This weekend in Ames, Iowa, there will be a Republican Party
presidential straw poll which has become enshrined in recent years as
the first major event in the Republican presidential discussion leading
up to the primary and caucus season. It ought to be an occasion of joy
for us to begin again this key part of the process of self-government,
in which a free and great political party begins to move toward the
choice of a champion to compete before the nation for the highest office
in the land. And it certainly should be an occasion for gathering our
thoughts about the most important challenges that the nation faces, so
we can make our decision between the various candidates based on a sound
judgment. Unfortunately, gathering our thoughts about the important
challenges we face is not likely to be a cause of joy in America in
1999.
When I reflect on the state of our nation, I look first for a
standard. This I find in the declaration of principles and beliefs —
taken together, the American creed — that was laid as the foundation
stone of
this nation’s life on July the Fourth, 1776. If we are honest with
ourselves on the eve of the presidential campaign of 2000, then we ought
to look at the condition of our country in the light of the Declaration
of Independence. The Declaration of Independence represents still the
creed that defines the American identity, and that states for all of us
those beliefs that are at the heart and soul of our national life. And
in that light we see that our heart is dying and our soul is in danger
and our liberty is almost gone. To see this is to understand that there
can be only one fundamental criterion by which we judge prospective
leaders: Are they prepared to lead the American people toward a
reawakened understanding of our national soul? Such an awakening — and
the entire range of policies and governmental actions implied by it —
is the only agenda worthy of consideration by this still-great people.
If we do not wake up as a people — and I mean NOW, not “early in the
next millennium,” but urgently soon — then the ordered liberty we so
cherish will no longer be embodied in the practices and the institutions
of our nation.
We are on the very brink. Bill Clinton has broken his oath before the
American people, perjured himself, showed contempt for our judicial
system and every decent value of heart and mind necessary to sustain our
family lives. After all of that, openly done and admitted, he is still
sitting in the White House as president of the United States. We have
placed command of the most awesome military power the world has ever
seen, a military power that can at a stroke account for thousands, tens
of thousands, even millions of human lives, in the hands of a man whose
moral judgment and character we cannot trust. The president leads our
nation not only in peace, but in war. And the first thing he did after
the perjured Senate let him off the hook was to take this nation into
war. It was a war in which we had no business, involving issues that in
no way threatened the United States of America and its people and
conducted according to the most immoral strategy of any war in the
history of this country. We chose and kept an immoral president, and he
led us down the path of immoral conflict.
The crisis of our nation’s institutions is not for tomorrow. It is
happening now. This president took us into war without a declaration,
remained in that war in violation of the War Powers Act and every
stricture of our law and Constitution, and we tolerated it. And this is
just a recent example of the many and increasing ways we have seen the
president, the courts, and others, hold in contempt those things that
are necessary in order to sustain our freedom.
Why is it happening? And more importantly, why do we tolerate it?
That is a question we need to be asking ourselves every day now, if we
want to see our children grow up to the same heritage of liberty that we
ourselves have enjoyed. It is the question that should define the
discussion among the men and women who wish to lead the Republican
Party, and it should dominate the questions put to them by the voters
making up their minds.
Why have we patiently watched while our national security interests
have been fundamentally betrayed over the last six years? During the
Clinton years, an enemy halfway around the world, with the will — as
they have recently declared — to defeat our way of life and our
political institutions of liberty, has been handed key secrets of our
nuclear weapons technology. The people who perpetrated this aren’t being
pursued and are not being prosecuted, giving rise to the suspicion
that this wasn’t theft at all. The Chinese didn’t steal our military
secrets; our president gave them away! And the damage that resulted has
been compared by some members of the Senate as the worst harm to our
national security since Pearl Harbor.
And if we didn’t understand our perilous situation from the scandals
in the White House, from the paralysis of the Congress, from the
betrayal of our national security, then the blood of those crying out
from the ground in cities all over this country, and finally even in
high schools like Columbine High School in Colorado, ought to tell us
that there is something wrong in America. We are supposed to treat it as
normal when young people in black trench coats, their hearts filled with
violence and evil, stalk the halls to kill their fellow students. That
is not normal. That is not America.
Neither is it the fault of the guns in their hands; it’s the fault of
the moral evil that is in their hearts. If we see that evil, if we see
that corruption, in high and low places, stealing our security and
taking the lives of our children, I think it is time that we take stock.
For many, the economy may be great. But I’ve got news for you. If the
moral heart of America is being destroyed, if the conscience of
America is being undone, then it won’t be long until all the rest
tumbles from its pedestal.
What are we going to do about it? That is the question that faces the
American people today. But to know what to do we have to know what is
wrong. And this we can especially see, if we are willing to look back at
the heritage of our nation with new eyes. In the Declaration of
Independence we celebrate the words with which our Founders stated the
basic moral principles of our way of life: “We hold these truths to be
self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these
rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power
from the consent of the governed.”
Many of us have heard those words time and again. But it breaks my
heart in today’s America, because we mouth them, but frequently don’t
seem to understand their true importance. We are very willing to join
with others to demand our rights; we go into court to make sure that
nobody tramples on them, and insist that we must have equality. We can
see all the ways in which those words justify us in our causes and
crusades on behalf of those things that we demand for our selfish
interests.
But, if we are to save our country, we must step back and look at the
one fundamental truth that above all cries out in that language, that
requires our attention, our understanding, and our allegiance, because
it communicates the truth that is the only sure foundation for our
strong character as a people. Our Founders didn’t just tell us that we
have rights. They told us where those rights come from. And it was not
from constitutions, from victories on the battlefield, or from stock
markets and the strength of our economic life. It was not from any human
power or any human judgment whatsoever. Rather, in those great words we
are invited to bow our knee before that source of our rights which is
the source of all our strength and all our dignity: the power, the will,
the authority of our Creator, God. This is the truth. This is the truth
which is the solid rock on which this nation stands.
But in so many ways, in the course of the last several decades, we
have turned our back as a nation on this truth. We have been willing to
follow those who have told us falsely that we can redefine our freedom,
turn our backs on God, ignore His will, forget His laws, and instead set
up our own desires and passions in their place.
Chief among such lies is the one that in my opinion epitomizes the
depth of moral corruption that is today destroying our conscience,
destroying our heart for citizenship and family life. It is the lie that
the right to life of our children, of our precious future in the womb,
comes from a mother’s choice. We can’t have it both ways. Either that
lie is to be our creed, or the Declaration is to be our creed. Either
our rights come from human choice, or they come from the hand of God.
The point must be put that way, to the whole country, by anyone truly
ready for the job of president. If we mean to retain our allegiance to
the great principles of the Declaration that we celebrate every Fourth
of July, then the first step we must take as a people is to overturn the
decisions, the policies and the laws that represent a rejection of the
most fundamental principle of our moral life.
Abortion must be driven, as policy and fact, from this nation’s life
and from the precincts of all our laws and public places.
Let that be the first step in our efforts to reclaim our rightful
place, not as the subjects and consumers of a vast utopian government
service machine, but instead as what we are supposed to be — the free
citizens of a free land. We must remember that our liberty gives us both
the right to participate and the responsibility to help shape the
destiny of our country.
Do we want to reclaim that self-government? Then we are going to have
to reclaim control of our schools. We are going to have to take them out
of the hands of bureaucrats and educrats, and put them back in the hands
of parents, who stand before God with the first responsibility for their
children’s lives.
If we want to restore that self-government, then we are going to have
to return control of our money and our economy to the hands of the
people who work for it. We are going to have to look in the eye those
who have told us for the last several decades, “Give us a little more
control over your dollars; we’ll wipe out poverty. Give us a little more
control of your dollars; we’ll take care of all your needs. We’ll take
care of your aging parents, your retirement. We’ll take care of
everything for you.” We have watched as, time after time, they have
raised the burden on our working life, taken more and more out of our
income. What have we gotten for it? Schools that aren’t good enough to
educate our children, and policies that are not good enough to provide
for our future, in spite of all the earnings that we have placed in the
Social Security system.
The key to this nation’s strength has not been a government that does
everything for us, but a people with the character, the strength, the
willingness and responsibility to do what they have to for themselves.
We must begin right now to reclaim those things that will put us in a
strong position to be that people once again. We must reclaim our rights
as a people. We must recover our willingness to assert our rights over
our money, our schools and our businesses, against an ever-expanding
regime of government domination and regulation.
But to do this will require that we defeat one argument that is made
across the board by those seeking to justify the surrender of all our
liberties. Whenever we say that it is time for the people to take power
back into their own hands, we meet with a reply of our unfitness for
responsible freedom. We are told that parents can’t be given control
over the schools, because they will fail to educate children well.
Similarly, the proposal to return first control over the dollars we earn
to those who earn them is met with the objection that the abolition of
the income tax would mean that the poor would be uncared for, the
elderly would be abandoned, and aging parents would be neglected.
We are told as well that we are not fit to have in our possession the
instruments with which to defend our families, our lives and our
liberty. Liberal elites do not consider that the American people are
morally competent to have Second Amendment rights, and so they wish to
remove those rights. The history of oppression throughout the history of
the world makes clear that a people judged unfit to defend its liberty
will soon lose it.
After the hard work, wisdom, strength, and initiative of this great
people have built up the most generous society, the strongest economy,
and the most successful republic in the history of the world, we are now
told that we are not even fit to take care of our own families and our
own children. Why do we have such contempt for ourselves that we sit
patiently and listen while our elites tell us all the things we are no
longer fit to do?
Recovery from this contempt, and awakening to a new sense of our
capacities and responsibilities as a free people, must be the central
goal of the Republican standard bearer in 2000. We have reached the
point where the crisis of our character is becoming a crisis of all our
institutions. We are in the crisis through which we will determine
whether we will hold onto or surrender those rights and prerogatives
which are essential if we are to retain our liberties.
We have been brought to this point by a liberal politics, infecting
the Republican Party as well as the Democrat Party, that plays on the
lack of moral self-confidence of so many people in this country. There
are too many Americans who no longer believe in each other, who no
longer believe in themselves, because they think that we have stepped
back from the moral truths that alone can make us a decent and
responsible people, capable of handling our rights and our freedom.
Liberal politics has been a sustained slander against the moral
character and fitness of the American people, and we are in the final
stages of a great temptation to believe that slander. Rejecting that
slander before our belief turns it into reality is the only thing that
matters in politics — in our national life — as the new millennium
begins.
Many politicians will talk to us about money, the budget, the
military, and other crucial but entirely secondary issues. But those who
really care about America, and who really care to reestablish our
strength based on the great principles of our national soul, will join
together in placing first on the agenda of our concern the restoration
of our nation’s moral principles, of its moral conscience, of its moral
character. That is the first challenge we have; on that, everything else
depends. Understanding this is the true and only test of practical
political leadership today.
Some moral conservatives think the battle is already lost. But I
would remind you that the key weapon of the opposition is their ongoing
lie that Americans are no longer decent and responsible, and it is by
repeating that lie that they have brought it as close to reality as they
have. If a lie can almost become reality, just because so many people
believe it, then a renewed faith in the founding TRUTHS of American life
will have even more amazing power to change reality. We must resolve to
act politically only on the basis of our faith in the founding truths of
American principle, and we will change political reality.
If you believe this, then I would ask you to join together with so
many of the other people, in Iowa and around the country, who are
fighting in a great army of moral renewal intended to restore this
nation’s allegiance — not only in lip service, but in heart and in fact
— to the great principles on which this nation rests, including the
first principle of God’s authority.
If you are not willing to step forward and accept this
responsibility, you should not expect that we will have this battle to
fight for much longer. A people that is not able to understand the
danger to its liberty, and is not willing to step forward to fight the
battle for its liberty when the opportunity is present, will not have
its liberty for much longer.
For the sake of those children who are yet to come, and for the sake
of an entire world which has been inspired by the success of our
God-fearing freedom, and which remains ready to be led and inspired by
it in the 21st century — think now of your duty as citizens. Turning
where we must turn if we are to find the strength to rebuild this
nation’s hope, to God our Father, let us go down on our knees before Him
and pray that the nation’s heart will be stirred once again with respect
for His name, with respect for His will and His law. Let us pray with
real faith that we will be graced with a return to that strong sense of
our own discipline, of respect for the God-given value of our children’s
lives, on which alone we can build a right moral conscience as citizens.
Let us pray for the wisdom and determination necessary to act on the
strength of that rebuilt confidence to reclaim our control over family,
over schools, over money, and finally over that government which is not
to be our master, but our servant and our tool.
Believe in the truth, and in the power of faith in that truth to
change political reality. If we can find it in ourselves to act
according to this faith, then in spite of all opposition we can enter
the 21st century with confidence not only in ourselves, but above all
with that confidence that comes — as it came to our Founders and to so
many in American history — from our faith in Almighty God.
God’s special hand of providence has been upon this country since it
began. It was there the night that Washington crossed the Delaware
famously clutching in his heart this one thing: his belief that God’s
providence was on the side of his revolution. The Revolutionary Army did
not have much in the way of equipment. They didn’t have boots, even, for
the feet of all their soldiers. They didn’t have all of the
paraphernalia and training of their British adversaries. Sophisticates
placing bets would have bet that they were going to lose. But the rag
tag band of heroes who made America with their faith and their blood
didn’t stand up and say that “We’ve got to go with the winner.” They
said in their hearts, “We must go with what is right. We must fight so
that this country will be based upon a sense of God’s will and God’s
justice.”
In spite of all the things that seem to stand against right and
decency, we must believe that if together we put our hand in the hand of
God, and our faith in the truth of His promise and His word, by
following our hearts and simply doing what is right, we can return our
country to the
true path of conscience, of character, of true liberty. This is the
politics of reality, founded on the deepest truths. And the humblest
citizen can strike a blow for his country by resolving to act only on
these principles in the critical political season now beginning. If we
dedicate ourselves to the cause of restoring in our time what the
Declaration truly stands for, we will know Whom to ask for aid. And I
think we can be sure our God will be faithful, and He will not withhold
from us — as He has not in the past, so He will not in the future —
His blessings of liberty.
Let the race begin.
