Trump Courts Pro-life Voters, Clinton Talks Security

WASHINGTON, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News -9th Sept,2016) : Donald Trump reaches out to so-called values voters Friday in a bid to bolster his credentials with conservative, pro-life Americans, after days of duelling over national security with Democratic White House rival Hillary Clinton.

The Republican nominee was expected as star guest at a Washington gathering of grassroots activists, conservative stalwart lawmakers and leaders in the anti-abortion and religious freedom movements.

Trump's attendance at the Values Voter Summit highlights how conservatives are keen to press such issues on the political mainstream as the bitterly fought presidential campaign heads into its final two months.

He addresses the event at about 3:30 pm (1930 GMT). Activists in the US capital were painting President Barack Obama's administration as having rolled back the rights of Americans seeking to practice their religion free from government interference.

"I've never seen anything like the attacks we're seeing now," Kelly Shackelford, president of the First Liberty Institute legal organization, told the gathering. The billionaire Trump, who is under pressure to convince the far right of his conservative values, is also well aware of his need to court middle-of-the-road voters including independents, as he trails Clinton in most polls ahead of the November 8 election.

- 'Birther' no more? - ====================== In that vein his campaign has taken steps to distance the Republican nominee from his years-long propagation of the "birther" conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States.

"He believes President Obama was born here... He was born in Hawaii," Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told CNN. Her comments came a day after Trump surrogate and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani made similar statements.

Trump himself has so far refused to acknowledge Obama's presidential legitimacy once and for all. The real estate magnate was the most prominent early proponent of a theory that Obama, the nation's first black president, was not born in the United States and therefore, under the US Constitution, ineligible to be commander in chief.

Trump embraced the long-debunked "birther movement" in early 2011, eager to push the theory as a way to connect with white conservatives and catapult himself to prominence while he mulled his own run for the White House.

Years later, in 2016, Trump rode to Primary victory thanks overwhelmingly to white support. Clinton has attacked Trump as recently as Thursday for refusing to disavow the birther theory. "We are facing a candidate with a long history of racial discrimination in his business, who traffics in toxic conspiracy theories like the lie that President Obama is not a true American," Clinton told the National Baptist Convention in Kansas City.

"If he doesn't even respect all Americans, how can he serve all Americans?" Clinton asked. "So we must keep calling him out, and rejecting the hateful,bigoted rhetoric that seeks to pit Americans one against each other."