Values Voters to Meet GOP Candidates

James Dobson's Focus on the Family organization is cosponsoring the Values Voters weekend in Washington. (By Chip Somodevilla -- Getty Images)

It's a Values Voters weekend in Washington, beginning Thursday evening with a film screening of "Bella," the latest release from the executive producer of "The Passion of the Christ," and concluding Sunday with a morning worship service featuring Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.

The event, billed as the Washington Briefing, will also feature appearances by all eight major Republican presidential candidates. Sponsored in part by Perkins's group and by Focus on the Family, evangelical leader James Dobson's organization, it claims to be "the largest gathering of values voters from across the nation."

One late RSVP: former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. The council announced last Monday that he had agreed to speak, the final GOP candidate to do so. Just a few weeks ago, several evangelical leaders said they would consider supporting a third-party candidate if Giuliani, or any other pro-abortion-rights candidate, were to become the Republican nominee. Two other candidates, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and Sen. Sam Brownback (Kan.), have warned that such a strategy by the religious right would benefit Democrats.

"I think a third party only helps elect Hillary" Rodham Clinton, Huckabee said in an interview with washingtonpost.com. "I don't see that being a good strategy for those who really care about pushing a pro-family, pro-life agenda."

In an online chat with readers on washingtonpost.com, Brownback said that to "support a third party will ensure a Democrat being elected to the White House."

Giuliani set off talk of a third-party candidate, but he is not the only one who faces the prospect of an unfriendly crowd. Dobson also has a dim view of the candidacy of former senator Fred D. Thompson (Tenn.). "He has no passion, no zeal, and no apparent 'want to,' " Dobson wrote last month about the late entrant into the GOP race. "And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!"

Values voters can decide for themselves whether Thompson could be their Great Hope; the Washington Briefing also includes a straw poll.