This chapter describes the most important human rights story since the end of the Cold War, the growth in the U.S. of a broad movement for international human rights that draws in evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Baha’is, African-Americans, and feminists. This movement has pushed successfully for legislation and active policy on international religious freedom, Sudan, sexual trafficking, debt forgiveness, AIDS, and North Korea. Despite its repeated successes, it has often been ignored by journalists, or else its programs and personnel have been misstated, so that the broadest coalition in foreign policy is sometimes reduced to the purported politics of the “Christian right.” The result is that this major evolution in American human rights concerns and in U.S. foreign policy has been missed or misunderstood.
Keywords: human rights, foreign policy, religious freedom, Christian right, Sudan, AIDS, North Korea, sex trafficking,