Richard Cizik

Defending their "Shared commitment to women and children," on the Washington Post/Newsweek's "On Faith" site, the Revs. Richard Cizik and Debra Haffner joined forces today support federal tax monies flowing to Planned Parenthood.

Cizik, you may recall, is a bit of a media favorite because he hails from a generally theologically conservative tradition but has been moving leftward politically over the past few years.

Haffner is liberal theologically and politically, a Unitarian-Universalist minister and the former president of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), a group that lobbies to end federal funding of abstinence-until-marriage sex ed programs.

As we've noted, the On Faith feature often skews liberal in theology and politics, and the Cizik/Haffner tag-team fits hand-in-glove with the leftward tack of the site.

Here's the duo's argument against defunding Planned Parenthood (emphases mine):

If you had to narrow it down to one person, the mainstream media's favorite evangelical Christian would probably be the politically liberal Richard Cizik.

The former National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) vice president resigned from the NAE in December 2008 after having made public statements to the effect that gay marriage and abortion were politically negotiable issues for Christians of good conscience. Before then he was actively involved in getting evangelical Christians to align with liberals on global warming-related legislative initiatives.

Cizik now heads a left-leaning group -- The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good -- that advocates for nuclear disarmament, Haiti debt relief, and "Muslim-Christian dialogue" among other things.

It is Cizik's work on interfaith dialogue that caught the approving attention of Georgetown University's Katherine Marshall. The On Faith contributor wrote a Feb. 15 story for the Washington Post/Newsweek blog noting a recent seminar attended by Cizik and Morocco's ambassador to the United States: