ping...
I heard part of this debate last nite; would that all debates had this level of exchange (if nothing else to expose the socialist baby-killers to daylight)
"I think that if we care about our freedom, we have to care about the moral foundations of our liberty--moral foundations that are relevant, by the way, to every practical problem we face.
In education, in health care, in our economic life, every study shows that if you allow, for instance, the breakdown of the family structure--the greatest contributing factor to poverty, to the gap in affordable housing, to the rising tide of crime and violence, to the inability, in fact, to deal with a lot of the problems that drive our young people into gangs, all are related to the breakdown of the family structure.
You know this. I know it. And yet, we don't want to talk about it. We just want to follow Barack Obama, throw some more money at the problem.
These problems become a catalyst for government spending. You know what a catalyst is--you keep doing the spending, but it doesn't affect the problem, because the root of our problem lies in the decay of our moral culture. And government has assaulted this culture with stands on abortion, with, now, an assault on the traditional family, with regulations in the social welfare programs that drove fathers out of the home and broke down the family structure.
He says, "This is not a concern of government." And yet government has, in fact, been deeply contributing to the damage that is being done to the moral culture of this country.
I think we're gonna go bankrupt if we keep paying for the consequences of moral decay, and refuse to address its causes.
That might be convenient for politicians, basing their power base on promise after promise to spend money on this one and that one. But I think, if we really care about the future, we don't want to keep burdening people with higher deficits from spending that is increasing, because the problems increase when you don't address their fundamental cause.
I believe deeply in self-government and liberty, but I don't think it's going to survive in America if we allow the continued, government-sponsored destruction of the moral identity of our people, and that is why we must give priority to addressing the underlying moral crisis that is the real cause of so many of our difficulties."
Obama may be a good reader of the script but he is not in Alan Keyes league as an intellect, a debater or a moralist. If it was a boxing match it would have been stopped in the second round.
Thanks for the post!
And there is also a link to the audio portion of the debate on the front page of Renew america:
http://www.renewamerica.us
http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/audio/10_21_2004debate2.mp3
Great debate!
thnx for posting that. I had wanted to read this.
Bump!
Thanks for posting.
Now folks can get the full picture. :-)