Alan Keyes stands firm on a number of vital public policy issues. His positions derive from the truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the protections guaranteed by the Constitution.

Here, in his own words, are some of his most basic positions — taken from excerpts of his speeches and writings.

• Abortion / life issues
  
• Affirmative action
  
• Agriculture
  
• Campaign finance reform
  
• Crime
  
• Death penalty / child sentencing
  
• Defense / foreign policy / Israel
  
• Economics
  
• Education
  
• Embryonic stem cell research
  
• Fair trade
  
• Free speech
  
• Health care
  
• Homosexual rights
  
• Immigration
  
• Iraq War
  
• Judicial activism
  
• Judicial supremacy
  
• Judicial vs. executive authority
  
• Law and order
  
• Marriage
  
• Massachusetts gay marriage
  
• North American Union / SPP
  
• Pornography
  
• Property rights
  
• Religious freedom
  
• Right to keep and bear arms
  
• School choice
  
• Sex education
  
• Social Security reform
  
• Taxation / government spending
  
• United Nations
  
• "Uniting for peace" after 9-11
  
• War on terror
  
• Welfare / family disintegration
  
• Why I'm running for president
  

Note: For a comprehensive list of Alan's positions on a variety of issues, see OnTheIssues.org — where researchers have compiled a fairly accurate description of Alan's views.

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Abortion / life issues

If the Declaration of Independence states our creed, then there can be no right to abortion, since it means denying the most fundamental right of all to human offspring in the womb.

The Declaration states plainly that we are all created equal, endowed by our Creator with our basic human rights. But if human beings can decide who is human and who is not, the doctrine of God-given rights is utterly corrupted.

For these and similar reasons, abortion must be understood as the unjust taking of a human life, and a breach of the fundamental principles of our public moral creed.

Some people talk about "viability" as a test to determine which human offspring have rights that we must respect, and which do not. But "might does not make right." So the mere fact that the person in the womb is wholly in its mother's physical power and completely dependent upon her for sustenance gives her no right whatsoever with respect to its life — since the mere possession of physical power can never confer such a right. Therefore, medical procedures resulting in the death of the unborn child, except as an unintended consequence of efforts to save the mother's physical life, are impermissible.

As far as the "legality" of abortion is concerned, how could the so-called "right" to murder our children in the womb have come about? I think, in open debate, I could prove it to anyone — that Roe v. Wade was the most obscenely illogical and shoddily-written Supreme Court decision perhaps in the whole history of our country. There was a perverse illogic to it that ought to, even to this day, warn us against the possibility that it has any real ground or foundation in our law or the Constitution.

In addition to overturning Roe v. Wade, we need a Human Life Amendment that respects life and restores our respect for the will of God.

As for the so-called "right to suicide" and related practices such as euthanasia: whatever emotional arguments we make on their behalf, they represent a violation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Our rights, including the right to life, are unalienable. If we kill ourselves or consent to allow another to do so, we both destroy and surrender our right to life. We act unjustly. We usurp the power that belongs solely to the Creator, and deny the basis of our claim to human rights.

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Affirmative action

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement sought the assistance of government to enforce the fundamental principle that all men are created equal. But today's civil rights groups have abandoned that principle in favor of preferential treatment for groups defined by race or sex. This is simply wrong. We cannot cure a past injustice with another injustice.

Moreover, preferential affirmative action patronizes American blacks, women, and others by presuming that they cannot succeed on their own. Preferential affirmative action does not advance civil rights in this country. It is merely another government patronage program that gives money and jobs to the few people who benefit from it, and breeds resentment in the many who do not. It divides us as a people, and draws attention away from the moral and family breakdown that is the chief cause of the despair and misery in which too many of our fellow citizens struggle to live decently.

I am opposed to quotas. I am against the idea that you should be deciding on the basis of race what positions people should have in the workplace. I believe in helping people get to the starting line — but not determining the outcome of the race.


Agriculture

Throughout the 20th century, the five- and ten-point plans of the politicians have come and gone, and every time the result has been the same — fewer and fewer family farms. This consistent policy failure is a sign of something fundamentally wrong in our approach. Emergency help in the form of loans and other assistance to enable farmers to re-capitalize for the next season is necessary, of course. But let's not confuse that with a policy that actually aims to perpetuate and strengthen the family farm. Temporary, emergency expedients do not address the fundamental structural impediments, particularly in finance, to the existence of this crucial American institution.

Family agriculture was placed in serious jeopardy early in the last century, when at the same time that we surrendered our economic sovereignty by accepting a federal income tax, we also consolidated centralized control of the distribution of our financial resources through the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank. A centralized banking system is incompatible with the existence of family farms, because it lacks any kind of obligation to — never mind personal contact with — those who work the soil. We need to restructure the way that capital flows into the farming sector and reintroduce community-based banking structures that are dependent for their survival on their relationship with people in rural communities.

The real key to saving the family farm, however, is not economic reform, but a renewed understanding of why the family farm is worth saving in the first place.

The family farm is not crucial because we need to have family farms in order to eat. Actually, a consolidated farm system of big agri-businesses could theoretically feed the country. Rather, we need family farm for its indispensable value in sustaining our nation's strong moral character. We must remember what men like Thomas Jefferson thought was required for us to survive as a free people. He pointed out the connection between the maintenance of liberty and the characteristics that develop from a strong population of what he called yeoman farmers. Yeoman farmers were characterized by a certain combination of discipline, common sense, independence of spirit and mind, love of liberty, and a deep sense of duty, responsibility, and obligation — of a sort that comes only from strong family farms. The characteristics that have provided the foundations for much of this nation's success in the world are rooted in the moral culture of the family farm.

The key to rediscovering our commitment to the family farm is to rediscover our commitment to renewing, strengthening, and preserving the moral character that America needs to survive in freedom.

If we are to remain free, we had better preserve the seedbeds of liberty. We had better preserve those parts of our society and culture through which we pass on the moral allegiance to American life, and the kind of heart, mind, and character that will sustain it. Throughout the history of our country, this task has been one of the primordial results and responsibilities not only of the family — but of our family-based system of agriculture.

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Campaign finance reform

Any acceptable proposal for reforming the way that American political campaigns are financed must be based on the premise of the constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of association. The right of free association includes the right to associate our money with the causes we believe in, and to do so in any amount that we think is necessary to get the job done. For government to dictate what we can do under the rubric of "campaign finance reform" is a total violation of our constitutional rights, and we should force our politicians to abandon it.

Campaign finance reform typically turns out to be incumbency protection, anyway. Professional politicians are unlikely to devise a system that isn't in their own interest. We need to devise instead a system for financing our political contests in the interest of our freedom. The premises that should govern such a system are simple.

The first principle is that there will be no "dollar" vote without a ballot vote. Only people who can walk into the voting booth and cast a vote for a candidate should be able to make a contribution to his campaign. This means no corporate contributions, and no union contributions, except from unions truly acting on the authority of members freely associating and intending to make a contribution. There must be no financial contributions whatsoever from any entities that are not actual, breathing voters.

The second principle is that when anyone casts a "dollar" vote, it should be publicized immediately. The whole world should know who is giving how much, and to whom, so that the voters can enforce the result.

If we have this simple system of liberty based on our constitutional rights, then we will be able to police the system effectively without the help of ambitious politicians. The people at the voting booth will decide what special interest should be driven out of politics, by driving out the politicians who represent them. We should not try to have bureaucrats and politicians enforcing this kind of political discipline. At the end of the day, it's up to us, the voters, to discipline the political system. But we can't do so if we don't have the information we need, of which the money trail is a principal component. Rich people who choose to give large sums to candidates and causes they believe in should be forced right out into the open political arena, into the heat and dust of the political fray. They should not be permitted to hide behind PACs and camouflage, but must rather stand publicly behind the support they are giving, If they are willing to bear that kind of heat, then let them make their contributions.

Many of the less scrupulous contributors who are manipulating the system today would not be willing to stand this kind of public scrutiny. And that will itself regulate participation of money in our politics. Ultimately, publicity tied with informed voting is the best way to regulate this system. It is the only regulation truly consistent with our rights and duties as free citizens, and happens also to be the only kind of proposal that will pass the constitutional test.

I therefore absolutely oppose the McCain-Feingold Law, and I urge all grassroots Americans to lobby tenaciously for its repeal.

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Crime

Costly domestic government programs to prevent and control crime actually deal with problems resulting from the breakdown of societal standards and personal self-discipline. Our first priority should be to restore the moral and material strength of the marriage-based, two-parent family.

Family disintegration and the refusal to take personal responsibility are the primary contributing factors in crime, violence, poverty, and numerous other social problems.

We must pursue policies that will not only preserve our liberties, but keep those who wish to harm law-abiding citizens off the streets.

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Death penalty / child sentencing

I believe that there are certain circumstances in which the death penalty is in fact essential to our respect for life. If we do not, in our law, send the message to everyone that by calculatedly, coldly taking a human life — in a way that, for instance, assaults the structures of law in a society, or shows a cold-blooded and studied disregard for the value of that life — if we are not willing to implement the death penalty in those circumstances, then we are actually sending a message of contempt for human life. We are encouraging people to believe that that step is not in fact a terminal step when they premeditatedly and fatally decide to move against the life of another human being. So I believe that there are circumstances under which it is essential, in fact, that we have and apply the death penalty in order to send a clear moral message to people throughout our society that we will not tolerate that kind of disrespect for life.

At the same time, I am opposed to lowering the age at which we adjudge people to be adults. The tendency in that direction now, to want to treat our children as if they are adults, is a confession of our own failure as a society to maintain the structures of family life, to maintain the basis of moral education. As a result, we have children now in whom there exists a shocking moral void, and those children engage in some acts that are heinous to us. But we need to respect the difference that exists between children and adults. We need to insist, from adults, moral accountability and moral responsibility — and we also need to help our children develop that ability to be mature adults. But we shouldn't take out our failure of moral education on younger and younger children. That is a great error.

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Defense / foreign policy / Israel

As the leader of the free world, America has a right and a duty to do all in her power to protect herself at home and abroad. We must vigilantly defend our sovereignty, independence, and identity as Americans. In doing so, we must be certain that our policies, military might, and foreign relationships are executed with prudence and justice.

The Constitution places on the federal government a solemn obligation to provide for our nation's "common defense" and to undertake those policies that best fulfill that goal, including the nurturing of alliances with friendly nations.

I believe that our best and most trustworthy alliances are cemented in shared principles. The nature of America's special relationship and commitment to Israel, for example, is a moral obligation — not a matter of real politik, or of calculation of the military odds, or of strategic advantage.

America's friendship with Israel reflects a moral truth about who we are and what we stand for. In our foreign policy and international alliances, we must never be subservient to merely pragmatic considerations of money, oil, or any other expediency. We must set our course mindful that we are morally obligated to always stand foursquare with those who fight on the front lines of freedom and representative government — especially if they do so with the kind of decency, courage, and integrity demonstrated by the valiant people of Israel.

But in order to maintain our ability to respect an essentially moral commitment in our foreign policy, we must ensure — first and foremost — that we remain respectful of the moral commitments that we owe to ourselves and to our posterity.

The greatest danger that we, Israel, and our other true allies face today is that America has already embarked upon the abandonment of those moral principles that are meant to guarantee the liberties that we cherish as a people, and that we hold up as the better destiny of the world.

Our national creed, the Declaration of Independence, tells us that our rights come from the Creator, yet we have forbidden our teachers in the schools even to mention His Name. All our claims to liberty and legitimacy as a free people rest on the premise that our rights should be exercised with respect for the authority of the Creator, yet we have practically expunged the very concept of Him from our public discourse.

We squabble over and even deny those ideas that constitute the basis of our moral character and our moral decency. This betrayal eats away every day at our integrity, at our conscience, at our moral self-confidence. And that has very real and practical consequences, because moral self-confidence is part of what is required to sustain our claims to liberty, and to embolden us to fight in its defense. It is very hard to sustain the claim to rights and liberty if we believe we're not decent enough to use them well.

And, when confronted by ruthless aggression, it is very hard then to remain a reliable ally.

This is the real crisis that all who love and respect America are facing. And this crisis will eventually — if we do not resolve it rightly — destroy the confidence we need to hold on to our freedoms at home and to defend liberty and decency abroad.

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Economics

What's the root of economics? "Economics" comes from the Greek "oikonomos." The word oiko meant household, and nomos meant the rules or regulations governing the household. Economics was the study of that which was required in order successfully to manage a household. Economics is founded upon the family.

When somebody's telling you they're going to take care of economics, while they stand by and let your family be destroyed at its very heart, in its very principle, they couldn't possibly be telling you the truth.

But we don't get it. We think economics is about money. No, it's not. If you really understood it, you'd realize money is not economics. It's about whether or not you have sustained the strength and integrity of your household, of your family relations, of all the strengths that can come when that network works the way it's supposed to. Have you noticed how people prosper when that's true, and how hard life gets for them when it's not? There's a reason for that.

People say, "Well, Alan, you're always talking about how we need to respect the marriage-based family, how we need to do what's necessary so we'll maintain the moral discipline to commit ourselves to the future, to raise our children up decently, to put aside our own gratification so we can educate them in the way that they should go. You're always talking about how we must instill in their hearts that faith in God that is the true foundation of self-respect. Why are you always talking about morality?" Well, I'll tell you why: because without that moral integrity, we can't have strong families, and without strong families, we will not have a strong economy. The family is the basis of our economic success.

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Embryonic stem cell research

If we are enjoined to respect human life, then we must respect that life at every stage, from conception onward. If we do not, then we are basically saying that there is some criterion on which we can declare that some human beings deserve respect, and others do not. But doesn't that violate the principle of equality?

We say that all of us have equal rights that come from the hand of God. And yet we are willing to say that because a babe in the womb is not quite as well developed as we are, we can ignore the rights of that child.

No medical advance, and certainly no material profit, justifies denying the claim to humanity of the embryonic human person. Those who try to justify it are driven from one tortured rationalization to another, none addressing the real issue. Being undeveloped, unconscious, unattractive, small, or unwanted — these are not reasons that we accept in any other context for failing to respect the wholeness of moral worth that every human being has from his Creator.

Why, therefore, should we accept it in regard to embryonic research?

No — we do not have the right to take human life merely because it is unconscious, or because it is undeveloped or damaged, or for any other reason that tempts us to deny the equal dignity of all human persons.

When we start making such invidious distinctions, we destroy the principle of equal rights. We can't claim rights for ourselves if we deny those rights to babes at any stage in their development.

We ourselves don't want to be used as the basis for experiments without regard for our humanity — and neither should they.

The Declaration of Independence says we're all of us created equal. It doesn't make a distinction between whether that creation is published in the womb or in the petri dish. It just says that God's Will determines our dignity, not human action, not human intervention. In the forgetting of this principle, you open the door to a plethora of evils. In the remembering of it, you lay the solid foundation for further human progress — but in dignity and in decency and in honor.

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Fair trade

American "free trade" policy in recent years has increasingly involved grants of excessive authority to international organizations of questionable political legitimacy. The GATT/WTO agreement was a big mistake. The World Trade Organization undermines America's sovereign international economic interests.

The American people must repudiate the policy of establishing unelected international bodies that act like the Supreme Court of the United States, striking down our domestic laws. We must repudiate disgraceful, profit-driven alliances with the despots in Beijing. And we must refuse to permit our representatives in Congress to volunteer for constitutional impotence by granting "fast track" authority to the president to strike back room trade deals without the advice and consent of the Senate.

I have always been a staunch defender of free enterprise and an opponent of the domineering bureaucracies, both national and international, which try to suffocate it. But I cannot stand with those so-called conservatives who believe that "free trade" is more important than free government, or the "fiscal conservatives" who seem to believe that money and economic advantage matter more than our right to constitutional, elective self-determination. Trade socialism must be defeated root and branch, even when it is called "free trade."

I think we gave away a portion of our sovereignty that we should never have surrendered when we entered the WTO. It violates the fundamental principle of our way of life: no legislation without representation. I’m not interested in protectionism or withdrawal. But folks ought to be paying a premium price to enter this market, or else giving us something concrete in return that’s of tangible benefit to the American people.

I believe we need to move away from negotiating multinational trade agreements, and ought to focus instead on cutting better deals by bargaining one-on-one with individual countries. I also believe we should impose tariffs on countries that undercut American farmers and manufacturers with cheap products.

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Free speech

Questions involving prior censorship or restraint need to be approached with great care. We must exercise care in such matters because the power to censor can easily fall into arbitrary or dictatorial hands. Our country is safer when no one holds that kind of power.

I am inclined, therefore, to respect the fact that people should be free to say and do certain things that others don't like. Nonetheless, we as a society — through our representative government — have an obligation to articulate and uphold standards of public decency. This means, first, that we must legally define what a "public place" is. The most valid definition would be any place to which our children may gain unimpeded access. This definition is reasonable because it reminds us of why we have such standards.

Society is then entitled to establish clear standards and define the kinds of behavior or things permitted in a public place, so that we won't need to fear that our children will be polluted in a such an environment. We proceed to set up barriers in public libraries, on the Internet, in bookstores, and in movie houses and segregate the things that we don't want to give our children access to.

Such public policy doesn't require government or its agents to restrain free expression. It simply requires society's delegated representatives to organize the distribution of the results of that expression, so that we can keep public places free of what are regarded as offensive influences or materials. This kind of approach doesn't, itself, involve censorship and abuse — it simply involves maintaining basic standards of public decency, so that we are able to act and work and live in such a way as to avoid those things we believe to be offensive, and can also act on the assumption that our children will, by and large, likewise be able to avoid them. That's what responsible parents and citizens have a right to ask for, at least at the state and local level. Such legislation of public standards is less a federal responsibility, except regarding such broad influences as the Internet.

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Health care

I don't believe in government-controlled health care, and I think that what we need to look at is ways in which we can put the consumer in proper charge of their own health care plan, so we can drive the cost down, instead of up.

Part of the problem with our present system, which I think has contributed to skyrocketing costs, is the fact that we have a third-party-payer system. You go home after you get the service, and you don't even know what it costs. If we bought cars that way, what do you think would happen to our car industry?

We need to adopt plans, such as the one that President Bush is talking about, where people can set up tax-deductible medical savings accounts and combine that with catastrophic insurance that will guarantee them against the major liability and at the same time give them greater freedom, greater control, and a greater reward when they are making good, effective judgments on how to get their health care.

This would put them in a better position to actually monitor the relationship between price and quality — and help them keep prices down by not giving their patronage and services to inefficient health care providers.

We also need to redefine what we are trying to pursue. I think the objective of the system should be health, not just health care, and that means taking what we've learned about the importance of diet, exercise, and fitness and including those in our concept of health care.

We need to start putting together an approach that will aim at keeping people healthy, by using the knowledge we have about what needs to be done. Studies show that a lot of the diseases that are now debilitating people, especially in the area of cardiovascular disease, could be eliminated by changes in diet and exercise.

To help lower health care costs, we also need to allow the importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Europe, and do other sensible things — based on free-market principles — that will give consumers greater choice of health care options.


Homosexual rights

In terms of civil rights discrimination, it is wrong to treat sexual orientation like race, for race is a condition beyond the individual's control. Sexual orientation, however, involves behavior, especially in response to passion.

If we equate sexual orientation and race, we are saying that sexual behavior is beyond the individual's control and moral will. We cannot embrace such an understanding of civil rights without denying the human moral capacity, and with it the fitness of human beings for life in a free society.

The effort to equate homosexual and lesbian relations with legal marriage represents a destructive assault on the heterosexual, marriage-based family.

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Immigration

Our country's immigration policy should encourage legal immigration to be maintained, and illegal immigration to be curtailed. The policy should be enforced through existing laws.

It's a travesty when those who have abided by the law and become citizens through the proper means are considered no different than those who have not. If we start extending all the privileges of life and citizenship to people who are not citizens and who are not here legally, then we're breaking down our own laws.

And in breaking down those laws, we're creating a situation that will eventually damage our economy, damage our ability to deliver social services, damage our ability to maintain schools on an equitable basis, and so forth. It doesn't make sense.

That's why I believe that we have to enforce our immigration laws, and that we shouldn't be putting laws on the books that will extend to non-citizens the privileges of citizenship, because I think you are actually inviting people to violate the law when you're doing that, you're decreasing the respect for the law.

Let me stress that I believe that immigration in the true sense is good for America. This would mean policies aimed at assuring that, by and large, the people who come to America come with the intention of becoming full and responsible citizens of the republic. It also means discouraging any who think they have the right to establish foreign enclaves in our midst, so to speak, in order to gain economic advantages for themselves without fully committing to help us build this free society.

Immigration, yes; colonization, no.

The first prerequisite, therefore, of any effective immigration policy is to regain full control of the borders of the United States. Proposed legislation in Congress falls far short of what is needed to achieve this goal. Until our political leaders put in place the tools and forces needed to control our borders, responsible and moral Americans should oppose any measures that would signal our acceptance of the de facto colonization of our country.

President Bush's guest-worker proposal and the Senate's amnesty bill are such measures. They may serve short-sighted business interests intent on cheapening the cost of labor in our economy, and they may serve the corrupt interests of Mexican and other foreign elites seeking to relieve the pressure created by their own policies of greedy exploitation, but they do not serve the common good. Serving the common good demands policies that give preference in immigration not just to workers seeking jobs and money, but to those who seek liberty and the responsibilities of citizenship.

Let me add that it is incongruous that in the midst of the struggle we are now waging against the international terror network--a struggle that has taken various forms, including, we are told, the effort we are making on behalf of self-government and liberty in Iraq--I think it's incongruous that we should be putting forth such a maximal effort of sending our men and women over there to risk their lives and spill their blood, and meanwhile we are being told that we don't have the right to defend the integrity of the identity and the borders and the self-government of our own people.

You can't have freedom in principle if you won't defend it in fact! And if we let our borders collapse, the facts that support our freedom will be gone, and you know it.

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Iraq War

I will not for the moment go into the question of whether it was right or wrong to choose Iraq as some kind of strategic priority in the war against terror. I frankly have said in the past and would say now — and not with the wisdom of hindsight either — it was not what would have been my choice.

Having, however, determined that we were going to go to war, and what we said was the best interest of defending the American people against weapons of mass destruction and other terrible elements of terrorism, somebody explain to me why it is that we see fit to then take the question to the United Nations?

When we respond to an attack on the United States and are moving forward with a strategy necessary to defend ourselves, we don't have to ask a "by-your-leave" from the UN — especially not when the regime established by the UN to keep Iraq under control had collapsed, without any effective action from other member nations.

Now, after we won the military victory in Iraq — which, thank God, everybody assumed we would — what should have happened? Well — and this is not the wisdom of hindsight either, because I said so at the time — what we should have done at that point was to keep the security aspects to ourselves and turn all the political junk over to the UN. That's part of why it's there.

This whole business of nation-building and shepherding people through representative government — it's not our purpose. How many people believe that we're going to introduce representative self-government in the Middle-East in the Arabic and Islamic countries, where they have never known not even one moment of liberty and self-government, as individuals or as a people where even some of their own clerics stand up and declare that their religion is contrary to the very principles of self-government?

How many people think we're going to do it, in one year, in five years, in one generation? I don't think we will! Why on earth did we set it as our objective? It makes no sense! You set yourself up for failure, and we did.

Instead, we should have turned to the international community and said, "Look. We established a UN because it was supposed to, among other things, help nations along the road to self-government." Some of the things that are put in that charter were our things, and they're not bad things. Why do we never use them against these bad guys?

Put the UN on the spot. We should say, "You should be working, all of you, to help these people to achieve representative institutions of self-government. Get in here with your money, and with your workers, and so on" — and guess what? Right this minute, would it be our prestige that was on the line? No.

I think that sometimes we wear blinders, we have prejudices. There should be no blinders and no prejudices when it comes to figuring out what we do to defend the interests of this country.

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Judicial activism

I think it's time for all people of faith and belief to wake up. What the judges have been doing is exactly the opposite of what the Constitution says.

We are living in a world that reminds me of the song that was played at Yorktown, as the British marched by after they had surrendered. "The world turned upside down."

Instead of living in a society where the sovereignty of the people is based upon our acknowledgment of the authority of God, we now live in a society where the authority of God has been denied, where the sovereignty of the people is usurped, and where the Constitution of the United States is now a sham, imposed upon us by the judges and by unscrupulous money and special interests in order to remove the people from their rightful place, and undermine — among other things — both their courage and their capacity for freedom.

Now, why do I say this? Because in addition to these intellectual shackles — where words like "separation of church and state" can be used to mislead Christian believers into thinking, "We can't talk about God in here, so we won't bring Him up" — what has been the result? Well, the result is that we no longer get decisions that respect the requirements of our God-shaped, God-fearing moral consciences. We get legislation and decisions, instead, that no longer take any account of those things.

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Judicial supremacy

You have the Constitution — or you have the judiciary. Which is supreme? Which is superior? The Constitution.

Now, some people will assert, "But it has been accepted as law in our country that the judiciary has the ultimate say on the Constitution." No, it hasn't, by the way. It's merely an argument, not a law.

I have no problem at all accepting a correct understanding of constitutional review. You know where I have a problem? I have a problem with the notion that somehow or another this is the exclusive prerogative of the judiciary — since, the last time I looked, those who compose the legislature take the same oath to uphold the Constitution, and the president or the governor takes the same oath.

If the argument holds for the judiciary — and we say it does — then it also holds for the other branches, when it comes to the fulfillment of the oath they have with respect to the power they exclusively control under our constitutions.

We have a system of checks and balances. The word "check" means literally "to stop, to hinder, to put an obstacle in the way of, so that action cannot be taken." And that means, to put it in simple language, the power to say, "No."

So, a judge — let's say — issues an order. The executive looks at that order and says, "This is incompatible with my oath, because it's contrary to the Constitution" (or with the law, too, by the way). And so he looks at the judiciary and says, "No, I will not carry out your unlawful, unconstitutional order."

Of course, somebody's going to object and say, "Well, if the governor says that or if the president says that, that's disrespect for law." No, it's not! That's respect for law. Last time I looked, respect for law meant that if the law says it, you respect that.

Now, is there something the judiciary can do when the executive refuses to enforce a court order? Well, the judiciary can appeal to the legislature for help, if it's a judicial order that's not being executed. But what if the governor and the legislature agree? Well, if the governor and legislature agree, then the judiciary can have whatever opinion it likes, but it is not the law.

I take this rationale directly from the reasoning whereby the judges themselves claim the power of judicial review — because, if you do not have the right on the basis of a conscientious view of constitutional authority to say "no" when you're the governor or the legislature, where on earth would the judges get it?

Last time I looked, the legislature, with the concurrence of the executive, makes the law. If a judge refuses to carry out the provisions of that law, why isn't the judge the lawbreaker?

Either the logic of constitutional review applies to all the branches, or it cannot apply to any of the branches. I would argue that it's meant to apply to all of them — so that we will have a system in which all three branches feel responsible to the Constitution, and will express their sense in the pursuance of their particular duty of what the Constitution requires.

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Judicial vs. executive authority

In the Terri Schiavo case, we witnessed a spectacle of the governor of the state of Florida standing before all of us telling us he hadn't the power to do anything about what he himself admitted to be the unconstitutional order of a probate judge — who was backed up by a county sheriff — to deliberately take the life of Terri Schiavo.

So, what does that mean? It means that the moment Jeb Bush declared himself to be thus incompetent — and I use the word advisedly — in the face of the judicial order, the executive power in Florida was transferred from him to the probate judge, who became the supreme executive authority in the state of Florida.

But in Florida, the supreme executive power shall be vested in the governor, the state constitution says.

Now, let's use our common sense here. Supreme — what does this mean? "Higher than this, there is nothing," in terms of executive power within the state of Florida.

So, if the governor of the state of Florida goes into a situation and says to a county sheriff, "Get out of my way," does the county sheriff have — from any source whatsoever, constitutionally — the executive power to say "no" to the governor? I think it's pretty obvious you can't be the supreme executive power if there is somebody higher than you. That's not possible.

So, the notion that Jeb Bush did not have the power to go to Pinellas County, walk through the door, and, if he had to do it, reinsert Terri's feeding tube himself (and his representatives vested with his delegated authority would have had the same power) — that is palpably absurd.

But it's more than absurd. It's dangerous.

If subordinate executive authorities, whether in Florida or nationally, can by court order forcibly resist the executive power of the state of Florida, then every judicial judgment and every judicial order is potentially insurrectionary, in the literal sense. It would constitute forcible resistance against the constitutionally-designated executive power of the state or of the nation.

I hope we all appreciate what we've witnessed here, because it dismantles the basis for both public order within our states and national security within our country.

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Law and order

Even some folks who call themselves conservatives believe that, somehow or another, if you don't obey every court order, whatever it may be, you're guilty of some disrespect for law.

I do hope we remember — as, say, Hamilton did when he was making his case for judicial review in Federalist 78 — that the Constitution, or, in the case of the states, our constitutions, constitute within their purview and jurisdiction the supreme expression of the will of the people. And that will constitutes the ultimate authority on which the claim of lawfulness is based in America.

Law is passed by our represented legislatures. It represents, therefore, the constitutionally-determined will of the people. It is law. It was passed and ratified by the people, by their representatives, or through convention and so forth. And because it has the stamp of that ratification, it is law. That is the constitutional version.

If I am a judge and what I say has no basis either in constitution or law passed by duly elected legislatures, from what does my opinion derive its authority as law in this country?

Well, if you're trying to tell me it has some authority as law, you're telling me that there is some way for something to derive authority of law that is not passed through the constitutional process of representation. And that would mean that we are no longer a sovereign people, we are no longer a free people.

It would mean that we are subject to the vagaries of the arbitrary determinations of so-called "law" made by judges whom we do not elect, who will not respect the embodiment of the will of the people, either in laws or in our constitutions.

It would mean — to put it profoundly, simply — that we have destroyed our republic, we have destroyed self-government, and we have destroyed the hard-won place of a self-governing people.

I frankly don't understand how this can be hard for people to understand.

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Marriage

Marriage is the God-ordained covenant between one woman and one man that provides the essential societal support for families.

As we look at attempts to change that definition, we need to be very, very clear that it's not a question of being against individuals, per se. It's a question of looking at traditional marriage and what it requires, and saying we cannot allow, in principle, an understanding of marriage that excludes procreation.

Because, that was God's plan. Marriage exists for the sake of procreation, for the commitment made, man and woman, to God's will as it is then exemplified in the child when the two become one flesh, and that is also a commitment of responsibility and self-sacrifice for the sake of respecting God's will for the future.

And that is, I think, the serious understanding of marriage. If we were to adopt a view that just says, "Well, sex is pleasure for pleasure's sake," and we can actually base marriage on that understanding of human sexuality, we would be lying to ourselves. We would basically be telling people marriage is about what you get out of it, marriage is about whether you're taking pleasure from it. And you and I both know that there are times in the course of raising children when there's a lot of sacrifice, a lot of grief, a lot of pain that we're putting aside the things that we would think at some level of our own pleasures we would want, because we're willing to be responsible under God's will for doing what we need to do as parents to satisfy our responsibilities.

Now, that can be a source of great joy at the end of the day, of great satisfaction, of great contentment, of great true happiness — but it involves a willingness, also, to take on great sacrifice and great responsibility.

You can't credibly advance an idea of marriage that sells short the need for that kind of lifelong, serious, and responsible commitment to God's will in the form of your commitment to be responsible parents.

And I think that's what's involved in our debate right now — people trying to substitute an understanding of human sexuality that is really incompatible with the moral foundations of marriage life.

The assault that's now taking place on traditional marriage should be taken seriously by everyone, because I think that it represents the last and final step in the surrender of the true understanding of marriage — the commitment to childbearing, childrearing, and the future. And if we allow folks who are pushing for things like gay marriage to have their way, we will abandon the moral mentality that is necessary to sustain decent family life, and that will be disastrous.

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Massachusetts gay marriage

From the legal profession, we find judges standing up to tell us that the legislatures must rewrite the laws so that homosexuals can get married — people who can't procreate, and therefore couldn't possibly satisfy, according to our Christian consciences and understanding, anything that looks like marriage, they must be allowed to marry.

You know what's fascinating about this? This whole situation is one of the prime examples of the truth that our republic — our democratic republic, our government of the people, by the people, for the people, constitutional republic — is dead, at least in terms of the practical mechanisms of its survival.

Take Massachusetts, for example. The Massachusetts equivalent of the supreme court of the state decided that the marriage laws of the state were wrong, and that the state must allow people of the same sex to get married.

Now, if you look at the decision [Goodridge v. Department of Public Health], they didn't take it upon themselves to simply say, "That's it. The laws must change." You know why? Because they realized that somebody might stand up and say, "Excuse me, y'all are legislating, and you don't have the legislative power."

Of course, the Massachusetts judges wanted to exercise the legislative power, but they knew that if they were seen to exercise it directly, someone was going to make a plausible objection that the whole power of legislation was over there, in the legislature, and how did you judges get it?

So, instead of doing it openly, they just said that "in our opinion, this denial of marriage to people of the same sex is not right, and therefore the legislature had to rewrite the law." They then went on very carefully to note that their decision itself did not make any change in the law.

Since their decision didn't make any change in the existing law of the state of Massachusetts, and since the legislature has not acted on the subject, you might be wondering how it is that homosexuals are being married in Massachusetts.

It's because Mitt Romney, who is telling people he's an opponent of same-sex marriage, forced the justices of the peace and others to perform same-sex marriage, all on his own, with no authorization or requirement from the court. Tells you how twisted our politicians have become.

On the first day of the court's deadline, Romney forced homosexual marriage through in the state of Massachusetts without any warrant or requirement from the court, and the day after that, he went to a conference sponsored by Focus on the Family to announce what a strong supporter he is of traditional marriage. God help us, please!

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North American Union / SPP

We are in a situation now — let me put it this way — where a lot of people are realizing we are being betrayed.

As a people, our sovereignty is being betrayed. Our borders are not being defended. Immigration policies are being proposed and implemented willy-nilly. Policies toward a North American Union are being done in such a way as to undermine our sovereignty as a people, destroy our borders, utterly subvert the demographics that sustain the identity of our people.

And it's being done by folks who are elected by us, and who profess to be of us, and yet who seem to be serving something else, not the American people. And I think the sense that we have an elite that has abandoned its allegiance to the Constitution, to government of, by, and for the people, and to the best interest of the liberty of this people — that's pervasive now. A lot of people are waking up to it.

Some of them, sometimes, try to intimidate you, and say, "Oh, it's a conspiracy theory," or something similar. And I say to them, "Go back and read the Founders." Hamilton and others were absolutely clear on this fact — that throughout human history, there has been a struggle between the principles of justice that respect the equity and justice for the whole of the people, and the ambition of those who believe that they're superior, that they should make the decisions, that they should get the benefits, and that everybody else should be cut out. That's an old story, and it's still with us.

As for denials that plans for a North American Union exist — it reminds me of that old saying: the smartest thing the devil ever did was to convince people he didn't exist. And these people think that they're going to convince us that nothing's going on, so that we'll ignore the evidence of our own eyes.

Thank God, Americans are waking up.

I think, however, we need to realize that this isn't just about our borders. It's not just about the Superhighway. It's not just about this action or that. We are in a situation where the sovereignty of the American people — a phrase you don't hear them say very much anymore — is being utterly subverted, and we must act across the board to assert and restore our sovereignty, in both a constitutional and a physical and geographic sense.

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Pornography

I'm fond of reminding people that the meaning of the word "pornography" in its Greek root, pornos graphein, means to describe the harlot's work, to describe the business of the harlot. And what is it that the harlot does? The harlot uses or abuses human sexual formation for pleasure only, making that the objective of everything.

It is that understanding of human sexual relations that I think we ought to know is now at the bottom of the assault that is taking place on the traditional family. We are in a debate right now over what marriage will be, and some folks want us to accept an understanding of the marriage relationship in which that sexual relationship is defined as being between two people who have no possibility, in principle, of ever producing a child. And that means that the whole connection between human sexuality and God's plan of procreation is destroyed if we embrace this understanding of human sexuality.

But what is that understanding, at the end of the day? It is a pornographic understanding of human sexual relations — an understanding that sees, in those relations, not what God intended for a man and a woman, not the family, not the transcendent obligations of parenting and the mutual relationship of parent and child, and the formation of families that then become the basis for decent society. None of that is there. The only thing that is there is selfish pleasure and gratification and self-fulfillment, an understanding of human sexuality that, at the end of the day, severs it not only from its natural foundation but from its God-given function and purpose.

I think that one of the reasons we are seeing this understanding on the march — people think that it's about homosexuals, but it's not. It's about the fact that many people in our country have embraced that pornographic understanding as their own. In their heterosexual relations, they are pursuing only pleasure and self-fulfillment and self-gratification. And that means that we've become a fertile field, a fertile ground, for an understanding of human sexuality that destroys the very possibility of family life.

That means that, in effect, the war against pornography is a war against that mentality which is creating the fertile ground for the whole crisis of the family, which in the end is the crisis of our whole society.

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Property rights

The idea of the "pursuit of happiness" in our great Declaration presupposes the right of property, a right our Founders understood was inseparable from all other unalienable rights. Without the right to pursue our individual version of the American Dream — independent of unjust interference from government or other sources — there can be no right to life or liberty. The individual pursuit of sustaining wealth and the control of that wealth is central to a free, open, and healthy society.

The right of property has long been threatened not only by unsound schemes of taxation, but by intrusions into the personal control of private property. The result has been a pervasive loss of opportunity in the marketplace for the common man and a disruption of normal principles of supply and demand, those necessary to competition and to the creation of fair prices for such things as housing, undeveloped property, and a broad range of goods and services. Today, disruption of the right of property is threatened additionally by extreme environmental values that place greater importance on the so-called "rights" of animals, trees, and streams than on the legitimate and essential needs of mankind — extreme notions that increasingly strip human beings of normal and reasonable economic opportunity. I support responsible human stewardship of God's creation, but I also whole-heartedly seek to include in that stewardship conscientious and vigilant respect for the fundamental human right of property.

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Religious freedom

The "separation of church and state" doctrine is a misinterpretation of the Constitution. The First Amendment prohibition of established religion aims at forbidding all government-sponsored coercion of religious conscience. It does not forbid all religious influence upon politics or society.

The free exercise of religion means nothing if, in connection with the ordinary events and circumstances of life, individuals are forbidden to act upon their religious faith.

I would do everything in my power, through public discourse and persuasion, by proposing legislation, and by careful scrutiny of the candidates for judicial appointments, to turn the tide against constitutional rulings that undermine religious freedom.

I oppose any efforts to use government power to impose views that contravene religious conscience on matters such as abortion and homosexuality.

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Right to keep and bear arms

I am a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment.

The right to keep and bear arms was included in the Bill of Rights so that when, by a long train of abuses, government evinces a methodical design upon our natural rights, we will have the means to protect and recover those rights.

In fact, if we make the judgment that our rights are being systematically violated, we have not merely the right, but the duty, to resist and overthrow the power responsible. That duty requires that we maintain the material capacity to resist tyranny, if necessary — something that is very difficult to do if the government has all the weapons. A strong case can be made, therefore, that it is a fundamental DUTY of the free citizen to keep and bear arms.

The gun control agenda is based on the view that ordinary citizens cannot be trusted to use the physical power of arms responsibly. But a people that cannot be trusted with guns cannot be trusted with the much more dangerous powers of self-government. The gun control agenda is thus an implicit denial of the human capacity for self-government and is tyrannical in principle.


School choice

The court-initiated prohibition of school prayer is only the symptom of a deeper problem — the neglect of moral education and character formation. The value-free education offered by the government-run schools has all too often proven to be education without value. This is especially true now that Outcome Based Education has been used as an excuse to establish curricular elements that amount to the politically correct brainwashing of our children.

Government money is increasingly used to enforce a low quality, crass form of vocationalism in the School-to-Work scheme, while the same educrats debase traditional academics with such fads as Whole Language Learning and Fuzzy Math. Parents and local citizens often know better than their educrat masters, but find themselves unable to resist the power of an entrenched and costly monopoly. Education reform is thus a question of liberty and self-government.

I strongly favor school choice approaches that empower parents to take control of their children's education, in accordance with the parents' faith and values. We not only need prayer in schools, we need schools that are in the hands of people who pray. Above all, we must break the government monopoly on public education.

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Sex education

Human sexuality is primarily a matter of moral and not just physical health. So-called "health-based" sex education programs have done more harm than good. They too often encourage adolescents to consider sexual activity apart from marriage and family life. Especially in government schools, where teachers feel they must deal with sexual matters without reference to moral authority, these courses result in a vapid, context-free presentation of sexual mechanics which degrades and debases the meaning of relations between the sexes.

Sex education is, as a rule, the private responsibility of parents. The government should not usurp this role. Where parents choose to encourage school-based instruction, I strongly support abstinence-based approaches for young adults.

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Social Security reform

Two principles must govern any reform of Social Security: (1) promises must be kept, and (2) future generations must have more choice, as well as a higher return on their savings, through market investments. We must keep the promises that have been made to current participants of the system, while returning control of current earnings and future security to each individual citizen.

I strongly support a fundamentally new approach for younger workers, placing them in control of the investments made with their savings dollars. The elimination of the income tax will make tax-privileged "retirement" accounts irrelevant — all savings will be tax free. So while I favor the transitional policy of replacing Social Security with individually-controlled tax-free investment accounts, the ultimate solution to the problem of long-term and retirement savings is to return responsibility for this crucial function to the citizens of the country, along with the freedom necessary to accomplish it.

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Taxation / government spending

Tyrannical taxation, and excessive government spending and borrowing, are not only threats to our economy — they erode the resource base of our freedom and our moral responsibility.

The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 85 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed. We need to return to the Constitution of economic liberty that our Founders intended to be a permanent bulwark of our political liberty.

The income tax in effect makes us vassals of the government — the politicians decide how much income we can keep. No mere "reform" of this slave tax, such as flattening the rate, can correct its fundamental denial of control over our own money.

Only the abolition of the income tax will restore the basic American principle that our income is both our own money and our own private business — not the government's.

Replacing the income tax with a national sales tax would rejuvenate independence and responsibility in our citizens. True economic liberty and moral revival go hand in hand.

A national sales tax would also put the American citizen back in control of fiscal policy. The best way to curtail government spending is to cut taxes, because they can't spend what they don't get. With a sales tax, we could deny funds to a spendthrift government — and give ourselves a tax cut — whenever we make the private choice to alter our spending and saving habits.

But we must also take away the government's credit card. With limits on both tax revenue and borrowing, the Federal government would finally be forced to get serious about spending cuts. That's why a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, with barriers to both borrowing and spending, is the best way to secure budget discipline.

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United Nations

The fundamental goal of American statesmanship must be to maintain an independent sphere of sovereign American interests and principles, and to pursue them in the world with prudence and courage, retaining the awareness that the United States is responsible for its own destiny.

Whatever benefits of international cooperation and consultation the United Nations has made possible, it has from its flawed founding been a source of dangerously naive globalist dreams. Some American politicians have been so corrupted by the internationalist ideal that they cannot resist the temptation to elevate the United Nations into a supra-national entity that threatens American sovereignty.

Should this pernicious tendency persist, the United States will have to withdraw from the United Nations, and yet firmly maintain our ongoing international responsibilities as a sovereign nation and world leader.

Ultimately, it is more important that the United States of America should survive in freedom than that the United Nations should survive at all.

Let me add that I have never supported the United Nations. As a UN ambassador, I represented the interests of the United States at the United Nations, which is a very different thing than supporting the UN itself. And during the course of my time as ambassador, we implemented some fairly tough policies that were considered to be anti-UN — though, in point of fact, they were really aimed at trying to bring the organization back to its original purposes and charter.

The original purpose of the UN is quite clear, and I don't believe it's blamable. At the end of World War II, some folks got together and said, "We mustn't let that happen again. Is there anything we can do?" I don't believe that's a blamable intention. I believe it's a praiseworthy intention. We don't want the world to go up in smoke.

On the other hand, the people who have, since that time, sought to use the United Nations and its instruments to destroy the sovereignty of our country, to betray the principles of our liberty, to sacrifice the keys to our economic survival and liberty are all people I have opposed and strenuously fought. And my purpose for being at the United Nations with the Reagan Administration was precisely that — to defend our interests and to fight the forces at the United Nations that were attempting to destroy us.

I don't believe that we should ever allow the UN any prerogatives that undermine or conflict with the sovereignty of the United States. Rather than do so, we should leave the organization.

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"Uniting for peace" after 9-11

For the life of me, I do not understand why, the day after 9-11, we did not demand an emergency meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, and stand there declaring what had gone on and demanding a "uniting for peace" resolution against terrorism — where we would have given chapter and verse to things that every nation on the face of the earth must do to fight terrorists, to restrict their financing, to restrict their movement, and to cooperate in their apprehension.

Why didn't we do it? We had the whip hand at that moment. Not a nation on the face of the earth would have dared to oppose us, and on the top of everything else, knowing the UN diplomats the way I do, the biggest mistake the terrorists made was to attack New York.

Those diplomats think that New York is their home, more than whatever country they come from. We would have gotten the votes we needed, and we would have codified the authority that was required to do what's needful against the terrorists. Why didn't the Bush Administration do something?

They didn't bother. I don't understand why. That was a sign of incompetence. And then we got in this run-up to the Iraq war.

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War on terror

Some people say that the war on terror is an issue, and I say, "What issue?" We have people wanting to kill us — this is not an abstraction, it is not a joke, and if we don't defend ourselves against them, they will kill us. This is not an issue, this is not an option, it is a reality — and we either deal with it or we die.

"What do you do about the war on terror" is like asking, "Do you want to die." No we don't — therefore we must defend ourselves against this threat, and we have no option and no choice. The issue is how are we going to fight it most effectively, how are we going to make sure we go after the terrorists and pre-empt their violence and destroy them before they destroy us?

I think we have to destroy their infrastructure and deal decisively with those governments that are willing to aid and abet them and possibly give them weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.

I would rather make a tough decision, based on the information we've got — and do what's necessary to prevent weapons of mass destruction that could kill 100,000 people — than to wait for the wisdom of hindsight to defend our people.

The wisdom of hindsight will leave hundreds of thousands of people dead. The wisdom of hindsight arrives too late to make the decision.

It turns out that the key to victory or defeat is moral understanding. The Islamic fascists are evil, and it is right to defend ourselves against them. But we do not fight them because they are Islamic, or even because they are fascists. We fight them because, by their practice of terror, they prove themselves to be people who have no regard for the fundamental tenets of decent conscience that we believe must be respected when human beings deal with one another, even in war.

Each time we speak of the war on terror, therefore, we evoke the moral cause of the war in which we are engaged. We rightly remind ourselves that our fight is not just against people who have attacked us, but against the evil that they embrace and embody in their heinous crimes against human conscience.

We also remind the world at large that the fight is not for us alone, but for people everywhere who believe that there are moral rules that should not be transgressed, even in war.

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Welfare / family disintegration

Most of our costly government welfare programs aim to deal with problems related to the breakdown of moral standards and self-discipline. We will go bankrupt as a nation if we continue trying to pay the ever-increasing costs of society's moral disintegration. We must end government programs like the family-destroying welfare system and sex-education courses that encourage promiscuity. These programs actually hasten the moral breakdown.

Our first priority should be restoring the moral and material support for the marriage-based, two-parent family.

I think that's vital to the future of the country. I believe that we need to mobilize folks, and get them to think in faith terms instead of in terms of selfish interest — I think most of our politics in recent years has been about vote your money, vote your pocketbook, vote your jobs. These are critically important issues — but the truth is, when we think it through, that a lot of the money issues we face are rooted in the fact that we have to spend large amounts of money compensating for our moral defects, for the breakdown of the family structure, the rise in crime and violence, the increases in poverty that come about because of the decline in the family structure.

We're paying a deep, huge cost for the moral weakness of the society, and then we act as if that's a money problem. I don't believe it is, and I think we know it's not.

We need to start addressing the real underlying cause of these challenges and to recapture a sense of the moral foundation, so that we can restore the moral discipline, restore the sense of commitment to true family life that then provides the basis for economic strength in our communities, for better performance for our children in our schools, for a greater sense of responsibility on the part of parents toward those children, and so forth and so on. We know that these are the keys to real progress, and it's time we got out and voted like we know.

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Why I'm running for president

I'm running for president because I think this republic is collapsing. I think our system of self-government is being replaced by a system in which we will be dominated by foreign powers, by globalist institutions, by self-seeking corporations, instead of having a government of, by, and for the people.

This collapse of our national sovereignty and the sovereignty of our people is taking place because we have abandoned the basic moral principle on which this country was founded: that our rights come from God, and that therefore we must exercise them and apply them with respect for the authority of God.

In every area, we are finding that this retreat from principle is leading to the destruction of innocent life in the womb, the collapse of the family structure, the loss of our self-confidence in the defense of our borders, and finally, a misunderstanding of what the war on terror is about, since our aim must be to defeat the forces that disregard the claims of innocent life, in violation of the fundamental principle on which our country was founded.

And I don't hear anybody else articulating this vision which makes it clear that we are urgently involved in an effort to save our republic, to save our system of self-government, and that effort especially depends on reasserting our allegiance for the basic founding vision and principles that our Founders put in place for this country.

I'm just sick of all the people dancing around it and acting as if we're dealing with this issue and that issue and the other issue. There is one issue, and all these other issues are like the fissures and cracks in the wall that bespeak the collapse of the foundations.

It's time we dealt with the real problem, articulated it with vision, and faced it with moral courage. And that is what my effort is about: to call people together on the common ground of our faith in God and our acceptance of the Declaration's principles, so that we can once again become a government of, by, and for a people who have reclaimed their active citizenship and reestablished real liberty in this country.

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