Has the Christian Right Co-opted Human Rights Advocacy?

An article in today's NYTstudies
the heroic efforts made by a band of idealist crusaders demanding that the Bush administration confront North Korea over its horrific record on human rights.

The same group of human-rights activists also is leading the effort to get the administration to deal with Sudan, international sex trafficing, and the deplorable state of the United States' own prison system.

The admirable group in question?  The Midland Ministerial Alliance, a group of right-wing evangelical Christians.

The American Spectator has a Starry-eyed piece on the city of Midland, Texas and how it became home to the most infuential (and only?) human-rights advocacy group to have the president's ear.

I'll let you read it, yourself, in part because I don't know the HTML necessary to put any quotations in boxes.

But here's the issue that I hope my friends on the left will consider:  has the Christian Right co-opted us on the issue of global human rights, and if so, then what do we need to do to re-insert ourselves into that effort?

Granted, Amnesty International will never have the sort of access to the presidents that an organization of ministers from Texas enjoys, but Nicholas Kristoff just last month (July 24th, in a  NYT article that is now pay-to-read) argues that there is a larger trend at work, and I agree.

Evangelicals Christians have been at the forefront of the Abolitionist movement, the entire batch of reforms associated with the Progressive Era, and the Civil Rights and Peace movements of the 1960s.    Secularists accompanied them, step for step, along the way.  But as the Republican and Democratic political parties split increasingly down a religious/secular fault line, the Republican party inherited much of the human-rights advocacy community.

I do not want my party to default on their ownership of the moral high ground to people who put up North Korean Human-Rights Abuse booths next to their Abstinence booths or who vote for a guy that installs Alberto Gonzalez as AG.  For too long, global human-rights was a partisan issue favoring the Democrats, and now I fear it's in danger of becoming a partisan issue for Republicans.  It should be neither, and nothing substantive will be accomplished without broad-based support.  I love Jimmy Carter and John Lewis, but we need a new generation of elected Democrats to carry their mantle.  Obama's recent turn towards international affairs, especially Sudan, is a promising start.  Who else is going to step forward?