Griper Blade: Global Warming and Evangelicals -- They Still Hate Gays

Rich Cizik isn't the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals by choice. Formerly the group's chief lobbyist, Cizik took over after Ted Haggard was booted out for visiting a gay prostitute and using methamphetamines. It wasn't so much the prostitute and meth part of that story that brought Haggard down, but the gay part. The fallen pastor is now undergoing 'reparative therapy' to get rid of the gay in him -- a quack psychology 'treatment' for homosexuality pretty much guaranteed to leave the poor guy worse off than he was before. He'll be depressed, feel like a failure, and possibly become suicidal. I don't envy him. No word on whether he's being treated for drug dependency. People have their priorities.

Cizik has decided to take the NAE in a new direction -- environmentalism. He's willing to put aside debates over established science like evolution and concentrate on what he calls 'creation care.'

Rich Cizik, interviewed by Grist:

The public has long acknowledged our involvement on family values and pro-life issues, and they've begun to take notice of our engagement on concerns like human rights, slavery, and AIDS. Only recently have we begun to adequately address the challenge scripture presents to us to be faithful stewards of God's creation. We released a paper in 2004 titled "For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility" [PDF], which calls on our movement to articulate a public theology to address what we call "creation care." It urges our 30 million members to live their lives in conformity with sustainable principles, and our government to reduce pollution and resource consumption.

Cizik told the New York Times, "I don't think God is going to ask us how he created the earth, but he will ask us what we did with what he created." If you allow for a God, that seems a reasonable enough line of thinking -- who cares who built your house if it needs painting?

It's that old saying, 'politics makes strange bedfellows.' Don't see this as a step to the left by NAE, however. This has happened before. A coalition of pro-life and feminist groups lobbied Bill Clinton to veto welfare reform and, once that issue was resolved (Clinton signed it anyway), the pro-life groups went right back to being right wing nuts...

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