Talk To Action contributor moiv has discovered a rather striking petition from 1996 in which Jim Wallis - along with a large number of prominent leaders of the Christian right - called for legal bans on abortion.

What does Jim Wallis think now ? It's impossible to tell. Writes moiv:

before his elevation as an "evangelical progressive" celebrity, together with a Who's Who of the Religious Right that he now says "gets it wrong" -- in lockstep agreement with Gary Bauer, Charles Colson, James Dobson, Robert George, William Kristol, Beverly LaHaye, Richard Land, Bernard Nathanson, Frank Pavone and Ralph Reed -- Jim Wallis signed a lengthy document that said plenty about abortion, culminating in a call for a constitutional amendment to criminalize abortion entirely.  And to this day, adept as he is at dodging questions about his true position, Wallis has yet to repudiate a word of it.

After attending a Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice, a Bay Area interfaith peace organization. steering committee meeting, where one of the major topics was our endorsement of an anti-torture campaign, I was flipping through the channels when I came across Bill O'Reilly interviewing Rev. Jim Wallis (editor of Sojourners). They were discussing an advertisement run in the New York Times by an organization called the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) that called for America to put an end to torture. O'Reilly asked Rev. Wallis a simple question, which I was surprised to see Rev. Wallis fumble. Granted, an armchair quarterback always feels better prepared than the person truly in the hot seat, but, Rev. Wallis is acting as a spokesperson for this campaign and I wish he had a more accurate response to O'Reilly's question.

The question from O'Reilly was "What torture?" He wanted to know what examples of torture could be cited to justify a campaign against it, specifically a campaign that accused the United States of torturing people. Instead of citing specific examples, Rev. Wallis gave the impression that the campaign was more philosophical, and that investigations were necessary to show whether the United States was, or was not, conducting or condoning torture.