"The Christian Right increasingly seeks to restrict women's reproductive rights internationally through its growing number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with consultative status at the United Nations. Believing their power to be enhanced by the election of an anti-choice president in 2000, these anti-choice NGOs have increased their presence at the UN. They oppose UN programs and platforms promoting access to abortion and contraception, and they promote an abstinence-only family planning curriculum worldwide. Using the access to a few official delegations and activities offered by their consultative status, the NGOs pursue their goals by attempting to stonewall the deliberative process of committees, organizing and funding an international caucus composed of other conservative religious entities and governments to mobilize opposition more broadly within the UN.
Working through the UN constitutes a shift in the history of conservative Christian evangelical organizations that historically limited themselves abroad to missionary work. Influenced by other sectors of the Right that oppose the existence of the United Nations as a threatening "One World Government," they have executed a Trojan Horse strategy of infiltrating the UN under the guise of reforming the institution, resulting in prolonged negotiations that signal to their supporters influence far greater than is actually the case."
""In June 2004, U.S. officials brought along a special guest to a regional United Nations (UN) conference on population issues held in Puerto Rico. It was Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ). Smith, one-time head of the New Jersey Right to Life Committee, promotes himself as a champion for international human rights and a strong opponent of abortion. "Anti-life strategies which rely on deception and hyperbole… are now being deployed with a vengeance in the developing world," he once proclaimed.1
A member of Congress for over twenty years, Smith took advantage of his presence at the regional UN conference - the biannual Economic Council for Latin America and the Caribbean - to directly lobby delegates against language that he felt hinted at abortion rights. His target was UN support for "reproductive health," a phrase that was first adopted during the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo a decade earlier and that has since become UN boilerplate. The Congressman wanted to revert to the pre-Cairo language of "family planning."
http://www.publiceye.org/reproductive_rights/UNdoingReproFreedomSimple.html
"The Family, or the Fellowship, is in its own words an "invisible" association, though it has always been organized around public men. Senator Sam Brownback (R., Kansas), chair of a weekly, off -the-record meeting of religious right groups called the Values Action Team (VAT), is an active member, as is Representative Joe Pitts (R., Pennsylvania), an avuncular would-be theocrat who chairs the House version of the VAT. Others referred to as members include senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee (the powerful conservative caucus co-founded back in 1974 by another Family associate, the late senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska); Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa); James Inhofe (R., Oklahoma); Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma); John Thune (R., South Dakota); Mike Enzi (R., Wyoming); and John Ensign, the conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name. Some Democrats are involved: representatives Bart Stupak and Mike Doyle, leading anti-abortion Democrats, are longtime residents of the Family's C Street House, a former convent registered as a church and used to provide Family-subsidized housing for politicians supported by the Family. A centrist occasionally stumbles into the fold, but the Family is mostly conservative. Family stalwarts in the House include Representatives Frank Wolf (R., Virginia), Zach Wamp (R., Tennessee), and Mike McIntyre, a hard right North Carolina Democrat who believes that the Ten Commandments are "the fundamental legal code for the laws of the United States" and thus ought to be on display in schools and court houses.
The Family's historic roll call is even more striking: the late senator Strom Thurmond (R., South Carolina), who produced "confidential" reports on legislation for the Family's leadership, presided for a time over the Family's weekly Senate meeting, and the Dixie-crat senators Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Absalom Willis Robertson of Virginia — Pat Robertson's father — served on the behind-the-scenes board of the organization. In 1974, a Family prayer group of Republican congressmen and former secretary of defense Melvin Laird helped convince President Gerald Ford that Richard Nixon deserved not just Christian forgiveness but also a legal pardon. That same year, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist led the Family's first weekly Bible study for federal judges.
"I wish I could say more about it," Ronald Reagan publicly demurred back in 1985, "but it's working precisely because it is private."
"We desire to see a leadership led by God," reads a confidential mission statement. "Leaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit." Another principle expanded upon is stealthiness; members are instructed to pursue political jujitsu by making use of secular leaders "in the work of advancing His kingdom," and to avoid whenever possible the label Christian itself, lest they alert enemies to that advance. Regular prayer groups, or "cells" as they're often called, have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120746516
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