The National Association of Evangelicals' (NAE) Director of Public Affairs, Robert Dugan, Jr., testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late May in enthusiastic support of Dr. Ernest Lefever.
Lefever, the highly controversial nominee for the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, withdrew his name from consideration on June 5.
Although he claimed to care for "every sparrow that falls," in recent years Lefever pushed to abolish all U.S. foreign policy legislation on human rights. (In May he expediently flip-flopped on this and said he had "goofed.") He believes the U.S. "has no responsibility--and certainly no authority--to promote human rights in other sovereign states," except in communist nations. He refused under persistent questioning by Republican senators to name any countries other than communist ones that violate human rights. Last year, he lobbied Congress to allow the CIA to use, and even pay, Christian missionaries to spy for the U.S. in foreign countries (NAE's Dugan did say many evangelicals would disagree with him on this). Among other things, Lefever has dismissed religious and other human rights activists in south Korea as "a mixture of naive Utopians and power hungry ideologues," and has opposed one-person, one-vote elections in Rhodesia and South Africa.
NAE's Dugan, in taking what he called the "unusual" action of endorsing Lefever, said he spoke for himself and not NAE officially, since NAE had not had time to take up the matter as an organization. Nonetheless, Dugan said he believed his "views reflect those of most evangelicals in the U.S."
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