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WASHINGTON, October 17, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Kansas Senator Sam Brownback is hoping that resurgence in faith and traditional values among US voters will work in his favour in a bid for the 2008 Republican nomination for president.

Brownback first campaigned for the US Congress in 1994, but as a “very different candidate,” according to a New York Times report. “In a contested Republican primary, he was generally considered the candidate friendlier to abortion rights because he did not oppose abortions in cases of rape or incest or to protect the life of the pregnant woman,” explained NYT columnist David D. Kirkpatrick.

But his life changed when he was diagnosed with melanoma in 1995. “It really caused me to stare at the end of life, and I wasn’t very pleased with how I was living at that time,” Brownback said to a group of monks at St. Anselm’s abbey Tuesday. “It sunk my roots real deep into my faith.” Formerly an evangelical Christian, Brownback converted to Catholicism in 2002; his entry into the Church was sponsored by Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
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  In 1996, Brownback ran for the US Senate, but he “began to shift his emphasis from economic issues to social issues like abortion,” according to Kirkpatrick. Brownback has backed bans on human cloning and destructive embryonic stem cell research and backed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex “marriage.”“At the Republican National Convention in 2004 he rallied a closed- door meeting of Christian conservatives with calls for a ‘cultural war,’” Kirkpatrick added.

Brownback organized a meeting last November to discuss the dangers of pornography addiction, calling on members to endorse a public health campaign warning that the addiction is destroying families and harming children.

In comments made to students at St. Anselm’s abbey Wednesday, he described the so-called separation of church and state as “the great debate of our season” and abortion “the defining issue of the difference between the political parties today.”

Read David Kirkpatrick’s column:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/national/14brownback.html

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