John Ashcroft
Former Attorney General

No matter what happens to me here this evening, there is one thing that has made me happier than any other thing that could happen to me today, and it is that my son drove and flew a combination of about 1,400 miles in order to be in Washington, D.C., and to participate in the Promise Keepers event there.

It's an interesting event. And it fits rather appropriately with the title for the remarks which has been assigned to me for this appearance. If you'll check your programs, I think it says that I'm going to talk about whether or not faith-based charities, and the cultural remedies that we have the potential of unleashing, can fill the gap left by welfare reform. And it's interesting that the Promise Keepers event in Washington is labeled "Stand In the Gap."

I don't think it's understood, but it's profound. It has to do with the history and future of America. If we're going to succeed as a nation it will be if the culture responds to help us achieve results and achieve potentials that we could not achieve with governmentalism and a faith in government that is supposed to meet every need and do everything possible.

There are those who say that government can meet all the needs.

I think that was the philosophy of the 1960s. I think they were wrong. I believe that we should never, ever be convinced that government can do more for us than we can do for ourselves. That's a fundamental principle we must always embrace.

But we have to understand that there is a role for government, and there is an opportunity for the culture to operate. When they're in proper balance, we make the most progress. And when they're not in balance, we are thwarted in achieving the opportunities that we should be able to achieve.

The Proverbs put it this way, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." We have to have the right vision and understanding of what can be achieved and what ought to be achieved. I have a good minister friend who puts it as well this way, "Where there are no people, the vision perishes."

It takes the right vision, and it takes the right work, takes the right understanding of government. It takes the right implementation, and it takes the right restraint.

And so this evening, perhaps because of the opportunity that I had to be in the Promise Keepers setting today and to witness hundreds of thousands of individuals making a commitment to be responsible servants, to be leaders in the spirit of Christ, which includes, if necessary, the willingness to sacrifice for one's family and one's community. That is the most important thing that could happen today. It is certainly the most important thing for my family, for my son, a 24-year-old, unmarried individual who looks forward to someday having a family and is already beginning to develop within himself a commitment to that family in a way which would renovate the face of America. And it's a great opportunity for us to celebrate it with the others.

When we talk about what our future is, I believe we really have to begin to ask questions about the kind of a future we want. I call it 20/20 vision. We have to look at the year 2020 and say, "What do we want?" Not just at the next election. Let's look at the next generation. We've had too many politicians looking at the next election and relying on polls as how to win the election, but not looking to the next generation and relying on principles as to how to implement a plan to get us where America should be, ought to be, can be and will be with the hard work of individuals such as you are.

I believe we have to have a realistic vision of what government can do and what government ought to be called on to do. And we have to also understand that there are things outside the purview of government. Those ought to be things that are left to the culture, to the non-governmental institutions and even the faith-based institutions, which do them immeasurably better. And when we have the right balance in that respect, I think we're a nation of achievement. The responsibility of government generally is to set thresholds, to establish minimums. You and I recognize this when we first encounter what it means to be governed, when we are told, "If you do that, you will be punished." Or, "If you don't do this, you will be punished." Government really says, "We expect certain minimum behavior and, absent that behavior, government will take action adverse to your interests." By its nature, it establishes minimums.

Now, there is something more than minimums to be required if we are to be successful as a country and if we are to mark the next century as a century of opportunity and freedom.

I don't have to remind you that America marked this century for freedom and opportunity. We just have to look a decade ago to see that there were people in a number of settings behind the Iron Curtain who were not free then, who are free now, because America so indelibly marked this century for freedom that Ronald Reagan could go to the base of the Wall and say, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

We need for the vitality and character of the American culture in the next century to be equally strong, so that we mark the next century for freedom and opportunity as those who went before us. Some of us have worked to mark this century as one for freedom and opportunity.

Government tends to set thresholds. The culture can challenge us to the maximums and to our potentials. And when we have government making sure that no one falls beneath the thresholds and we have the culture operating to challenge us to reach our highest and best as a nation, those two things in balance and in cooperation are the definition of an America that succeeds. It not only succeeds, it leads.

Individuals who see themselves as just governmental officials tend to operate to accommodate people at their lowest and least, tend to suggest to people that we can all do well if we just stay at the minimums.

Frankly, that's too much the story of Washington, D.C., where instead of calling ourselves to our highest and best, we have all too frequently accommodated ourselves at our lowest and least.

We've said we would be willing even to accommodate families without parents. So if you bring children into the world without parenting them, you're provided a subsidy. That's accommodating America at her lowest and least, not challenging America to her highest and best.

We need to find a way to challenge this culture to her highest and best if we want to meet the expectations that the world will have for us and the aspirations that we will have for ourselves in the next century.

Now, the culture doesn't just set the minimums, it inspires the maximums. Minimums are enforced governmentally by mandates or orders of government and impositions in the law. Impositions and mandates reinforce the minimums. The maximums are not mandated or imposed. They are inspired and modeled. And that's why it is so important that they can be achieved when they are part of what happens in the culture.

A good leader not only understands that he has the responsibility for mandates and impositions in the governmental sense at the threshold level. A good leader understands that in addition to governmental opportunity he has leadership opportunity. A good leader inspires and models as well as imposes and mandates.

We really need, then, to bring into the equation both the operation of government at the mandate and imposition level, and the leadership of the culture at the modeling and inspiration level. That's what's so important about being able to fill the gap created by welfare reform with the opportunities and the capacity of the culture to stand in the gap.

A gap in our culture is being addressed in Washington, D.C., today. It's a gap in terms of fathers in the home. You and I know that one out of every three children born in America is born to a home without a father. Three out of every four children in America will live at some time during their childhood in a home where the father is not present.

We know the problems that we've had. We've experienced and endured abusive situations. And it is important that we not only have the right laws in place to correct those, and we must profoundly understand the role of not just imposition and mandate in correction. But we must all understand inspiration and modeling in the correction of those problems.

Coach McCartney of Promise Keepers deserves the applause and the cheers of every American because he is leading American men to understand that it's more than just following and obeying the law and staying out of jail. Being the kind of people who will create and shape an America for the next century will make us strong enough to define that century as an American century, a century of freedom and opportunity. I applaud him today, and I believe the Promise Keepers is a wonderful step in that direction.

When government is overbalanced and tries to do it all, we find ourselves in counterproductivity. We find ourselves slipping. And the 1960s found us believing that government could do everything.

Phyllis Schlafly was kind enough to mention the little effort I waged to stop the National Endowment for the Arts. That came in the 1960s. You'd think, to hear people talk in Washington now, that there were no artists in this country, no authors, no musicians in this country prior to 1960. I want you to know the greatness in American art did not begin in 1965 with the Great Society.

I like what Foster Friess did in Jackson Hole. He said, "If you'll repudiate that NEA grant for a paltry $14,000, I'll give you $50,000." I think that was great incentive, and I just couldn't understand why people wanted to quibble with that. But I believe you've signaled something, that we'd be better off as a culture in artistic terms and in governmental terms if we would just abandon this commitment to think that government can do it all, especially to shape the arts.

We ought to know that whenever the government sanctions one piece of art it stigmatizes another piece of art. We don't need government trying to tell us what kind of art to support. And we certainly know, from looking at their record of trying to direct what we should support, that government is an abysmal failure in that category.

But that's not the only failure that we have as a culture and as a community when government is overbalanced, when it feels like it does it all. Government began to muscle its way into the community with a kind of power and displacement potential that moved other associations and institutions, non-governmental entities, to the sidelines in the area of meeting human needs.

Whether you read the Manhattan Institute's study about the hundred neediest cases in New York as they've come through this century, or whether you just look from the 1960s when we really put our faith in government, we watched a skyrocketing problem of illegitimacy. We watched a skyrocketing problem of broken homes. We watched a skyrocketing problem of the lack of personal security. What we finally concluded is that the proliferation of laws around the minimums will never carry the culture to the performance of the people at the maximums. We need to find a way to reinfuse this process, to really bring the culture back into it, to bring in the ability of institutions that deal with the whole person, not just the wallet and the breadbasket but also into the heart of people, back into the equation.

Two years ago, when we were doing welfare reform, we had the first two welfare reform measures vetoed. I put into the law what was called the "Charitable Choice" provision, which simply was a way of saying, "If you're going to contract out welfare services as a state, you're not allowed to discriminate against faith-based organizations that would otherwise provide welfare services."

That was predicated on the evidence. Look at the drug remediation stories. There are stories about Teen Challenge, which has about a 70 percent remediation rate - people totally drug-free three years after leaving the facility - not only drug-free but alcohol-free. Compare it to the government settings, which find that they are lucky if they get people a 10 percent remediation rate, measured after one year.

Incidentally, treatment costs about eight times as much in the governmental program as it does in the private sector.

Because we need the right balance, we need to understand that a program that treats an individual as if he is a hollow container spiritually and values him only so long as he meets the criteria statistically of being a welfare case or a drug addict, is not a program that's going to carry an individual to his or her highest and best. As our people are not at their highest or best, our country cannot be at its highest and best.

I'm pleased that, just by saying you can't discriminate against faith-based operations and putting those operations in a framework to protect them so they don't have to change their bylaws, they don't have to strip their nomenclature apart. One institution was going to try to help some people, and the Welfare Department said, "Well, you have to take the word 'Saint' off the front of your building. You can have 'Luke's Hospital,' but you can't have 'Saint Luke's Hospital.'"

We're still fighting this pernicious idea that people who are people of faith are somehow to be denied privileges given to others. The Boy Scouts were denied an opportunity to perform a ceremony on the grounds of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. because the Boy Scouts embrace a belief in a supreme being.

When we discriminate against those who would carry us to our highest and best and challenge us to be what we ought to be as a nation, we end up encouraging ourselves at another level. It is a disgrace not only to our forefathers but it damages the future of this country. The Charitable Choice provisions in the Welfare Reform law will make it possible for us to call more people to their highest and best. And that's where the future of the United States is to be found.

I was pleased with USA Today this last week. Its cover story said, "Law Lets States Increase Church's Welfare Role." It tells about a young woman who has decided she's never going to need welfare again because she has found help from people in faith-based organizations which previously had been discriminated against and limited and eliminated from the arena.

It's like the Promise Keepers in Washington, D.C., today. The welfare system puts a little spare change in your hand. Promise Keepers takes real change to your heart.

We need, as a nation, to do something more than just put spare change in the pocket of individuals. We need the kind of inspiration and modeling that moves people to their highest and best, rather than the kind of mandate and imposition which compresses people to their lowest and least.

When we seek to fill the gap left by welfare reform, we must do more than fill that gap. Let's bring a superior set of opportunities, not merely a replacement set of opportunities. That superior set of opportunities will have the full character of the United States of America in its broadest sense, this culture, this community, not just the sanitized, sterilized sense governmental programs have been bringing. We must do more than fill the gap, we must call America to greatness. It can be done and it will be done as we begin to call the entire community into the operation.

I do believe that, if America is to be the nation that marks the next century as a century of freedom and opportunity.

Frankly, I shudder to think of the alternative. If we don't have the energy, commitment and capacity to define the next century, what country will? Will it be some generous, benevolent society like China, with its billion people more than we have and its example of freedom? Where there's not one single dissident outside of jail in a nation of that size? I shudder to think that we would shirk our responsibility to define the next century. We have to have an America at her highest and best if we are to define the next century. I'm pleased that Phyllis mentioned that I've been active in the situation regarding the proposed program for national testing of America's students. National testing is the nose of the camel of national curriculum under the tent. National, dumbed-down curriculum with fuzzy math and whole English featuring creative spelling and students who are able to justify wrong answers but cannot calculate or compute right answers is not the way to our highest and best.

And I have to commend the members of the House. They understood this. They followed the lead of Representative Goodling and voted 295 to 125: Not one red cent for national testing.

That issue came to the Senate, where everyone was so bent on compromise - that's a rare thing in the Senate, you know. Well, maybe not rare enough. So bent on compromise that I was the only person to stand and speak against it. We were able to get thirteen votes against it, but 87 to 13 votes are not winning margins most of the time.

I began to speak some more and enlisted Lynn Cheney in the operation. Two days later, we got 27 Senators to say, "Don't let this come back from the conference the way we sent it to the conference. Let's yield to the House's position." Senators have been adding their names to that on a daily basis. And I have indicated, as you have been told, that I will filibuster any conference committee report that includes nationalized testing. That would lead to nationalized teacher certification, which takes the control of education from moms and dads and moves it to bureaucrats.

Now, that's the tragedy. The single most important operative condition in educational achievement for students is the involvement of parents. If we nationalize the curriculum and nationalize teacher certification, all the decisions are made in Washington, D.C. That would tell parents they're useless and meaningless in the process. That would pull the rug mightily from beneath the feet of our students and leave them not prepared to meet the next century. That would leave American lacking the quality of individual who can and should and must define the next century as one of freedom and opportunity. So I call on every one of you to call on members of the Senate. And it wouldn't hurt to remind the members of the House of Representatives. A dumbed-down system of national tests is against the best interests of America now, and against the best interests of America in the future. It would undermine the ability of America to continue to set a standard of freedom and opportunity around the world.

I couldn't believe it when I read the stories about Illinois. A school district tried the fuzzy math, some people call it "rain forest math," where you talk more about the rain forest than you do about mathematics, the whole predicate there.

The National Council of Mathematics Teachers have really denounced the idea of computation. They are not interested in students that compute. They think calculators can do the computations. So they want students who can justify wrong answers, instead of reach right ones. They want students who can justify wrong answers, but they don't know the difference between right and wrong.

They're like the "whole language" English folks who didn't care whether or not you could read or write. They just wanted you to be able to argue. And they sent home tasks, telling you to argue with your parents and to enter into these kinds of antagonistic arrangements. But the truth of the matter is we need students who can read and write -- and the repudiation of the alphabet, if I may digress, is turning our backs on a tremendous asset in this culture. The alphabet is the scientific, rational way in which we can sound out words we've never seen before. And we can deconstruct them and frequently figure out what they mean. There are cultures that don't have an alphabet, and you just have to recognize a picture. And if you've never see the picture before or the set of characters, you're out of luck.

Do we want to take this marvelous, scientific, logical tool of alphabet away from the American student and say, "Forget about phonics?" We're going to impose national testing on you, and it'll reflect a non-phonics, sight-recognition, whole language approach to education."

Well, even if I could impose my test, I wouldn't do it, because I want you and I want local schools and I want parents involved. We must rally to reject national testing. I hope you'll stand with me on that and make sure that every member of the Congress understands that we must not corrupt the future of this country by sweeping from moms and dads the prerogative of educational decision-making and lodging it in the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.

When you sweep that from moms and dads, and you place it in the hands of government, you're again transferring from parents who tend to have the capacity to inspire at the highest and best, to government, which frequently deals in minimums.

How often have we seen the dumbing down of the tests, the dumbing down of the curriculum, the sacrifice of quality because government specializes in and focuses on the minimums instead of inspiring and modeling the maximums?

Let us not sweep to the governmental component of the culture the decision-making for local education. Let us reinvigorate education with a massive infusion of parental involvement and protect that so that the future is rich and we have a set of opportunities for the next generation equal to ours.

We cannot only fill the gaps we create with reform, we can put in those gaps a far superior product. It illustrates the fact that it is not enough just to disengage the government from doing what it does poorly. We must reengage the culture in doing what it does well.

As we do that, we build an America of which we can be proud. The ability to commit one's self to this country, I think, is most dramatically seen in the life of Abraham Lincoln. I loved Lincoln's remarks when he left Springfield to go to Washington, D.C. He seemed a prophet. He said, "I go not knowing whether, if ever, I shall return." Strangely enough, Lincoln came back to Springfield only in a casket.

He also made a statement, "I go not knowing whether, if ever, I shall return with a task before me greater than that which faced Washington."

I thought to myself, that's arrogant. How can he say that what he's doing is tougher than bringing the country into existence? I don't think it was arrogant. I think he felt the weight of a nation exploding, and he felt that he would need special help.

Lincoln understood that it's tougher to hold it together when it's being divided from inside than it is to bring it together when it's being pressurized from outside.

Then he concluded his very brief remarks to his friends as he stepped on to the train by saying, "Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended Washington, I cannot succeed. And with his assistance, I cannot fail."

That little couplet is as true today as it was in the day that Abraham Lincoln shared it with his fellow citizens. If we are to reject the lowest and least, and are to pursue the highest and best for America, we can only do it understanding that without his assistance we cannot succeed, but with his assistance we cannot fail.

Thank you, and God bless you.