Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights

Guess Who Entered the Human Rights Campaign? A Review of Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights, by Allen D. Hertzke. TRUE OR FALSE? October, 2000. In support of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, Bill Bennett gives a speech in a Senate caucus room and the next speaker reads a supportive statement from Gloria Steinem. One observer notes, "Bill Bennett and Gloria Steinem and Chuck Colson and Gloria Feldt are all saying the same thing." Good Friday, 2001. Michael Horowitz, Republican think tank director, and Joe Madison, African American radio personality, chain themselves to a fence at the Sudanese embassy in Washington (to protest that regime's support of a growing slave trade) and are arrested, then call on Johnnie Cochran to defend Horowitz, and Ken Starr to defend Madison. Fearing publicity, prosecutors drop the charges. Late in 2000. Pope John Paul II, U2's Bono, and Pat Robertson join the campaign to provide debt relief to impoverished third-world countries. "Tightfisted Republican Senator" Phil Gramm threatens to filibuster the legislation. Pat Robertson asks viewers of the 700 Club to contact Gramm and demand he remove his hold on the legislation. Gramm promptly does just that. Also in 2001. Kweisi Mfume and Al Sharpton join Jesse Helms, Henry Hyde, Dick Armey, and various evangelical leaders in calling for tough U.S. action against the NIF of northern Sudan. Spring of 2003. Sudan violates its cease-fire agreement, causing the Midland Ministerial Alliance to deliver a letter to the Sudanese embassy under the letterhead "Hometown of President and First Lady Laura Bush." The letter explains that the group has been documenting NIF atrocities for five years and "flouting of the law will have devastating consequences for the regime." The letter gets the attention of the government of Sudan. May, 2002. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof calls evangelicals the nation's "newest internationalists," saving lives "in some of the most forgotten parts of the world." Some go so far as to label evangelicals the "foreign-policy conscience of conservatism," rescuing Republican foreign policy from a takeover by big business. All of the above statements are true. Surprised? If these unlikely alliances are news to you, you are not alone. This remarkable human rights movement has been all but ignored by the media. But the astonishing lack of coverage by the press has at least served to avoid giving away the ending of Allen Herztke's Freeing God's Children: the Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights. This movement has martialed the efforts of thousands of people all over the United States: feminists, Jews, Episcopals, Catholics, African American activists, modern-day abolitionists, and organizations as diverse as NOW, Amnesty International, the Campaign for Tibet, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Hertzke's book tells the story of these unlikely alliances. As he notes, Washingto

of what Christian religious conservatives can accomplish if they choose targets that do not generate widespread popular counter-resistance and are given better advice in terms of political strategy. I particularly enjoyed the passage that describes how the Ethiopian Christian who had endured torture and imprisonment astounded Michael Horowitz with his willingness to forgive and belief that if the dictator of Ethiopia truly came to be a Christian and repented of his past behavior that he would go to Heaven. Those are the sorts of witnesses for Xty that we need today. dlw