"We're dealing with flesh-and-blood men and women, and not abstractions," [Barack] Obama said...

...and "if condoms and potentially things like microbicides can prevent millions of deaths, then they should be made more widely available. . . . I don't accept the notion that those who make mistakes in their lives should be given an effective death sentence."

Oh this makes me happy:

When Rick Warren, one of the nation's most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine. ...

For a quarter-century since the rise of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, white evangelical Christians have been widely seen as a Republican preserve. No one did a more comprehensive job of organizing them than President Bush, and he carried the white evangelical vote in 2004 over John Kerry by a ratio of nearly 4 to 1. Many of the most politically active evangelical leaders have insisted that the morally freighted social issues -- abortion, stem-cell research, same-sex marriage -- took priority over all questions. ...

[Pastor Rick] Warren speaks for a new generation of evangelicals who think that harnessing religious faith too closely to electoral politics is bad for religion, and who are broadening the evangelical public agenda to include a concern for global poverty and the scourge of AIDS. (E.J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post)

I've been appalled in the last few years by the religious hysteria over gay marriage while the poverty problem -- along with myriad other human rights situations, in which thousands and thousands of people are dying -- were largely ignored. Maybe, maybe, they'll start to resent being manipulated for political purposes and prioritize their issues now. Forget about legislating people's sex lives; harness that moral outrage towards feeding children in Africa. Or finding a cure for AIDS. Or cancer. Or Darfur....