Major manmade global warming alarm campaigner Richard Cizik, forced to resign as the National Association of Evangelicals’ (NAE) vice president for governmental affairs last December when he embraced homosexual civil unions in a National Public Radio interview, has now embraced proposed legislation that pro-life groups warn “deceptively promotes ‘common ground’ on abortion, promoting policies to ‘reduce the need for abortion’ that pro-life leaders say would actually lead to its increase,” as Kathleen Gilbert of LifeSiteNews.com put it.

The legislation, co-sponsored by Democratic Congressmen Tim Ryan and Rosa DeLauro, “purports to ‘reduce the need for abortion’ by increasing funds for the Title X Family Planning Program, which funds Planned Parenthood, and set aside grants for explicit sex education.”

But statistical data indicate that “family planning” and sex education do not lead to fewer abortions, and they lead to fewer unwanted births only because more women with unplanned pregnancies have abortions. Support for the bill by Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, and NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) is consistent with that.

So why would Cizik, who has positioned himself as pro-life, support the bill? No reports have made it clear. But under the outspoken environmentalist’s watch the NAE shifted increasingly toward majoring on trendy issues with tenuous Biblical support and away from issues that had unified evangelicals for decades. For example, the Institute on Religion & Democracy’s Alan Wisdom found through a Nexis search that during 2006, only 3 percent of media mentions of NAE (excluding those focused on the scandal-prompted resignation of former NAE President Ted Haggard) referenced its opposition to same-sex marriage, and under 1 percent referenced its opposition to abortion, but 37 percent referenced the environment and global warming.

The overwhelming majority of Cizik’s attention in recent years has been on the environment, especially global warming. Not coincidentally, Cizik told the World Bank in 2006,

I’d like to take on the population issue, but in my community global warming is the third rail issue. I’ve touched the third rail . . . but still have a job. And I’ll still have a job after my talk here today. But population is a much more dangerous issue to touch. . . We need to confront population control and we can — we’re not Roman Catholics after all — but it’s too hot to handle now.

As The Acton Institute and The Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) revealed in a joint paper, From Climate Control to Population Control: Troubling Background on the “Evangelical Climate Initiative”, large groups long committed to population control see alleged manmade global warming as a way to bring their agenda in through the back door. Cizik’s not-so-subtle hint at support for population control over three years ago fits with that agenda, and so does the Ryan-DeLauro bill, as Planned Parenthood and Guttmacher Institute support imply.

Cizik now works for anti-population growth leader and media mogul Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundation, which has strong emphases on population control and global climate action.

What ties population control and climate action together? Acton and IRD explained in their joint paper:

Logically, one can care for the environment without supporting population control. But for many radical environmentalists, the route from global warming (and care for the environment generally) to population reduction seems irresistible: since people use up natural resources, release CO2 into the atmosphere and otherwise pollute the environment, the fewer people, the less global warming and less harm to the environment. To help the environment, therefore, we must reduce the human population.

LiveScience.com made the connection explicit in an article reporting on a new study on the effect of childbearing on carbon dioxide emissions. It’s no wonder, then, that, as Acton and IRD pointed out, “The Hewlett Foundation, which contributed $475,000 to the [Evangelical Climate Initiative], is a major contributor to the causes of abortion and population control. Like many other groups, the Hewlett Foundation explicitly connects its interest in these causes to its views on the environment.

In contrast to Cizik’s endorsement of Ryan-DeLauro, the NAE made its own position clear in a July 31, 2009, letter from NAE President Leith Anderson to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi regarding pending health care reform legislation. Anderson wrote:

. . . one point on which the NAE as a whole wishes to be very clear is its opposition to abortion and, most assuredly, the use of taxpayer resources to provide abortions.

. . . the NAE is concerned that abortion, if not specifically excluded from being covered and funded in the plans arranged for by this legislation, may be considered to be approved under the legislation after enactment. If facilitation of abortion is not the intent of Congress, then language specifically excluding abortion must be incorporated into the bill . . . .

Members of the NAE believe that the Bible reveals God’s calling and care for persons before they are born, which is why the NAE firmly opposes abortion generally.  Also stemming from this belief is the NAE’s continued interest in the conversation about how to find common ground in the effort to reduce the abortion rate in the United States. The NAE holds that federal subsidization of abortion would run counter to this aspiration. Indeed, the possibility that money taxed from their earnings could be used to facilitate the intentional termination of prenatal lives is anathema to many members of the church congregations that the NAE represents.

The Bible repeatedly warns God’s people against alliances with the wicked (Exodus 23:32; 34:12; Judges 2:2). More poignantly, it asks: “If one carries holy meat in the fold of his garment, and with the edge he touches bread or stew, wine or oil, or any food, will it become holy?” and answers no. Again it asks, “If one who is unclean because of a dead body touches any of these, will it be unclean?” and answers, “It shall be unclean” (Haggai 2:10-14). “Bad company ruins good morals,” warns the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 15:33).

Perhaps it’s time for Cizik and other self-professed evangelicals who have joined him in support for both global warming alarm and the Ryan-DeLauro bill to think long and hard about what their associations with pro-abortion, pro-population control environmentalists have done to their spiritual and moral discernment.