A few days, Faith and Action’s Rob Schenck posted a video explaining his organization’s role in Washington, DC, saying that “political analysis” was not part of the mission, but rather their mission was to conduct “Christian missionary outreach” to elected and appointed officials:
Our task is very simple. And that is to announce Biblical truth, the claims of Christ in the Gospel, the revelation God has given to us in his word and the application of it through historic Christian moral instruction … We do engage with policy issues rarely. What we are mostly concerned about is not policy or politics or personalities but rather, we’re concerned about persons, human beings, individual souls and, first, their relationship to God, their understanding of truth with a capital “T” and how they apply that in their own personal lives and then how that bleeds into their policy initiatives.
Given that that is Schenck’s stated mission, it was rather surprising to see this video he posted today announcing that he was heading to Annapolis, MD to meet with a group of other right-wing activsts and state legislators to plot strategy with a working group at the state capitol on how to fight efforts to grant marriage equality to gay couples in the state.
Schenck says his role is to help this coalition develop a rationale for preserving traditional marriage and says this is an important task because Maryland is so close to Washington, DC and has a great influence over the thinking there. Schenck says that it is vitally important to preserve marriage in the states and many have already “fallen” and so it is his task to offer an “apologia” defending marriage on both a secular and a religious level. He says that Maryland is especially important, because it is a “churched state” with a large African American population:
That doesn’t sound like ministry to me … it sounds a lot like trying to influence policy.
We’ve written about Schenck multiple times before: about the tangled web of organizations to whom he has ties and with whom he shares office space, including Focus on the Family; about his private meetings with John McCain; about his VIP invitation to attend Sarah Palin’s VP announcement; about his attacks on Barack Obama’s Christian faith; about his ties to Senators James Inhofe and Orrin Hatch; about his history of annointing doors and chairs in the Capitol before significant political events; and, of course, his history as a radial anti-choice advocate who was arrested for thrusting a fetus at Bill Clinton back in 1992 and leading protests against a doctor in New York who was eventually assassinated by an anti-abortion zealot.
