By special permission from James Dobson, Inc. and Council for National Policy, The Scott Wilder Show is grateful for the opportunity to bring you the transcript of Dr. James Dobson’s speech on 07 February 1998 before the Council for National Policy.   Many people believe this to be one of the most important speeches made in years.  Make sure to tell a friend they can find this transcript at www.wildershow.com. 

Dr. Dobson was speaking as an individual and not as a representative of any organization. 


CNP #5
GUEST: JCD
DATE RECORDED: 02-07-98
DATE TRANSCRIBED: 02-18-98
TAPE LENGTH: NA 

The following transcript is from a speech given by Dr. James C. Dobson, on February 7, 1998, at a Phoenix, Arizona, meeting of the Council for National Policy (CNP). Dr. Dobson was speaking as a private citizen, and not in his capacity as president of Focus on the Family. CNP member Elsa Prince of Holland, Michigan, provided the introduction...

INTRO:

Elsa: Well, I'm very privileged to be able to be here today to introduce our next speaker, because Dr. James Dobson is a highly sought-after speaker. I know that he is requested to speak many, many times. In fact, he told me at one time that he could speak at least 10 times a day and still have some refusals besides, so I think we are very, very fortunate to be able to have him today, and I consider it a real privilege to be able to introduce him.

He's a prolific author with at least 15 top-selling books, many of them being translated into over 35 different languages. Through his ministry he uses books, videos, magazines, and all of these are designed for children, young adults, teenagers, as well as lawyers and physicians, pastors, for families and single-parent families, and all of this material is designed for the specific problems for each one of these groups.

Besides this, Dr. Dobson is also involved with the 90-second commentaries which are broadcast on 49 commerical TV stations in 650 cities and at least 11-1/2 million people are exposed to this each week. These——if you have not seen any of these commentaries, you should really tune-in to your TV's and try to see this, because they are powerful.

He's empathetic, he's a powerful communicator, he's been a faithful husband to Shirley for 37-1/2 years, he's a very devoted father. He's all of this and so much more. He's a wonderful friend to all of us, and he certainly is a true friend of the family. Please warmly welcome Dr. James Dobson. (applause)

END OF INTRO

BODY:

JCD: It's very good to be with you all. Elsa, it's a little nostalgic for me...for you to introduce me here at CNP (Council for National Policy). The last time I spoke here in 1990, your late husband, my great friend, Ed Prince, introduced me, so it brought back memories for you to do that today. But it is a great pleasure to be here at CNP...

...CNP has meant an awful lot to me and to Shirley through the years. I came to the second meeting that ever occurred in 1981, I think. Early '81 was the first, or maybe late '80, and I missed that one. I came to the

second one and I attended almost every meeting through those early years. I learned so much. I was just really beginning to key-in on the national scene and what was going on in public policy.

Howard Phillips and Paul Weyrich and so many others here were so helpful to me at that time, to give me a fix on a new area that I didn't understand. Obviously, I've always had very deep convictions, conservative viewpoints with regard to the family, and so what happened here just reinforced that.

In fact, in terms of my own family advice, I get criticized a lot for having those conservative views. There are people who say that I want to take the world back to the days of Ozzie and Harriet. And that's not fair, that's a lie. I don't want to go back to the days of Ozzie and Harriet. That's simply not true. I want to go back to the days of Mayberry, with Sheriff Taylor and Opie and all of those good folks. (applause) Don't you just love it when Barney Fyfe says, "My whole body is a weapon"?

But my conservative views bring me an interesting response in other contexts, too. We have students on our campus now who spend an entire semester with us at Focus on the Family. They get 16 units of credit. If you have a very, very bright youngster in their junior or senior year of college or their first year of graduate school, I think this is the finest thing we're doing. But these kids come to campus primarily because their mothers tell them about us and one of them was there last semester and he wrote me a poem. He said, "Roses are red and violets are blue, when I was a kid, I got spanked 'cause of you."

But again, it is such a pleasure to be with you all at CNP and as I indicated, I started in 1981 and continued attending the events almost always or very consistently until 1995. So for 14 years, Shirley and I came to these meetings.

Now I'm going to tell you something rather honestly about my own views and my own metamorphosis, if you will, but in 1995 I began to get an impression that's probably unfair and probably not accurate, but I began to get an impression that maybe my own perspectives were a little at variance from at least some of the people at the Council for National Policy, maybe that I was out of step with the direction that the organization was going, and began to feel a little distance there and so, in 1995, we quit coming to these events. And we have not attended one in the last three years, so it is great to be back.

But Morton Blackwell called me several months ago and asked if I would come back and speak to you all today and that felt like the right thing to do. At least I can express to you what is on my heart and what I've been thinking and feeling, and then we can take it from there.

I want to begin with two caveats, or two disclaimers, before we get too far into it today. The first is that I do not stand here before you as the president of Focus on the Family or any other organization. I come here as an individual. I paid my own way here. Focus on the Family did not do that and the reason for that is because I want to be able to speak freely with you about my political views in a way that would not be appropriate for a non-profit organization. So I'm here on my own behalf today.

The other thing I want to say to you all is that what I'm going to say to you in the next few minutes may be at variance with what some of you believe. We may not be at the same place. I didn't come here to argue with you or to irritate you or frustrate you or anger you or certainly not to insult you, but I am here to express some very, very deep convictions that I have that probably matter to me more than anything else in my life and I'm going to speak very boldly to you about some of those convictions.

And I want to start with a Scripture. Now I know this is not a Sunday School class and that there are people here today who have all kinds of religious traditions. I sense that most of you are deeply committed Christians, but that's probably not true of all of you and I don't want to insult anybody again, but to understand my world view and the way I see things, politics and every other aspect of life, you have to go to this book, because that's the foundation of everything that I care about.

And so I want to read a Scripture that kind of lays that foundation for what I will say later. Now there are——when I have a discussion with people——there's a question that I like to ask, especially those who are theologians or pastors or those who feel like they know the Bible.

It's a question that I enjoy having some fun with, and I ask them this question; I ask it of you: What is the very first thing that God created when he set out to create the universe? What was the first thing he made?

When you ask people that who know the Bible, they immediately go to Genesis 1 and they try to remember what that said and was it the heavens and the earth or the firmament or the light or the deep? What was the first thing that God created when he set out to do that? Actually, they are wrong, because there's a hook in the question. The answer is not found in Genesis 1 or any part of Genesis. It's actually found in the book of Proverbs, Proverbs 8.

And in this passage, Proverbs 8:22-30, wisdom is speaking in first person, metaphorically. Wisdom is, as we know, throughout this book, God's point of view. Wisdom is His way of seeing things. Wisdom is His value system, and so wisdom, here, is talking about itself and this is what it says: "The Lord brought me forth as the first of His works before His deeds of old. I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began. When there were no oceans, I was given birth. When there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth. Before He made the earth or the fields or any of the dust of the world, I was there when He set the heavens in place."

"When He marked out the horizon on the face of the deep, when He established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep. When He gave the sea its boundaries so the water would not overstep his command, and when He marked out the foundations of the earth. Then, I was the craftsman at His side."

What this is saying, in other words, is that the moral law of the universe antedated the physical universe, it came first. It was not as though the children of Israel wandered into the wilderness and the Lord looked at their behavior, and they're worshipping idols and they're doing all these wrong things, and he says, "Hmmm. Those folks need some rules," and so he calls Moses up into the hills and said, "Here are the Ten Commandments. This will help those people do better."

It is not that way at all. That moral foundation, that moral law, is eternal because it's an expression of God's own nature and it pre-dates the universe and it will outlast the physical laws. You can no more defy that moral law than you can jump off a ten-story building, because if anything, the moral law outranks the physical law. The physical law is going to pass away. His book says, "The heavens and the earth shall be rolled up like a scroll, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth, there'll be new physical laws, but the moral law is eternal."

He said his Word shall live forever. So that moral law has great significance and it says in the end of that chapter, "For whoever finds me, finds life and receives favor from the Lord. But whoever fails to find me harms himself and all who hate me, love death." The moral law of the universe.

What this is saying to me, and I hope to you, is that the universe has a boss. It has a boss and he has very clear ideas of what is right and what is wrong. It doesn't matter a whole lot what you think or what I think. What matters is what he thinks, because that moral law has been there from eternity and will be there to eternity, and if that is true, then we have an obligation to understand it and to respect it.

Now, I'm not talking today about dogma. I'm not talking about denominations. I'm not talking about churches. I'm talking about a law that's written on the heart of every human being. And this is the end of the Sunday School lesson. Romans 2:14 says——I'm going to paraphrase this——it says: "When the Gentiles," the non-Jews, "act in accordance with the law, having not heard the law, it shows that they have a law in themselves, written on their hearts, for their consciences either condemn or approve their behavior.

Now you can override that law and you can sear that conscience, and you can get beyond it, but it is there. It is there in all of us. It is programmed into the human spirit. You do not have to be taught that it is wrong to murder. You don't have to be taught that it's wrong to steal and to lie and to extort and to bribe and to oppress the poor and to express racial hatred and to be promiscuous, both homosexually and heterosexually. There's no difference between those two. Promiscuity is immoral. It's wrong, as is adultery. That law is eternal and it is written on the heart of man.

Now, the world doesn't accept that view. I want to tell you, that understanding that I just gave you——and forgive me for kind of being in a didactic mode, but that understanding provides the basis for my whole life, my whole world view, my understanding of where we are as a nation and what's going on in Washington and all the state houses of government. That's the foundation.

But as you know, there are many people that don't accept it today. We have already heard from David Noble and others who talked about other world views, primarily post-modernism. Post-modernism essentially rejects that explanation I just gave you. Post-modernism says there is no God and there is no eternal standard, there are no rules. You make them up as you go along, and what seems right is right.

There are no transcendent values that will stand from time to time. When human life becomes inconvenient, you can get rid of it, because it was not created by God, because there is no God, and it's all subjective and whimsical and you make up your ideas as the circumstances arise. And that post-modern notion, that there is no moral law to the universe, has taken hold and taken hold root like a cancer that's spread through this entire nation, and it continues to spread. MTV works on it every single day. We see the effects of it.

We have, at Focus on the Family, a magazine called Brio magazine that's done for teenage girls, and we send out 200,000 of those a month and Susie Shellenberger, who is the editor of that magazine, receives about 1,000 letters from those teenage girls and their letters to her are changing.

Five or six years ago they would write and argue with her about abstinence verses having sex with my boyfriend. They're 14 years old. They would write and say, "Why do you say that? Who says it's wrong? And they would argue with her. They don't do that now. They write now and say, "That's okay for you. That's alright if that's your view. That doesn't happen to be my view. We all have to make up our own mind." So it's moral relativism that has found its way into the so-called X-er generation. It is the view that absolutely dominates at the university level today.

I mean, no other view is even tolerated. There is less intellectual freedom on today's university campuses than anywhere else, because what I said to you initially today in regard to the moral foundation for the universe is absolutely not tolerated on most secular university campuses today and if you hold to such a stupid notion, tenure is probably out of the question for you in most situations, and you may not even be hired if they know that, and there is this indoctrination that goes on.

John Leo is a columnist for Newsweek [sic, U.S. News & World Report]. I'm sure many of you read his stuff and he comes up with some very interesting columns and he wrote one about six or eight months ago that just blew me away. He was reflecting conversations with history professors on university campuses about this issue, about moral relativism, and they told him that it is very common today for the students, of course, to accept no right and wrong, no standard whatsoever, claiming there is no absolute truth, which gets you into some very interesting positions. One of them, dealing with the Nazis in World War II. And he said it's common for students to say, "Well, I don't particularly happen to have liked the Nazis, I dislike what they did, but who's to say that it was morally wrong to gas Jews?"

See, if there's no moral truth, if there is no standard, then there's no horrible atrocities and holocausts that can be condemned, so that those images that we've seen of 1,000 people, women and children, standing naked in the rain all day, holding little babies with frightened little children around their knees, for their turn to go into a gas chamber, is not morally wrong. Who's to say? The silly, unfortunate, misled kids, saying, "Who's to say it was morally wrong?" Because there is no moral standard. It changes absolutely everything.

You probably are aware of the article in The New York Times by Dr. Steven Pinker, a evolutionary psychologist, so to speak, who wrote in November, or late October, in The New York Times, of all places, about the rationale for mothers killing their newborns. See, Francis Schaeffer told us in 1970 that abortion and infanticide and euthanasia were all connected and if you allow one, and you'll have all three, because they all deal with the sanctity of life. Who made life? If God is eliminated, and therefore, you can eliminate the unborn child, you will soon be eliminating not only infants that you don't want and older people you don't want, but other "undesirables."

And he told us this was coming and here it comes, and Steven Pinker writes this article in which he's just carefully laying down the philosophical foundations, the way the left works, you know. They'll just put it out there then they'll let everybody gasp and then somebody else goes a little farther. Well, I don't know if you saw the article on November 6th right after that in the Washington Post. This one really took my breath away. It is referring to a Dr. Michael Tooley.

Dr. Tooley is a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado and he is what he calls a eugenicist, and that gives you a clue, and he says, "And Tooley does not bother with Pinker's pretense that what's under discussion here is only a rare act of desperation, the killing of an unwanted child by a frightened, troubled mother. No, no, no. If it is moral to kill a baby for one, it is moral for all. Indeed, the systematic, professionalized use of infanticide would be a great benefit to humanity. Most people would prefer to raise children who do not suffer from gross deformities or from severe physical, emotional, or intellectual handicaps," writes eugenicist Tooley.

Get this last sentence. "If it could be shown that there is no moral objection to infanticide,"——(why would there be no moral objection to infanticide? Because there's no moral objection to anything; it's all subjective)—— "the happiness of society could be significantly and justifiably increased," and here it comes.

So there is that perspective and where it leads is to the dehumanization of undesirables and we know where that led in 1938 and after in Nazi Germany.

Now, obviously, not everyone accepts this notion. And I'm here to talk to you today about those who don't. I want to encourage you and tell you what you already know: that there are millions and millions and millions and millions of people in this country who do honor the Holy One of Israel and have not bowed at the feet of Baal. There are millions of them out there.

And I know those people maybe better than anybody in the country. Now, that may sound like an overstatement and I didn't say it to aggrandize myself, but I know those people, because I'm in constant contact with them.

We receive 250,000 letters and phone calls a month at Focus on the Family. I'm in constant communication with those people. I do a radio program every day. It starts about 4:00 in the morning and goes until 4:00 the next morning, and by 9:00 in the morning, there is a report put on my desk called the "Pulse" report and it tells me how many people have called and will call in that day and what they're saying. I get their comments. I have instant feedback from them. I know what they're thinking. I know what they're feeling. I know those folks. I know their heart. I read their letters. I talk to them on the telephone.

And I want to tell you about them. They're good people. They're good people. They love their kids. They love their spouses, their families. They love their God and they are very, very concerned about what's happening today. They see this moral freefall. They see this moral relativism and they're very concerned about it. It contradicts everything they stand for and they also feel under attack. They feel under assault by Hollywood and they can't do anything about it and by the rock music industry that just sells sex and violence and all sorts of evil to their kids.

And MTV they see the television and the "Ellen"-type programs and cable TV and all those sorts of things. They see it and they're very alarmed about it and they can't do anything about it. They feel the culture has got their families. The culture is like a river that flows in front of us and their kids are caught in this current and they're being carried downstream and so many of them are being wounded by it. They're beginning to believe the things that they're told. Those people are very concerned.

There was a poll that was taken just in the last couple of months by the Luntz Research Organization that showed 80 percent of the American people, 80 percent, believe that we're in a severe moral crisis.

That's not 80 percent of conservatives like us. It's 80 percent of the nation says we're in a moral crisis. The Pew Research Organization, last April, asked people to list their concerns, what bothers them the most, what worries them the most, and at the top of the list, above everything else, was the decline in moral values.

These people out there are worried about what they see and they're in contradiction with the elite and with the cultural trend setters and it is very difficult for any of us to get anyone in government to understand those people or to treat them like they had a legitimate point of view, and that is my concern.

I want to go back to 1995 when I was here last and to something I was trying to say at that time that I never got a chance to finish. I was trying to tell a story about a visit that I had with Senator Phil Gramm. I want to share it with you now, not to attack him or embarrass him but simply to convey what I'm trying to say.

In 1995, I was looking for a politician, a Republican leader, who had a chance to win the White House who understood what I'd been saying, who understood that moral foundation to the universe, who was willing to articulate it and willing to fight for it, and I decided that Phil Gramm just might be that man. I heard him on TV. I liked what he said. I thought that maybe he might be the one that we could get excited about.

And so I asked for an appointment to see him and he agreed to see me and I flew to Washington, D.C., from Colorado Springs and with me that day were Gary Bauer, Ralph Reed, and Betsy DeVos. Went in to see him. Went in and sat down. I had this on my heart. I have something I really want to say. And he starts by telling us he only has 40 minutes, he has to go do something and he begins talking and he talked and he talked and he talked for 30 minutes, and we had 10 minutes left. And he's still talking, and so I finally said, "Senator, it's not polite to interrupt a Senator when he's talking, but I came a long way to say something to you, and if you don't ever let me say it, I'll leave here and you won't ever know what I came to say."

So he talked some more, and then he said, "Okay, what is it that you came to say?" I said, "Senator, there are millions and millions and millions of people out there, good family people, trying to raise their kids, trying to keep them moral, trying to teach them what they believe, that are very agitated and very concerned because they don't hear anybody echoing what they believe. And they're not known to The New York Times, they're not represented by The New York Times, and they're not known inside the Beltway.

They're unknown to folks inside the Beltway. It's as though they don't exist, or if they do, they're called names like Hillary Clinton called them last week."

And I said, "They're not known to the Washington Post, who referred to them as "poor, uneducated, and easy to control." That's the attitude." By the way, we have surveyed the listeners to Focus on the Family and people on our mailing list. We've done extensive surveys on that, and 50 percent of them have college degrees and 70 percent of them have some college and many of them have graduate degrees. It's a very bright, very well-educated, very well-informed population. They're not terribly political. They're not in Washington. They're not——they write their representatives if we tell them to, because they've got their hands full with their kids, but they're very informed and they're very concerned about what's going on.

I said, "Senator, if you would hone in on those people and speak their language and talk to their hearts and identify with the things they care about instead of just talking about taxes, the economy, and money, they care about more than money. If you will do this, you will have millions of people following you."

I'll never forget what he said. It's been widely quoted in the paper. It's been misquoted in the paper. Some people say that he said, "I ain't no preacher, and I can't do that." That's not what he said. Some people have said that he said, "I'm not running for preacher and I can't do that." That's not what he said. What he actually said was, "I'm not a preacher and I can't do that." And I said, "Senator, you will never reach our people." And we got up and left. And Senator Gramm was out of the race in Louisiana just a few weeks later.

Now that was 1996. Let me go back, if I can, to 1994. Now I've been waiting to say this for a long time and you guys are the ones that are gonna get it. (laughter) Nineteen-ninety-four, Republicans, for the first and only time, other than when Ronald Reagan was running, Republicans spoke to the hearts of that pro-moral community. I mean, they got them jazzed and excited. They ran on a pro-life platform. You hear that they ran on the "Contract With America." We didn't hear much about the "Contract With America" until the Republicans had won. That wasn't what got them elected. They ran on a pro-life platform. And they energized...(applause) that whole community and it was incredible.

In November of 1994, when the election occurred, nine million new voters came out who hadn't voted before and put the Republicans in power. Remember this number: 43 percent of the total votes that Republicans got that year came from people who identified themselves as conservative, evangelical, and pro-life.

That's an incredible statistic and constituency. Forty-three percent. Newt Gingrich is speaker today because of that 43 percent. There is no special interest group. There is no constituency that comes anywhere near that. One of the unions had 11 or 12 percent. There's nothing even close to that. Forty-three percent.

What did the Republicans who were shocked to assume power and moved into all the offices of power in Washington, what did they immediately start to do, but to insult that constituency? Immediately began to do it. (applause)

November of '94 is when they were put into office. Overwhelming. Everybody's talking about it. January, the New Congress comes in. January 20th or so, the president comes down to the Congress to make his State of the Union address and Newt Gingrich chooses somebody to respond to the president. Who did he choose? Christine Todd Whitman, the absolute antithesis of everything that constituency stands for. (applause)

She is pro-homosexual activism. She's pro-condom distribution. She's pro-abortion. She's pro-partial-birth abortion. She even named a truck stop for Howard Stern on the New Jersey turnpike, which is the only thing she's done so far that I agree with. I mean, naming a toilet for Howard Stern is the only logical thing she's done. (laughter)

They put a symbol of the immoral, amoral constituency up in front of the people who had just handed leadership to the Republicans. And from there on down, it was one insult right after another. You already know them, so I don't have time to talk about all of them.

We come now to 1996 and this is a part of my view that you may disagree with, but Bob Dole did everything he could to insult those people during that campaign. (applause) Bob Dole said harsher things about Gary Bauer than he did Bill Clinton, and it just seemed like all the way through he was determined to distance himself from this constituency that had put the Republicans in power. And I spent three hours with him one day, asking him to do the same thing I said to Senator Gramm, and I couldn't even get him to say that, "If elected, I will appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court." He would not say that. Then, of course, he went to San Diego, and they stripped from that convention every element of the usual presentations that dealt with the pro-moral issues——every bit of it. All that was left was kind of a show-and-tell and talk about the economy and money, but there was no reference at all to the moral issues, or very, very little. Bob Dole got on national television, looked straight into those cameras, and said——and you remember—— "I will not be bound by the platform that's been written, and, indeed, I haven't even read it."

Folks, you do realize that this pro-moral community that I'm talking about, worked through the democratic process to elect representatives to come to San Diego to write that platform and to put that pro-life plank in there, and Bob Dole is saying to the nation, "I don't even plan to read it. I will not be bound by it." And television sets went off all over the country.

Now, remember I gave the figure 43 percent in 1994? In 1996, that percentage was 29 percent. That 14 percent right there represented the difference between winning and losing in that election. Where'd they go? Republicans said, "Now they don't have any place to go. Where are they going to go?" Well, some of them did go. Some of them voted for Bill Clinton, and some of them stayed home, and some of them, like myself, voted for another candidate. I voted for Howard Phillips, (applause) not because I was convinced Howard would make a great president. I don't know that. I voted for him because he stands for the principles and the values that I believe in, and nobody else did. So that's where we stand. (applause)

Now I want to say to, with reference again, to that pro-moral community that's out there. From what I'm hearing and what people are saying to me, and a man, a physician from southern California called me this week to say this: "There is great discouragement with the Republican Party, great irritation and, indeed, there is a sense of betrayal out there for what has occurred since 1994." I'm going to reflect that to you, looking at the record, in regard to the moral issues. I'm not talking about taxes. I'm not talking about the military. I'm not talking about building bridges and roads and all that sort of thing. I'm talking about the moral foundation to the universe——those principles that we know are right.

Now in 1994, the Republicans ran primarily on a pro-life platform. I mean that's what the promise was. What has been the delivery? Last year, the Republican-led Congress, House and Senate, gave $900 million to Planned Parenthood to take that abortion message around the world. And we're supposed to get excited about supporting that? You talk about betrayal? I told you I wasn't going to pull punches.

The man who has probably fought more for the things we believe in than anybody in Congress is Jesse Helms, but he bailed on that one. Jesse Helms bailed out on that. Nine-hundred million dollars to Planned Parenthood, to go to these Catholic countries, these Muslim countries, where they don't accept abortion and to begin to propagandize and began to work to spread that horrible procedure around the world. Republicans did that, and shame on them for doing so! (applause)

The issue of parental consent also takes my breath away. For 300 years, parents have held the absolute authority for the medical care of their children, and, indeed, you cannot give an aspirin to a child, a minor, of another family or bind a scratch——put iodine on it or anything without running the risk of being charged with battery——without that parent's permission. And yet, now, as we heard this morning, a 13-year-old girl can go off to school. The parents think she stays there. Some feminist counselor or some teacher can pack that child off that campus and take that child across town to an abortion clinic, where she goes through a procedure that she may remember for the rest of her life. She will remember it for the rest of her life, and she comes home that night. Her parents not only can't stop it, they're not entitled to even know about it! After the fact! She could continue to bleed. She could have an infection. She could have severe emotional consequences to this, and it's none of the parent's business. A 13-year-old girl is some days a child. Some days she acts a little grown up, but usually she acts like a child. That child's in the hands of people who have a very different philosophy. They don't accept the moral standard of the universe, and they have control of that child.

Did you hear last year about that teacher in Crystal Park, Illinois, who had an affair with a 14-year-old girl and got her pregnant? And he packs her off to the abortion clinic [sic, family planning clinic], where they inject her with Depo-Provera and other hormones to get rid of that child [sic, so he can keep having sex with her]. Took her there three times to cover his affair, and by law, they couldn't tell the parents. They couldn't tell the parents that the teacher is bringing that kid there. By law, they had to give that kid the medication. Congressman Istook, who fights for the things we believe, and I appreciate his work, got excited about this. He took that to the Republican leadership last year. He tried to get the issue brought on the floor. He wanted a vote on it. He could not even get the Republicans to vote on it. Not only did they lose, they never even voted on it. And not only could they not pass parental consent, which puts the power back in the parent's hands, they couldn't even pass parental notification, where we'll be able to tell parents what we're doing with their kids. This is a Republican-led House and Senate?

How about the National Endowment for the Arts? Ninety-nine million dollars more to offend people of faith. Couldn't defeat it. How pitiful!

What about the marriage penalty, for Pete's sake? The average family spends $1,500 more in taxes for the privilege of being married, and the Republicans haven't been able to deal with that. "Not enough money," we say. How about school choice? How about school prayer? How about religious liberty?

How about the safe-sex ideology? This one really does bother me. Twenty-five years ago when that condom distribution program started——and we've spent nearly $3 billion on it now——there were only two sexually-transmitted diseases at an epidemic proportion: syphilis and gonorrhea. They were both easily controlled by antibiotics. Now there are over 20, and they're at an epidemic proportion. It is incredible. One in four Americans has  a sexually-transmitted disease, because that includes the bacterias, which can be treated. Set those aside, even though some of the diseases are becoming resistant to antibiotics——gonorrhea and others——but set those aside, the sexually-transmitted bacterias. One in four has an incurable lifetime sexually-transmitted virus. They will suffer from it for the rest of their lives, and many will die from them.

You hear an awful lot about HIV. Very few women die of HIV. Some of them do, but very few. Far more die of HPV, the human papilloma virus. If it were not for HIV, it would be getting headlines; 4,000 women per year in this country die of cervical cancer as a secondary result of infection with the human papilloma virus. It causes genital warts. It interferes with sexual intercourse. The rest of their lives, their marriages will be affected by this. It is spreading like wildfire. A study that was done at the University of California Berkeley, a few years ago, tried to evaluate just how widespread human papilloma virus is. We know genital herpes is out there. That's another one that is not curable. You get it; you've got it, and you will keep it forever. At the University of California Berkeley they evaluated all the young women, average age 21, who came into the Student Health Center for routine gynecological exams in the course of one year, and they quietly evaluated them for the human papilloma virus. Forty-seven percent of them had it. It is incredible, and it is spread, despite condoms, because it is spread from areas of the genitalia that are not covered by condoms. And the Congress gave $200 million more this year to safe-sex ideology. It is a failed policy. It is a miserable, embarrassing, disgraceful, harmful policy, and the money keeps going up: $4,000 (sic, $5 million) more than the year before.

To their credit, they did include $50 million or $60 [million] for abstinence education, but that money has largely been co-opted by the other side: the feminists and others in state health departments that have used it for their purposes. Congress has not set up regulations to prevent that, and so it continues, and it goes on.

Pornography——there's not been one indictment of a hard-core pornographer since 1993. Now that is primarily Bill Clinton's fault because the Justice Department is not doing its job, but who's talking about it? Who's talking about it?

Now, folks, I know all the answers to this, because I've been in conversation with many Republican leaders about this. I've had this conversation with a lot of folks. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with my great friend Rick Santorum, just day before yesterday about this. I know the answers. I know what they say. They say, "We don't have the votes. You can't expect us to pass things when we don't have the votes. We've got a lot of moderate Republicans. We only have a 10 vote majority in the House. We don't have the votes. We can't pass these things." Well, maybe, maybe.

But Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the most liberal justice in the history of the United States, an ACLU lawyer, one who will defend abortion to her dying day, was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3 in the Senate. There were only 3 conservative Republican senators who had the guts to put principle above who knows what——what a disgrace! When I asked them about it, they said, "Well, we feel the president is entitled to make those appointments." And I said, "Talk to me again about Robert Bork. Where was that principle when he was appointed?" Well, I think you see where I'm going.

What bothers me, too, is that the Republicans who say they don't have the votes also don't have the voice. See, this is maybe even more egregious to me is that the other side is so passionate about what they believe, and they advance it, and they pursue it, and they teach it. In November, November the 8th, 1997, Bill Clinton did an absolutely outrageous thing. I mean, it was outrageous! He went to speak and give the dignity of his office to a group defined by their sexual perverse behavior——a homosexual rights group——and validated them and validated the things that they stand for, including the redefinition of marriage and all the other things that they stand for, and two days later held a hate-crimes conference at the White House, in which Bill Clinton said that we need to revamp the curricula of all the schools in America to teach pro-homosexual concepts to kids. He didn't put it in quite those words, but that's what he said. What he said was an attack on every member of that pro-moral community that's out there and their children in school. This is going on all over the place.

I just read last week in Massachusetts. They just gave a questionnaire to the students who were there. One of the questions that they asked was, "Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a passing phase, that you will eventually pass through?" It's that kind of propaganda.

So the president of the United States is there proposing that that be universalized. You know, we've always had the idea that parents control the education of their children. Here the president is telling us that we need to revamp the curriculum, and so I wait for the echo. Where are the Republican leaders who stand up and say, "This is outrageous. We will not stand for it"? There was not a peep of protest from a single Republican leader in the House or the Senate——not one, not the conservatives that you know and love. None of them had the courage to speak to that. They're so intimidated. They're so pinned down. It was just incredible. Only Bill Bennett did it. Bill Bennett wrote an article in Weekly Standard disagreeing with the president on that and gave a very rational argument for it. He was the only one that I saw. Maybe you saw some of them. I waited for it, and I've since had Sen. Ashcroft on my program and others, and I've said, "Senator, where were you, and where was everybody else?" He said, "I should've spoken." Why don't they? I don't know. It's a lack of conviction that there is a boss to the universe, and yet there are moral standards that we are held to, and we need officials who will stand up and represent them. (applause)

Speaking of Christine Todd Whitman, she got in trouble in November, as you know, and she was about to lose, and the Republicans came tearing up there to her rescue. Christine Todd Whitman is the most liberal governor, or at least the most pro-abortion governor in the nation.

The Republican Party gave her one-and-a-half million dollars to help pull her through. And these people went up to help her: Jack Kemp, John Kasich, Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle, whom you're going to hear from tonight. I hope you'll ask him. Steve Forbes, whom I hope you'll ask tonight, Colin Powell, Jim Nicholson, Terry Bransted, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Peggy Noonan, and Rick Santorum, who stood on the floor of the Senate and gave the most impassioned plea for the unborn child, went to New Jersey to campaign for the woman who vetoed the legislation that would've protected those children. In one clinic in New Jersey, 1,500 kids are killed by partial-birth abortion each year.

I don't understand that, and I don't understand, also, why a month ago, Republicans went to Indian Wells and dealt away this issue, a 78 percent issue, on the matter of campaign financing. What that conveys to the constituent, see, I'm talking about, is that principle does not matter. It's party over principle——that there are some things that you stand for, whether it is popular or politically astute to do so or not. That's what that pro-moral community stands for. And yet, it seemed to me, that what I heard from the Republicans in Indian Wells was, "We cannot have power if we stand on principle. Please don't take away our power." What good is it to have power if you don't use it for good? (applause)

I will wind this up. I just have to say that the two phrases that came out of Indian Wells that we've before, really do get to a lot of people I know. It's "big tents" and "litmus tests." Do you know that the Democrats never use those words? You never hear a Democrat use the word "litmus test," unless he's referring to a Republican. You never hear them talking about the "big tent." Why? Because they rarely abandon their moral constituency——or immoral constituency. They're always there for them, with few exceptions. Bill Clinton is still hanging with the partial-birth abortion thing, even though the American Medical Association says he's off the wall, but he hangs with it because they don't disappoint their constituency. Republicans use those two phrases when they're getting ready to abandon their core values, and they're embarrassed about it, and they've got to give a rationale for doing it. Big tent, litmus test.

Let me tell you guys something. I know you know this. I know you've heard it, but I've got to say it again. What are we talking about here? We're not talking about partial-birth abortion. We're talking about murder during delivery. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about infanticide. And this baby, this six-, seven-, eight-pound baby is delivered——all but the head, brimming with life, fully viable, can suckle, can look you in the eye, can respond, and so quickly all that humanness begins to unfold——delivered all but the last two or three inches, roll that baby over. He's unanesthetized. And you pick up scissors, and you cram them into the back of his head, and his whole body stiffens, and then they insert a powerful suction device into the back of the head, and suck the brains out of that baby, and deliver a dead baby. I want to tell you all something from my heart: there is no tent big enough for me and people who will do that. (applause)

I've got to conclude. Let me just say it comes down to two questions: Does the Republican Party want our votes——no strings attached——to court us every two years, and then to say, "Don't call me. I'll call you." And to not care about the moral law of the universe. Is that what they want? Is that what the plan is? Is that the way the system works? And if so, is it going to stay that way? Is this the way it's going to be? If it is, I'm gone, and if I go——I'm not trying to threaten anybody because I don't influence the world——but if I go, I will do everything I can to take as many people with me as possible... (applause) I'm speaking for the Coalition, the Christian Coalition, in September, and I plan to say it again, and I may say it over and over and over again. I may take a leave of absence from Focus on the Family to say it, but we've been at the back of the bus for 20 years, and it is time now. (applause)

See, this is exactly what happened in 1858. It's happened to the Whig Party. They got out of touch with the moral fiber of the nation. They ignored them. They didn't listen to them, and the whole party disintegrated, and the Republican Party was born in the crucible of conviction and courage and moral rightness, righteousness. That's where the Republican Party started. It took a stand against slavery in a day that cost 600,000 lives in a Civil War, but they knew it was wrong, and they took a stand on it, whether win, lose, or draw. That's God's business. They took a stand on what was right. If the party has left that, and it is now going to mouth these things every two years, and then go onto something else, I think we need to look for another. It would be tragic if that happened. I don't want that to happen. There are many state houses of government where Republicans will suffer if that happens. It will be a disaster for the country, but somebody said, "If you do that, you'll have no voice at all." I don't think we have a voice now. I can't hear the voice. (applause)

I came here today to say two things to you. One is to beg you. I beg you, shamelessly, to use your influence on the party at this critical stage of our history. You have a lot of influence on the party; a lot of you are politicians. You have an opportunity to talk to them. They're getting a lot of feedback from the other side, from the Rockefeller Republicans who are giving them a lot of money. They don't hear a lot from us. I beg you to talk to them about what's at stake here, because they've laid the foundation for a revolt, and I don't think they even know it because they're so out of touch with the people that I'm talking about.

The other thing I came to say to you——and I really am through——is that there is very good news on the home front. We are winning this battle despite political leadership. You saw the poll in The New York Times on abortion. People are coming our way. They're moving this way. You go back to the late '80's. We'll say in 1986-87. No one foresaw that the whole Soviet Empire was getting ready to collapse. I didn't read one Sovietologist who said, "This thing is getting ready to blow up." Other than Ronald Reagan who said that we would transcend communism. I heard no one say, "This thing is built on sand. The whole thing could come down." No one saw that. No one perceived that the Wall was getting ready to fall, but it was a house of cards, and it was ready to come down.

I have reason to believe that modern liberalism is also built on the sand. The American people don't go with the National Organization for Women. They don't believe Patricia Ireland speaks for them. The women of this country don't identify with her. She's noisy; she gets a lot of press, but the American people are not with her. They have, as they claim, 250,000 members. Goodness, we have 5 million on our list of names; 250,000 is nothing. The people are not with her. They're not with the American Civil Liberties Union. They don't believe that crazy nonsense. They're not with People for the American Way. They're not with NARAL. They're not with all these organizations. They're still deeply conservative because there is something written on their hearts that they cannot get away from. (applause)

If we simply had a moral leader or a party of moral leadership who had the courage like Ronald Reagan did with the Soviets, despite everything the press threw at him, for calling it the "Evil Empire," if we had people in government who stood up for these things we believe and didn't dance around and try to apologize and try to avoid criticism by the press but went right to the heart of it: saying "This is right, and I stand on it if no one believes it." We could win this thing, and we could do it fairly quickly, in my view, and what we need are people of courage. (applause)

I started with a Scripture. I'm going to end with one. I've held you too long, and I'm sorry. This Scripture in the Old Testament, for me, sums up where we are now, and where the people have been from this time, 4,000 years ago to today. It's all right here---this struggle between good and evil. There are only two ways of looking at it: God is, or God isn't. He has a standard, or he doesn't. There's right and wrong, or there isn't, and we have a choice: the true pro-choice, and here's where it is from the 30th chapter of Deuteronomy, in the 19th verse. I love this verse:

"This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you a choice: life and death, blessings and curses."  You've got to make a choice. It's one or the other. There's no in-between.  "Now choose life so that you and your children may live."

God bless the families of this country. God bless you, CNP, and God bless America. Thank you.

(Question and Answer Session)

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