I just want to point out again that the Family Research Council is not a clever parody devised by liberals looking for a strawman to attack.  And the Values Voter Summit was not organized by liberal writers from Religion Dispatches and Talk2Action in order to set a crafty trap to lure fringe figures of the religious right into making a spectacle.  

Nor were all those leading Republicans tricked into attending the event, courting the votes of this crowd, due to some liberal conspiracy to portray them as science-denying, Rapture-awaiting, gay-hating extremists. They elected to attend this event and did their best to portray themselves as science-denying, Rapture-awaiting, gay-hating extremists.

The Values Voter Summit likes to portray itself as representative of all of American evangelicalism.

That is not true, and when they make that false claim, they should be called out on it.  Evangelicals who disagree with the politics, science and stunted ethical views of the Values Voter Summit are right to protest that they do not represent all or even a majority of us.

But for folks like Jim Wallis, Mark Pinsky and Jim Ball to say that these so-called "Values Voters" are not part of American evangelicalism is just as ridiculously dishonest as the FRC's claim that they comprise the whole of it.  To say that this bloc of voters on the religious right is insignificant or marginal or a mere fringe in American evangelicalism is just as dishonest as their claim to be the only group of any significance.

Seeing through the miasmas is going to be an ongoing struggle, as politically and religiously motivated actors on all sides hack away at strawmen in keeping with what seems to be the current fashion in public discourse in this area.  

I think Rev. Katherine Ragsdale (then the executive director of Political Research Associates; currently President of Episcopal Divinity School) got it right in her essay in Dispatches from the Religious Left:  The Future of Faith and Politics in America:

"Perhaps one of the most fundamental outrages of all is the erosion of honest public discourse.  When, instead of disagreeing honestly, the Right (or any of us) practice to deceive and to cut off debate with spurious claims ...  we are left unable to know what to believe, how to speak in order to he heard, how to struggle together to discern the truth.  By all means, let us put our values and convictions on the table, with the facts, and then lets disagree about the moral and public policy implications of that data.  Let us disagree passionately - an indicator of how seriously we take it all.  But let's disagree honestly."