Robert Casey - chairman, Campaign for the American Family; former governor, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; attorney; former State auditor general, 1968-1977; former member, Pennsylvania State Senate, 1962.

 Words really fail me when I try to describe how much in awe Ellen and I have been at the generosity and the basic goodness of the people of this country. And it really gives you renewed hope and confidence in the future of this great country, because we are a good people inside. It's not just words on a page with the American people. We believe very deeply in our religious principles, we believe in the bedrock principles that made this country great and strong, and we saw evidence of that in our own personal experience, when I was really at death's door. People in this room have been there and have come back, because of the miracles of modern medicine and tremendous care -- we do have the greatest health care system in the world, with all of its faults, all of its difficulties, all of its travail -- but the greatest health care system in the world.

I am a living testament to the American health care system and to the genius and the daring and the courage of so many wonderful people. But perhaps most of all, I'm living testament to the power of prayer and the power of our value system. And the generosity of the people of our country. So to them and to you, and to all of those in this audience who have said to me this evening, "You know, we prayed for you," you can't ever begin to know how much we appreciate that. And I would never be here tonight were it not for that, and I give witness to that every day of my life.

I don't take myself too seriously. I've been in this business called American politics for about thirty years. In a pretty rough, tough kind of brass knuckles state called Pennsylvania, a very diverse state. I had my ups and my downs, and won some and lost some. Winning is a lot better, as you know. But I had an experience I want to share with you tonight. It's a true story.

I was running for reelection as governor of Pennsylvania in 1990; I'd been in office for four years. Those of us in the business like to think that after a while a certain number of people know who you are and know what you've tried to do and have some sense of where you've been and what you've stood for. But many times that's not the case. Because people have other things to do, like raising kids and paying bills and doing their jobs every day. Many people don't pay much attention to what politicians do Monday through Friday.

Anyway, I was running for election as an incumbent governor with four years of service, going down the stretch, ten days to go, the bit in your teeth. You know, driving as hard as you can drive, the adrenaline is flowing and every place you go you stop people and ask them to vote for you and give them your material. You've been through this, there are many candidates and many public officials in this audience. Anyway, it's a Sunday morning. After church, we decided to do some retail campaigning in a little town called Oil City, Pennsylvania. That's where Mr. Drake first drilled that oil well, a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania. Not a Democratic area, I might add. I'm a Democrat. Although some would give you an argument on that, I think, these days, but that's another story.

Anyway, Oil City, Pennsylvania, a Sunday morning, about ten days before the election. I walk into this gas station, there's a fellow pumping gas. Had one of my friends with me, helping me. We had our material, of course, the brochures and all that stuff you carry around and pass out during election campaigns. I walked up to this guy at the gas pump and said, "Excuse me, sir, you don't know who I am but my name is Bob Casey, I'm running for governor of Pennsylvania." And he was staring down at the ground and never even bothered to look up at me. Totally unimpressed. And he just kept doing what he was doing, and I just stood there. I didn't know what to say to the guy. He was just deadpan, and it got kind of awkward. I wasn't saying anything and he wasn't saying anything. Finally, as though a light went on in his head, he looked up at me and he said, "What'd you say your name was?"

I said, "Casey."

He said, "What are you running for?"

I said, "Governor."

He said, "Oh, yeah," he said, "I heard about you. As a matter of fact, I'm going to vote for you."

I said, "Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate that." And then I made a fatal mistake. I asked him why.

He said, "I'm going to vote for you because anybody'd be better than the guy that's in there now."

True story.

So if you think you're a big deal, take a ride to Oil City, Pennsylvania.

But I am very happy to be with you this evening, and I don't take myself too seriously. That's one of the first rules, I think, in politics, because we're all pencilled in, we can all be replaced, and oftentimes we are replaced. But I think, if I can be serious for just a moment, we come together tonight at a very exciting time in our history. It's a time of great renewal and revival. That's not too strong a word. Because that's what's happening in our country. Something big is happening. As a politician, I know that. You can sense it too.

Some politicians haven't yet sensed it. They don't see the wave that's riding, cascading across this country. You see it. You feel it. You helped to create it. And some of the people who have power in this country are going to ride that wave. Some are going to be swept away by it. Many don't understand it. Many already have been swept away by it, and most of those individuals are in my party. In the Democratic party. They just don't get it. They look around them, and if they were observant the signs are unmistakable, if they followed the trend of human events, not just in the political world but the world around us, what's happening all around us.

You can judge just by the covers of the major news magazines. The Pope shows up in Manila and four million people come out to see him. Many of them young people. The Christian Coalition thunders across the country and rejuvenates the political system in many, many ways, another very powerful sign. I saw a television program recently where a group of men calling themselves members of an organization called "Promise Keepers" -- you know the organization.

Standing in a football stadium, where I'm told they paid a fairly substantial sum of money to gain entry, in a driving rainstorm, taking pledges to be good fathers, essentially. A straw in the wind. If you're in this business called American politics and you don't understand what's going on, you'd better find another line of work. Because it's powerful.

 And then you pick up Time magazine, of all magazines, and who's the man of the year? The Pope is the man of the year. This man whom they said, a year and a half ago, was dead, out of business. What's he done since? He wrote a book. He wrote a book of poetry. He records a record in Latin. These are all bestsellers. You can't get them in the bookstores. He's on the cover of one of the biggest news magazines in the biggest country, most powerful country, in the world. A country which has been secularized in such a destructive, pervasive way, in spite of itself, makes him the man of the year. That piece in that magazine quotes Archimedes, way, way back, who said, "Show me a place to stand and I can change the world." And Time magazine concludes that article by saying, "Pope John Paul knows where he stands."

And I mention that as another illustration of what I'm talking about, something very big is going on here. You get Newsweek magazine -- I couldn't believe my eyes. Did you see that cover, called "The Politics of Virtue"? Did you see that cover? I mean, these people are in the business of selling magazines. So, by definition, they put things on their cover that people want to read about, that people are interested in knowing about. Did you ever think you'd see the day when a major news magazine would have a cover talking about politics and put those two words together, "The Politics of Virtue" on the cover? You turn inside. They've taken a poll. You know what the poll shows? Seventy-five percent of the people in this country say America is in moral decline. And you know what else they say in that poll? That that decline is a more important problem than the economic problems of our country.

No matter where you look. Go back to Time magazine a couple of weeks later. What's on the cover of that Time magazine? Two little figures, a husband and wife, the day of their marriage. You know what the lead story in the magazine that issue was? The disintegration of the institution called marriage in our society, and all of the travail and problems caused by that disintegration. And then it goes on and on. They had a cover on miracles. You remember that cover on Time magazine? On miracles. Then they had one on shame, I think that was in Newsweek.

And about that same time, a tidal wave rolled across this country. We saw the Congress of the United States turned literally upside-down and inside-out. And all of those Democrats -- and it pains me to say this -- all of those Democrats who were elected back in the year that was the Year of the Woman, five congressional Democrats were elected, they were all unelected. And in their place are now five new members of Congress, also women, who don't subscribe to the radical far left agenda on the social side of things in this country.

So if ever there was a time in our history when the people of this country are yelling, screaming at the top of their lungs to people in power in Washington and in the state capitals, this is it. And they are saying, "We have a crisis of the spirit in this country." Money's very important, economic issues are of paramount importance. We can all agree on that. But the American people are saying, "Tell us more. We want to know about our pocketbooks, tell us about our pocketbooks, talk about taxes and growth. We want to know about that. But we also want to know about things that go beyond the pocketbook. Things that go to the spirit of this country. Things that have motivated this country from the very beginning."

The words in that Declaration. They want to know about those words. Because they believe them. We were taught as kids to believe them, to recite them. They want to know that those words live and are not just words on a page, but words with meaning, contemporary meaning and challenge and promise and hope for this country. So they're saying, they're screaming to the political system in this country, "Talk to those issues. Speak to those issues." And they're saying to the political parties, "You'd better stand for those ideas and those values."

It's a time of great excitement, a time of great dynamism, a time of maximum opportunity. Most surely a time of maximum challenge, because this country has been secularized, and we have paid a bitter price for that process. Haven't we? In all areas of our society.

And you know something else? As a governor, I can tell you, it's very expensive. Very expensive. Every line in the budgets of the major states of this country, under the category of Human Services, every line recites the saga of government and the public purse being called into the breach to repair the rending of the social fabric that has flowed from that process. Where values have been removed from the public square, from the public debate. We've paid a bitter price for that removal, but now it's coming full circle in the phenomena I've talked about here this evening.

You know this. And you not only know it, you've acted to try to change all of this. For that, I salute you. And I want to tell you something tonight. I'm determined, as all of you are, to be a player in this drama, to be part of the great exhilarating challenge of what it means to live in a democracy at a time like this, a time of ferment and change, a time of transition, a time of new beginning, a time of revival, time of renewal. It's heady wine, if we can just seize the moment and take advantage of it. And make our contribution to the best of our ability to try to facilitate and help this change.

I want to talk tonight for just a few minutes about some basic change. I'm trying, to the best of my ability, to work through a group called the Campaign for the American Family, because I firmly believe we've got to put the American family at the center of national policy. And I know in this room tonight there are leaders of some of the most active and effective and committed pro-family organizations in this country. I want to add to that effort and that energy by trying to do what I can to advance that agenda.

But it takes change, as you know, basic and fundamental change. In areas that concern the value system of the country. I want to talk about a few of them here tonight.

First, adoption. I believe we need a national conversation on this subject. We intend to call a national symposium or a national conference on adoption sometime in the near future. I intend to challenge the political structure of this country in both parties, the White House and the Congress, to step up to the plate and make adoption a number one priority in the national policy of this country.

As the governor of a major state, I've seen kids trapped in foster care, and so have you. There are many heroes and heroines in the foster care movement, but my experience very simply is that foster care is the most expensive and many times the most anti-child alternative of all of the alternatives available to us in our system. We have kids in foster care in Pennsylvania, thousands of them, trapped in that system, whose parental rights have been terminated, and about whom nothing is being done. For one reason or another.

When I was governor, we increased the state subsidy for adoption services to the counties to a hundred percent, to try to encourage and give incentives to increase the level and the rate of adoption. It didn't work. So we instituted an adoption program at the state level, the statewide adoption network that's now in place in Pennsylvania. You know what the purpose of that program is? To take the most vulnerable kids, retarded kids, minority kids, sibling groups, those who are hardest to place, and put them first in line. You know why?

 Because the America that I was taught to believe in is not supposed to leave anybody out or anybody behind. And the party I joined, the party of my father, my grandfather, all of their brothers and sisters, who used to see the signs in the windows that said, "No Irish need apply," my people said, "Oh, is that right? Okay, fine." They were powerless. So they said, "We're going to be Democrats because Democrats are supposed to stick up for the powerless." The Democrats did that, to their credit, on many occasions, and those were their finest hours. Believe me. But somehow along the way, they lost direction.

And for only the second time in our history, the most powerful country in the world wrote off an entire class of people, unborn children. Wrote them off. You know, maybe China can write them off, or some other country that doesn't have a birth certificate called the Declaration of Independence. Maybe they can live with that. But we can't live with that in America because we have that Declaration. And it's been like a bone in our throat, hasn't it? It's been like a square peg in a round hole. And they keep hammering and hammering that square peg, but it won't go into the hole. They keep telling us, "It's over, it's decided, it's behind us, it's all taken care of, go home now, don't worry about it," and the people say, "Oh, yeah?" And the cases keep coming up to the Supreme Court, from Texas and Pennsylvania and Louisiana and Missouri and Nebraska and all over this country. And you know, sooner or later, and it's going to come in our lifetime, I really believe that, this is going to change. We made that mistake once before, didn't we? In the time of the Dred Scott case, the only other time in our history when we wrote off an entire class of people.

Before you take away people's basic rights, you first must dehumanize them. You've got to drain away all their humanity and convert them into non-persons. We've witnessed that process in this country. But I want to talk about that tonight, because I think our people have got to have this conversation. We've got to talk about this. This question of life. We've got to talk about adoption. We've got to get those kids out of that revolving door which, in my state, has taken children and kept them in that system for eight to ten years, spit them back out on the street. And they wind up either in the penitentiary or the cemetery.

Under our program in Pennsylvania, and the program we worked with, the Black Ministers Association in Pennsylvania, the "One Church, One Child" program, we placed 800 children, minority children, through that program alone, in just seven years. And we can place more children. If the President of the United States and the Speaker of the House and the leadership in the Congress on both sides joined hands and said, "Listen, there are lots of things we don't agree on, but in the name of God can we not agree to give kids a chance, a real chance, to be productive, happy, law-abiding, decent citizens? Put them in a home where they've got a mother and a father and a family and a structure that gives them the kind of support they need."

You know what the public cost of adoption is? It's zero. It doesn't require a big bureaucracy, it doesn't require a lot of government spending, it doesn't require a lot of intervention. All I'm asking the President and the Speaker to do is to stand up and say, "We're going to put adoption on the front burner in the United States of America." We're going to say to the governors, "Let's have a national meeting of every governor in this country, have them come in here and sit down and say to them, 'We want you to go back to your states and iron out the problems, the red tape, the roadblocks, the problems that go with terminating parental rights. Whatever the issues might be, iron them out.'"

We've put men on the moon. We can figure this out. They talk about putting a hundred thousand cops on the beat in high crime areas, wonderful. Let's put 500,000 kids in adoptive homes over the next five years in the United States of America. That's a goal that's worth fighting for.

We can begin to reconstitute this unit called the American family, which is disintegrating before our very eyes. That's one way of doing it. To begin that process. Get government out of it, just point the people in the direction you want them to go. And give women a realistic alternative to abortion in the process. Adoption is very important. I think it's extremely important. It's important also to change the anti-family provisions of our federal tax laws in this country, to make family formation, family strengthening, family support, just as important as support for capital formation. Machines and buildings are important. They produce wealth and jobs. They get support in the tax code of this country.

When you contribute to the education and the feeding and the support and the raising of children, and when you figure that working families in this country produce two-thirds of the gross domestic product and pay four-fifths of the tax burden in this country, there's something terribly unfair and unjust about that system. And let me tell you something. When people hold up that post card and say, "Wouldn't it be nice to have a postcard that's in place of that 1040?" we all agree on that. I'll take a postcard any day rather than a 1040. But I want to know, when they hold up that postcard, does it have a picture of the American family on it or doesn't it? And if it does, then I want to know more. I want to learn more about that system.

We must read the fine print on some of these suggested changes against the backdrop of this question: What impact will this have on the working families of this country? Because the decline in real family income over the last ten years in this country, especially on the lower end of the economic spectrum, is a very, very serious national problem. But beyond that, we have a fundamental question. America's on a treadmill. Mother and father get up at 5:30 in the morning, take the child or children to the day care, they go to work, they work all day, they come back at night, they're exhausted. They spend a few minutes with their children, put them in bed, and get up the next day and do the same thing all over again. It's a terrible problem. It's pervasive in our society.

And everybody talks about the economic cost of that situation, the purchasing power of money and all of that. But no one ever talks enough, in my judgment, about the moral cost of that situation. Where parents are spending more and more time being breadwinners and less and less time being parents and mentors and teachers, and giving example to their children.

So the children slip away, move away, and we have a chaotic situation on our hands as a result. We've got to do something about the decline in real family income in this country through the private sector and through governmental process where that's appropriate. But we must look at these issues, in my judgment, through the prism of the question, "What impact will they have on the working families of this country?"

It's going to take change. Basic change. Change in our welfare system, which is coming as we speak. To eliminate and pull out all of the perverse disincentives against work, against marriage, against saving, against families living together, where teenage children get a higher benefit if they leave the household and set up an apartment of their own. Government policies, where they're necessary, should keep families together and not drive families apart, as is so often the case now in our society.

And finally, we've got to change the most anti-child, anti-woman, anti-family policy of all: abortion on demand.

 America needs a national conversation on abortion. Our greatest enemy is silence. Those on the other side don't want to talk about it. They don't want it examined. They want to deal in the superficial. Euphemisms like "choice," without ever telling us what happens. Tell me when that choice is exercised. I never thought I'd live to see the day when an elected representative of my own party would stand up in the Congress of the United States and say what was said during the debate recently on the partial birth proposal made by Congressman Charles Canady of Florida. These are late abortions in the third trimester in some cases. A representative of my party said, in effect, "Isn't it terrible that someone would even consider banning this gruesome, incredible medical procedure? Isn't it terrible that someone would consider voting in favor of a bill like that." How can they defend third trimester abortions? It defies comprehension. Yet, it's going on every day in the Congress of the United States. We need a national conversation on this question. We need congressional hearings on this question. In the light of the tremendous advances that have been made since 1973, in fetology, in embryology, in neonatology.

We didn't have a sonogram in 1973. My youngest daughter's having a child; she brought home to me a picture of the sonogram of her unborn child. We put the picture on the VCR in our living room, very early in the pregnancy, the most beautiful picture we've ever had on our VCR. You see, I think the Congress of the United States ought to put that picture up on a big screen in a hearing room.

They should discuss among themselves in the Congress of the United States what they see in that picture and then tell the American people what they see. Or, better yet, let the American people tell them what they see in that picture. I think you would have a change of opinion on this question that would be dramatic. It would occur with rapid-fire speed. All we've got to do is get that picture on national television and say to the American people, "Tell us what you see with your eyes in that picture."

When a woman's going to have a child, when she's pregnant, does she go to her husband and say, "I have good news for you. We're going to have a fetus."?

No. She knows what it is. Children in fifth grade know that that's a person. Why can't all these smart people out there, all these Ph.D.s from famous schools, why can't they figure that out? We have to help them figure it out. A national conversation. Not a national shouting contest, but a national conversation.

We're examining immigration policy, the welfare system, affirmative action -- why not a national conversation on life?

We'd examine one other question in those hearings, at least one other one, and that would be this fundamental question, "Have the promises made by those who support abortion on demand in this country come true?"

You recall back in 1973 and since, we were told that once the unwanted child was removed from the scene there'd be fewer women in poverty, domestic violence would abate, child abuse would lessen, we'd have happier families. Here we are, twenty-three years later, and just the opposite has occurred. Abortion on demand has been a complete and total failure as a pragmatic, empirical matter. And in the process, in my judgment, it has been the most cynical, the most chauvinistic exploitation of women in American history.

And I want to tell you something. We are winning this competition, this battle, by any measure. The Freedom of Choice Act never got out of committee. Almost 90 percent of the counties in the United States have no clinics for abortion because the people don't want them there. Medical schools don't want to teach it any more. Most doctors that are respected wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. When our President signed the executive order saying that abortions were going to be permitted in military bases overseas, every single doctor on American military bases overseas said, "We're not going to do the procedure, as a matter of conscience." Now, that is a very, very powerful and persuasive little fact, it seems to me, in terms of where this country is going. And every attempt in the Congress of the United States to expand that abortion license has failed miserably. We need a national conversation. We need public hearings to educate our people and tell them what's going on in the United States of America under Roe v. Wade, that there are third trimester abortions.

I was in Wichita, Kansas, a couple of months ago and I saw the third trimester abortion clinic with my own eyes. It's expanding.

Most people in this country have no idea that Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton permit that kind of practice. If we told them -- they're not being told now -- if we told them that, and confronted them with that reality, I think you'd see a massive change in public opinion.

What I'm leading to here is very simply this, that the educational process, in my judgment, will lead to legal protection for the unborn child. As a matter of history, Abraham Lincoln said that were he in Congress, if a bill were presented to him to change the result in the Dred Scott case, he would vote in favor of that law, even though it went against the decision of the Supreme Court. He said his reason was that, unless we have that principle in our government, we will have surrendered our sovereignty to the arbitrariness of the Court.

In Roe v. Wade, they didn't decide when life begins. So the Congress can make that determination. And if the Congress makes that determination, and says the child is a person under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, for purposes of due process and equal protection, we will get to the central question: Is America going to stand up for the child or not? When I stood on the Supreme Court steps the day that Planned Parenthood v. Casey was argued, I said, "In this debate, who speaks for the child?" I said, "Pennsylvania's here today to speak for the child."

I want to ask that question again here tonight. Who will speak for the child? I believe America must speak for the child. And that day will come, that day will come. It will come because of the basic goodness and the common sense of the American people. If we simply give them the information necessary to make that decision, and if we say to them very simply, and to our leaders in this country, "America, we take you at your word. We've read the Declaration. Every word of it. We believe these rights are inalienable. We believe that they come from our creator, Jefferson's words, the first Democrat, Jefferson's words. They come from the creator, and they are self-evident. They're as plain as the nose on your face. They can't be taken away by the state or by name, by definition."

You know what those rights are. The first one is "life." It comes even before "liberty." And, of course, "the pursuit of happiness." So we say to our people, "We've read those words, we take America at her word. Our job as citizens is to make sure that the day comes in this country when those words are not just words on a page, but words to live by."

The threshold question, when it comes to the American family, is, "Who gets to become a member of that family? And on what basis?"

You see, I believe that in the greatest country in the world, every child deserves a chance to be born. And I'm absolutely convinced that we are winning this battle if we continue and stay the course and carry that message. These words from our Declaration will be not just words on a page but words to live by.