As a result of 40 Ohio Pro-Family Forum leaders meeting with two McCain Campaign staffers last Saturday, six of us were asked to meet privately with him yesterday afternoon. There was a lot of media coverage, but the attached story does the best job of explaining the meeting. However, it does leave out the fact the Ohio Pro-Family Leaders have decided to move forward and start working to educate Ohio Values Voters about the vast differences between McCain and Obama. Personally, I can't wait any longer and can't take the chance that Obama will be our next president. I spent an hour sitting next to McCain, questioning him and listening as the group took him to task on issues like embryonic stem cell research. Dr. Willke, Founder of National Right to Life, gave him every reason to reverse himself on that issue. [But apparently, he didn't.] For me this election is primarily about the next Supreme Court appointments, even though McCain is with us on many other issues as well.

About 90 leaders attended the Denver meeting, according to the Associated Press..

"Our shared core values compel us to unite and choose the presidential candidate that best advances those values," said [Matthew] Staver, who heads the Florida-based legal advocacy group Liberty Counsel and originally backed the candidacy of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. "That obvious choice is Sen. John McCain. I think people left the meeting in unity the likes of which have not been evident through the primaries."

Staver said the result will be more leaders "energizing their base" and targeted efforts in battleground states and states with anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives this fall such as Florida and California.

According to Staver, those in attendance included Phyllis Schlafly, head of the Eagle Forum; pastor and "Left Behind" co-author Tim LaHaye and his wife, Beverly, founder of Concerned Women for America; David Barton, founder of WallBuilders; Rick Scarborough of Vision America; and Don Hodel, a former interior secretary and former president of Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family.

James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and a fan of neither McCain nor Democratic candidate Barack Obama, did not attend.

Time magazine, which first reported the meeting, says that the group agreed to "unite behind McCain."

Stephen Strang, editor of Charisma magazine, who, like most Religious Right leaders had supported Huckabee, was also present in Denver and has come out for McCain.

But like John Hagee and Rod Parsely, it could be that Strang's support will be a mixed blessing, since Strang also recently backed a controversial Canadian evangelist who, as Richard Bartholomew reports at Talk to Action, boasts of raising the dead, making tumours drop off, meeting angels and Biblical figures, and of being told by God to heal a woman by kicking her in the face.

The views of religious right leaders can range from the merely odd, to the wildly anti-democratic, profoundly bigoted and even horrific, as we saw in the case of John ("McCain threw me under the bus" Hagee.

How far such things will continue to be an issue in the campaign, remains to be seen.

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