives on the bench.

Christian Defense Coalition

There is no doubt this decision would not have been reached if Sandra Day O'Connor were still on the bench instead of Samuel Alito.  If President Bush gets an opportunity to nominate another Supreme Court Justice, he could shape the direction of the court for a generation to come.  Also, that next appointment may be the 'swing' vote in overturning Roe.

Rep. John Boehner

[T]his decision is further confirmation Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, President Bush's two successful appointments to the high court, are who we hoped and thought they were.

Janet Folger

One more president. One more judge. And one more chance to finish the work we began 34 years ago. Our work is not in vain.

Gary Cass

Dr. Gary Cass, executive director of the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, responded, "This is what we hoped and prayed for when we elected pro-life Americans who would nominate and confirm judicial nominees. This is what we hoped and prayed for when two new Supreme Court justices were added to the bench. Today, those years of hoping and praying have borne the best kind of fruit—-the protection of defenseless lives."

Richard Land

Thank God for President Bush, and thank God for Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito.

Tony Perkins

[The] president of the Family Research Council said the decision vindicated the 2004 victory of Mr. Bush and "shows that elections have consequences." Since conservatives "know that next vacancy is just so incredibly important."

It is not often that we find ourselves in agreement with Tony Perkins, but when he notes that this decision shows just why the “next vacancy is just so incredibly important” we couldn’t agree more.   

A few weeks ago, we noted that Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, appeared to be quietly positioning to become one of the Right’s leading powerbrokers and had been more-or-less openly challenging James Dobson.  

In that post, we mentioned that Land publicly came out against Dobson’s gracelessly obvious attempt to back Newt Gingrich while simultaneously quashing Fred Thompson’s potential candidacy.  Land heaped praise on Thompson as a “Southern-fried Reagan” while saying that Gingrich cannot be trusted.  

Apparently, we were not the only ones who have noticed Land’s pro-Thompson efforts:

Mr. Land said Mr. Thompson's wife, Jeri Kehn, telephoned to thank him for a complimentary newspaper column. On Saturday, Mr. Thompson phoned to say he wanted Mr. Land present at any campaign kickoff.

In the past few election cycles, Dobson has been an aggressive campaigner for right-wing candidates.  But in a recent interview with Reuters, Dobson suggested that politics is a sideline, not his primary concern: 

In an interview, the founder and chairman of the influential conservative advocacy and counseling group Focus on the Family said that politics was a sideline to his real passion: helping families via his books, radio show and counseling services.

"It's not Focus on Politics, it's Focus on the Family," he told Reuters at his spacious office that offer breathtaking views of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

With current polls showing Giuliani leading the Republican pack, and some polls suggesting that Thompson would immediately be among the front-runners if he enters the race, Dobson could find himself increasingly marginalized as a political power broker.  Lucky for him, all that political bullying and campaigning is not his “real passion.”

UPDATE: The Washington Times issued a correction to the article mentioned above, noting that it was Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder who received the call from Thompson, not Land:

This article incorrectly reported the circumstances of a phone call from former Sen. Fred Thompson and his wife about the possible launch of a presidential campaign. The call was received by Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, who said, "No date or time frame was mentioned."

The “world’s largest conference of pro-family leaders and grass-roots activists” is slated to take place next month in Warsaw Poland. Known as the World Congress of Families, the event is backed by various right-wing groups such as The Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Concerned Women For America, The Heritage Foundation, and others.  

The year’s event, entitled “The Natural Family – Springtime For Europe and the World” is being held in Poland because apparently it alone is last hope for saving Europe and the rest of the world from the “demographic winter and … the secularists”:

Europe is almost lost; to a demographic winter and to the secularists.  If Europe goes much of the world will go with it.  Almost alone, Poland has maintained strong faith and strong families, though even Poland comes under severe pressure to change.  Poland has saved Europe before.  It is likely she will save Europe again.  On family and population questions, Europe is the battleground in the early years of the 21st Century, and Poland is the pivot point.   It makes abundant sense that The World Congress of Families IV meet among the brave people of Poland.

Among those who have reportedly agreed to attend is US Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration Ellen Sauerbrey – and members of the European Parliamentary Working Group on Separation of Religion and Politics are not particularly understanding about the Bush Administration’s willingness to lend the “official U.S. government stamp of approval to [the] extremist and intolerant views” that will surely be espoused at this conference: 

We urge you to withdraw from this conference because your participation provides an official U.S. government stamp of approval to extremist and intolerant views held by some participants and attendees. These extremist and intolerant views include prejudiced attitudes toward foreigners, people from other religions, homosexuals, and the inclusive vision of what represents a family unit that has been developed by the United Nations and the European Union.

…

The United States rightly prides itself on supporting and spreading religious tolerance, pluralism and inclusion. This conference, and many who will be attending, reject that ethos outright. We have no problem with people expressing beliefs and convictions that we do not share. In a free society, that is right and just. However, we do object when foreign government officials lend support to such views, especially when platforms are used to denigrate and attack those with whom they disagree.

We’re not sure if any of those parliamentarians have been paying attention to American politics for the past six years, but it doesn’t seem very likely that concerns over religious tolerance, gay rights, and xenophobia would cause Sauerbrey to withdraw from a conference put together by a still-loyal group of the Bush administration’s ever-dwindling political supporters.

One of the Right’s rallying cries that has become increasingly pronounced in recent years is the so-called “Criminalization of Christianity” – the idea that Christians in this country are under attack by liberals, the courts, and the government and are being targeted, arrested, and imprisoned simply for living their faith.

One of the foremost advocates of this concept is Janet Folger, who has not only written a book about it, but routinely issues paranoid warnings about what is in store:

Christians have the right to remain silent, but if we remain silent very much longer those are precisely the words we are going to hear before we see the inside of a prison cell.

Of course, much like the supposed “War on Christians,” the “Criminalization of Christianity” is completely bogus as we explained in a recent memo on right-wing opposition to hate crimes legislation recently introduced in Congress:

Religious Right groups are so eager to prevent any legal recognition or protection for gay and lesbian Americans that they are waging an aggressive disinformation campaign against these legal protections. Their strategy?  Create a distraction from the reality of violent crimes by claiming that such laws are really designed to criminalize Christianity.

The campaign is, of course, dishonest to the core.  But it is part of a larger strategy that has been politically and financially useful to Religious Right leaders over the years.  They tell millions of Americans, week after week, that gay rights advocates are out to silence conservative Christians, criminalize the reading of the Bible, and force people to choose between their faith and public service. It’s not true. But it serves the radical right’s political goals: it is easier to convince Americans to support discrimination – even to oppose laws designed to discourage violent hate crimes – if you have first convinced them that their gay neighbors want to shut down their church and throw their pastor in jail for reading the Bible.

…

Hate crimes legislation is not targeted at any of this constitutionally protected activity.  It targets only those who commit violent crimes against persons intentionally selected because they belong to, or are perceived to belong to, certain groups in our society.

But the Right will have nothing of it.  To them, efforts to pass hate crimes legislation is nothing more than an attempt to turn all Christians in criminals.  As the Traditional Values Coalition sees it:  

“Liberal and homosexual extremists want to silence people of faith whose religious beliefs condemn homosexual behavior.  This bill effectively adds a footnoted exception to the First Amendment of the Constitution – ‘none of these protections apply to Christians or other people of faith.’

“This bill begins to lay the legal foundation and framework to investigate, prosecute and persecute pastors, business owners, and anyone else whose actions are based upon, and reflect, the truths found in the Bible.

And just in case the warning that Christianity is being criminalized wasn’t clear enough, TVC has unveiled this helpful visual aid:

“Under no circumstances will I cast a vote for Rudy Giuliani as president.” Meanwhile: Giuliani reaches out at Regent. Also: Religious Right unhappy.

For “travel.”

Blames “open border and blanket amnesty crowd.” Victim’s father on Fox host: “disrespectful.” Watch O’Reilly scream at Geraldo.

But also “redoubles its efforts to mobilize its political machine.” Also in RS: Profile of Ron Luce’s BattleCry.

Already beat Tommy Thompson in GOP primary money race.

Derides “theocrat bogeyman” but warns against “Christian reconstructionists.”

The “most conservative” leading GOP candidate is “least liked by conservatives.”

Over “Ten Commandments” monument that led to his removal. “Obama does not understand religious freedom and the importance of recognizing God…”

Earlier this week, Gary Bauer of American Values, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, and Mark Earley of the Prison Fellowship, met with The Christian Science Monitor to discuss the candidates running for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, among them John McCain:

And why is Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona struggling in his second run for the presidency, despite his solid conservative voting record on social issues? It's all about a speech he delivered in 2000, in which he referred to two religious leaders – Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell – as "agents of intolerance."

Bauer says that comment was interpreted among social conservatives as an attack on them and their involvement in politics, not just on the two men named. "Obviously, he's more conservative on these social issues than Giuliani is, but there isn't anything comparable in Giuliani's rhetorical record where he went after Christian conservatives in a rhetorical way," Bauer says.

It is exceedingly odd that Bauer would cite McCain’s “agents of intolerance” remarks as the primary reason McCain is having so much trouble winning over the Right, considering that Bauer had defended McCain at the time.

For those who don’t remember, Bauer endorsed McCain on February 16, 2000.  Just under two weeks later, McCain delivered his “agents of intolerance” speech and that same day, Bauer appeared on Fox’s “Special Report with Brit Hume” and defended the speech, saying that McCain was not targeting Christian conservatives:

I do believe that if you're a conservative voter, a traditional voter, if you're pro-life, if you're pro-family, there's enough -- plenty in Senator McCain's record to justify a vote for him. Over the weekend, he said he would overturn Roe versus Wade. When he asked how -- when he was asked how, he said by appointing judges that understand the Constitution. Roe versus Wade was unconstitutional.

He said today that faith-based voters are an important part of any opportunity we have to deal with the major problems facing the country. I hope after the firestorm of today is over with that we can focus on the fact that he's reaching out to traditional conservative and Christian voters, and I think he'll get a fair share of them.

Not long thereafter, Bauer began claiming that even though he had been in the audience during McCain’s speech, he had had nothing to do with its language:

Today, he explained: ''I didn't get a chance to see that speech until it was too late to do anything about it. It had already been passed out to the press.''

Mr. McCain's aides challenged the statement, saying Mr. Bauer not only reviewed the speech in advance but also added a paragraph to it.

As the Washington Post reported on March 26 of that year, Bauer was anything but a passive spectator:

Then came what Bauer calls "this very unfortunate thing." Bauer had seen a draft of McCain's speech on the plane--he swears he thought he was on his way to a veterans event--but because it had already been distributed to reporters, he couldn't delete anything. He did add some lines, to soften the blow, praising Dobson and Charles Colson. He later defended the speech as making a distinction between certain leaders and grass-roots Christians.

Yet seven years later, Bauer has managed to position himself in a right-wing leadership role commenting on McCain’s problems with the Right, somehow neglecting to mention his own direct involvement with McCain and the very incident he now cites as responsible for the candidate's woes.       

The above-mentioned March 2000 Post article was one of many that took a look at Bauer’s future after McCain lost the primary race to George W. Bush, wondering what would become of him now that he had become persona non grata to the Right. And at the time, Bauer was unrepentant:

"I think I made the right decision and if I had to do it over again, I'd do it again," Bauer said

Well, luckily for you Gary, McCain is again running for president, so here’s your chance.   

State AG: “It's not a German shepherd, is it?" Jane Chastain: Planned Parenthood opposes because of “bottom line.”

Automaker’s financial woes supposedly due to American Family Association.

Reverend Rob Schenck of the National Clergy Council and Faith and Action says he just returned from Sudan and Darfur and apparently likes what he sees:

The Reverend Rob Schenck … returned over the Easter weekend from a seven-day diplomatic mission to Khartoum, Sudan and its Darfur state … The purpose of the mission was to engage Khartoum's government in dialogue on religion and human rights and to gain first-hand information on the state of religious liberty in the officially Islamic country.

"I was surprised by what we found in Sudan," said Schenck. "The new unity government and various peace plans seem to be working. There is new power sharing with Christians, but much remains to be done. It's an extremely complex situation, one we need look at afresh."

Schenck added, "Evangelical believers in Khartoum gave us a strong message against U.S. sanctions, one I intend to deliver to President Bush."

Schenck just returned from visiting with the Sudanese leadership in Khartoum, a regime which is accused of orchestrating a genocidal counter-insurgency campaign against the people of Darfur with the assistance of government-backed Janjaweed militias who routinely rape women, torture men and burn victims alive, killing nearly a half-million people and displacing millions more. 

And he returns pledging to press the Bush Administration not to implement sanctions simply because there appears to be some “power sharing with Christians” - even as the regime continues to kill African Muslims throughout the region. 

Schenck’s visit was hosted by Sudan's Foreign Ministry at the same time as Rep. James McGovern was being denied entry into Sudan because he refused to “[meet] with government officials, saying he wanted to visit the refugee sites alone.”  Presumably, Khartoum realized that McGovern and Schenck would have different messages to share with the US public once they returned, which is why one was welcomed and the other barred. 

Schenck is not alone in thinking that the regime in Khartoum ought to be rewarded simply because, while it continues to kill the mostly Muslim people of Darfur, it has stopped war against the mostly Christian south. In February, Franklin Graham also returned from a meeting in Khartoum with similar views: 

Graham said he came away thinking that Bashir, who now stands accused of presiding over the killing of at least 200,000 people in the Darfur region in the country's west, deserves credit for signing the peace agreement with rebels in the south in 2005.

Although human rights activists and some U.S. officials are counseling tougher measures against Bashir's government to end the violence in Darfur -- and to more fully implement a faltering peace agreement with the south -- Graham said that a softer approach is needed.

"I'm not a politician, but I think our government does need to recognize some steps he's taken and reward this government in some way to show them we appreciate what they have done" regarding southern Sudan, said Graham, the son of famed evangelist Billy Graham and head of the international Christian relief group Samaritan's Purse. "I think we can do more when we're engaged."

…

Graham said Bashir pledged to allow groups to build their churches and to look into Graham's other requests, including one for $15 million to help rebuild at least 600 churches in the south destroyed during the war.

Of course, there are other faith organizations that have been vocal in their concern about the victims of Darfur, such as Evangelicals for Darfur and the dozens of organization affiliated with Save Darfur. Graham and Schenck don’t appear to be members of either.  

Citing “segregated, protected class categories, including homosexual behavior and cross-dressing.”

Weyrich: actor would “unite both the economic and social conservative wings of the party.” Vetting is tough, though.