James C. Dobson - founder and president, Focus on the Family; psychologist; former Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, USC School of Medicine; author; host, "Focus on the Family" radio program.

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

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

I want to start with a scripture. Now, I know this is not a Sunday school class, and that there are people here today who have all kinds of religious traditions. I sense that most of you are deeply committed Christians. But that's probably not true of all of you, and I don't want to insult anybody.

To understand my world view, and the way I see things, politics and every other aspect of life, you have to go to this book, because that's the foundation of everything I care about. So I want to read a scripture that lays that foundation for what I will say later.

When I have a discussion with people, there's a question I like to ask, especially those who are theologians or pastors, or those who feel like they know the Bible. It's a question that I enjoy having some fun with. I ask them this question, and I ask it of you.

What is the very first thing that God created when he set out to create the universe? What was the first thing he made?

When you ask that to people who know the Bible, they immediately go to Genesis 1 and try to remember what that said. Was it the Heavens and the earth, or the firmament, or the light or the deep? What was the first thing that God created when he set out to do that?

Actually, they are wrong, because there's a hook in the question. The answer is not found in Genesis 1, or any part of Genesis. It's actually found in the Book of Proverbs, Proverbs 8. And in this passage, Proverbs 8: 22-30, Wisdom is speaking in first person, metaphorically.

Wisdom is, as we know, throughout this book, God's point of view. Wisdom is his way of seeing things. Wisdom is his value system. And so wisdom here is talking here about itself. And this is what it says:The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works before his deeds of old. I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began. When there were no oceans, I was given birth. When there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth.Before he made the earth, or the fields, or any of the dust of the world, I was there when he set the heavens in place. When he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep. When he established the clouds above, and fixed securely the fountains of the deep. When he gave the sea its boundaries so the water would not overstep his command, and when he marked out the foundations of the earth. Then I was the craftsman at his side.

What this is saying, in other words, is that the moral law of the universe antedated the physical universe. It came first. It was not as though the Children of Israel wandered into the wilderness and the Lord looked at their behavior, saw them worshiping idols and doing all these wrong things, and said, "Hmmm. Those folks need some rules." And then called Moses up into the hills and said, "Here are the Ten Commandments. This will help those people do better."

It is not that way at all. That moral foundation, that moral law, is eternal because it's an expression of God's own nature. It predates the universe. And it will outlast the physical laws.

You can no more defy that moral law than you can jump off a ten-story building. Because if anything, the moral law outranks the physical law. The physical law is going to pass away.

This book says the heavens and the earth shall be rolled up like a scroll, and there will be new Heavens and a new earth, and there will be new physical laws. But the moral law is eternal. He said, His words shall live forever.

So that moral law has great significance. It says in the end of that chapter, "For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the Lord. But whoever fails to find me, harms himself, and all who hate me, love death."

The moral law of the universe. What this is saying, to me - and I hope, to you - is that the universe has a boss. It has a boss. And He has very clear ideas of what is right and what is wrong.

It doesn't matter a whole lot what you think, or what I think. What matters is what He thinks. Because that moral law has been there from eternity, and will be there to eternity.

And if that is true, then we have an obligation to understand it, and to respect it.

Now, I'm not talking today about dogma. I'm not talking about denominations. I'm not talking about churches. I'm talking about a law that's written on the heart of every human being.

And this is the end of the Sunday school lesson. Romans 2:14 says - I'm going to paraphrase this - it says, "When the Gentiles" - the non-Jews - "act in accordance with the law, having not heard the law, it shows that they have a law in themselves written on their hearts. For their consciences either condemn or approve their behavior."

You can override that law. You can sear that conscience, and you can get beyond it. But it is there. It is there in all of us. It is programmed into the human spirit.

You do not have to be taught that it is wrong to murder. You don't have to be taught that it's wrong to steal and to lie and to extort and to bribe and to oppress the poor, and to express racial hatred, and to be promiscuous, both homosexually and heterosexually. There's no difference between those two. Promiscuity is immoral. It's wrong. As is adultery.

That law is eternal, and it is written on the heart of man.

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

But as you know, there are many people who don't accept it today. We have already heard from David Noble and others who talked about other world views, primarily postmodernism.

Postmodernism essentially rejects that explanation I just gave you. Postmodernism says: There is no God, and there is no eternal standard. There are no rules. You make them up as you go along. What seems right is right. There are no transcendent values that will stand over time. When human life becomes inconvenient, you can get rid of it, because it was not created by God, because there is no God.

And it's all subjective, and whimsical. You make up your ideas as the circumstances arise. That postmodern notion that there is no moral law to the universe has taken hold, and taken root, like a cancer that's spread through this entire nation.

And it continues to spread. MTV works on it every single day. We see the effects of it.

We have, at Focus on the Family, a magazine called Brio that's written for teenaged girls. We send out 200,000 of those a month. Susie Shellenberger, who is the editor of that magazine, receives about a thousand letters a month from those teenaged girls. Their letters to her are changing.

Five or six years ago, they would write and argue with her about abstinence versus having sex with a boyfriend - they're fourteen years old. They would write and say, "Why do you say that? Who says it's wrong?" They would argue with her.

They don't do that now. They write now and say, "That's okay for you. That's all right if that's your view. That doesn't happen to be my view. We all have to make up our own minds."

So moral relativism has found its way into the so-called "X" generation. That view absolutely dominates at the university level today. No other view is even tolerated. There is less intellectual freedom on today's university campuses than anywhere else, because what I started with you today, in regard to the moral foundation for the universe, is absolutely not tolerated on most secular university campuses today. If you hold to such a stupid notion, tenure is probably out of the question for you in most situations, and you may not even be hired if they know that about you. This indoctrination goes on.

 I decided that Phil Gramm just might be that man. I heard him on TV. I liked what he said. I thought that maybe he might be the one we could get excited about.

So I asked for an appointment to see him, and he agreed to see me. I flew to Washington, D.C., from Colorado Springs. And with me that day were Gary Bauer, Ralph Reed, and Betsy DeVos. Went in to see him. We went in and sat down. I had this on my heart. I had something I really want to say.

He starts by telling us that he only has forty minutes, he has to go to something, and he begins talking. And he talked, and he talked, and he talked for thirty minutes. And we had ten minutes left. And he was still talking.

And so I finally said, "Senator, it's not polite to interrupt the senator when he's talking, but I came a long way to say something to you, and if you don't ever let me say it, I'll leave here and you won't ever know what I came to say."

So he talked some more, and then he said, "Okay. What is it that you came to say?"

I said, "Senator, there are millions and millions and millions of people out there, good, family people trying to raise their kids, trying to keep them moral, trying to teach them what they believe, who are very agitated and very concerned because they don't hear anybody echoing what they believe. They're not known to the New York Times. They're not represented by the New York Times. And they're not known inside the Beltway. People don't talk about those folks inside the Beltway. It's as though they don't exist, or if they do, they're called names like Hillary Clinton called them last week."

And I said, "They're not known to The Washington Post, who referred to them as poor, uneducated and easy to control. That's the attitude."

By the way, we have surveyed the listeners to Focus on the Family and people on our mailing list. We've done extensive surveys on that. Fifty percent of them have college degrees, 70 percent of them have some college, and many of them have graduate degrees.

It's a very bright, very well-educated, very well-informed, population. They're not terribly political. They're not in Washington. They write their representatives if we tell them to, but they've got their hands full with their kids. They are very informed, and they're very concerned about what's going on.

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

I'll never forget what he said. It's been widely quoted in the paper. It's been misquoted in the paper. Some people say that he said, "I ain't no preacher, and I can't do that." That's not what he said.

Some people have said that he said, "I'm not running for preacher, and I can't do that." That's not what he said.

What he actually said was, "I'm not a preacher, and I can't do that."

And I said, "Senator, you will never reach our people."

We got up and left. And Senator Gramm was out of the race in Louisiana, just a few weeks later.

That was 1996. Let me go back, if I can, to 1994. I've been waiting to say this for a long time. And you guys are the ones that are going to get it.

For the first and only time other than when Ronald Reagan was running, Republicans spoke in 1994 to the heart of that pro-moral community. I mean, they got them jazzed and excited.

They ran on a pro-life platform. You hear that they ran on the Contract with America. We didn't hear much about the Contract with America until the Republicans had won. That wasn't what got them elected. They ran on a pro-life platform, and they energized that whole community. And it was incredible.

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

Newt Gingrich is Speaker today because of that 43 percent. There is no special interest group, there is no constituency, that comes anywhere near that. One of the unions had 11 or 12 percent. There's nothing even close to that.

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

November of '94 is when they were put into office. Overwhelming - everybody's talking about it. The new Congress came in. January 20th or so, the President came down to the Congress to make his State of the Union address. Newt Gingrich chose somebody to respond to the President.

Who did he choose? Christine Todd Whitman. The absolute antithesis of everything that constituency stands for.

She is pro-homosexual activism. She's pro-condom distribution. She's pro-abortion. She's pro-partial birth abortion. She even named a truck stop for Howard Stern on the New Jersey Turnpike. Which is the only thing she's done so far that I agree with. Naming a toilet for Howard Stern is the only logical thing she has done.

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

We come now to 1996. And this is the part, in my view, that you may disagree with. Bob Dole did everything he could to insult those people during that campaign.

Bob Dole said harsher things about Gary Bauer than he did about Bill Clinton. It seemed like all the way through he was determined to distance himself from this constituency that had put the Republicans in power.

I spent three hours with him one day, asking him to do the same thing I said to Senator Gramm. I couldn't even get him to say, "If elected, I will appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court." He would not say that.

Then he went to San Diego. They stripped from that convention every element of the usual presentations that dealt with the pro-moral issues. Every bit of it. All that was left was kind of show-and-tell, and talk about the economy and money. But there was no reference at all to the moral issues, or very, very little.

Bob Dole got on national television, looked straight into those cameras, and said - and you remember - "I will not be bound by the platform that's been written, and indeed, I haven't even read it."

Now, folks, you do realize that this pro-moral community I'm talking about worked through the democratic process to elect representatives to come to San Diego to write that platform and to put that pro-life plank in there. Bob Dole said to the nation, "I don't even plan to read it. I will not be bound by it."

 And television sets went off all over the country.

Now, remember I gave the figure 43 percent in 1994? In 1996, that percentage was 29 percent. That 14 percent right there represented the difference between winning and losing in that election.

Where did they go? Republicans said, "They don't have anyplace to go. Where are they going to go?"

Well, some of them did go. Some of them voted for Bill Clinton, and some of them stayed home. And some of them, like myself, voted for another candidate.

I voted for Howard Phillips, not because I was convinced Howard would make a great president - I don't know that. I voted for him because he stands for the principles and the values that I believe in, and nobody else did.

And so that's where we stand.

Now, I want to refer again to that pro-moral community that's out there. What I'm hearing, and what people are saying to me. There is great discouragement with the Republican Party, great irritation. And indeed, there is a sense of betrayal out there for what has occurred since 1994.

I'm going to reflect that to you, looking at the record in regard to the moral issues. I'm not talking about taxes. I'm not talking about the military. I'm not talking about building bridges and roads and all that sort of thing. I'm talking about the moral foundation to the universe, those principles that we know are right.

The Republicans ran for Congress, primarily, on a pro-life platform. That's what the promise was. What has been the delivery?

Last year, the Republican-led Congress, House and Senate, gave $900 million to Planned Parenthood to take that abortion message around the world. And we're supposed to get excited about supporting that? You talk about betrayal?

I told you I wasn't going to pull punches. The man who has probably fought more for the things we believe in than anybody in Congress is Jesse Helms, but he bailed on that one. Jesse Helms bailed out on that. $900 million to Planned Parenthood, to go to these Catholic countries, these Muslim countries, where they don't accept abortion, and begin to propagandize, and begin to work to spread that - that horrible procedure around the world.

Republicans did that. And shame on them for doing so.

The issue of parental consent also takes my breath away. For 200 years, for 300 years, parents have held the absolute authority for the medical care of their children. Indeed, you cannot give an aspirin to a child, a minor, of another family, or bind a scratch, put iodine on it, or anything, without running the risk of being charged with battery unless you have that parent's permission.

Yet now, as we heard this morning, a thirteen-year-old girl can go off to school. Her parent thinks she stays there. Some feminist counselor, or some teacher, can pack that child off that campus and take that child across town to an abortion clinic, where she goes through a procedure that she may remember for the rest of her life. She will remember it for the rest of her life. Her parents not only can't stop it, they're not entitled to even know about it after the fact. She comes home that night. She could continue to bleed. She could have an infection. She could have severe emotional consequences from this. And it's none of the parents' business.

A thirteen-year-old girl is some days a child. Some days she acts a little grown up, but usually she acts like a child. That child is in the hands of people who have a very different philosophy. They don't accept the moral standard of the universe, and they have control of that child.

Did you hear, last year, about that teacher in Crystal Park, Illinois who had an affair with a thirteen-year-old girl and got her pregnant? He packed her off to the abortion clinic, where they injected her with Depo-Provera8 and other hormones to get rid of that child. He took her there three times to cover his affair.

By law, they couldn't tell the parents that a teacher was bringing that kid there. And by law, they had to give that kid the medication.

Congressman Istook fights for the things we believe, and I appreciate that. He got excited about this. He took this issue to the Republican leadership last year and tried to get it brought on the floor. He wanted a vote on it. He could not even get the Republicans to vote on it. Not only did he lose, they never even voted on it.

Not only could they not pass parental consent, which puts the power back into parents' hands, they couldn't even pass parental notification where we're willing to tell parents what we're doing with their kids. And this is a Republican-led House and Senate?

What about the National Endowment for the Arts? $99 million more to offend people of faith. Couldn't defeat it. How pitiful.

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

How about school choice? How about school prayer? How about religious liberty?

How about the safe sex ideology? This one really does bother me. Twenty-five years ago when that condom distribution program started - and we've spent nearly three billion on it now - there were only two sexually transmitted diseases at an epidemic level: syphilis and gonorrhea. They were both easily controlled by antibiotics.

Now, there are over twenty, and they're at an epidemic proportion. It is incredible. Sexually transmitted diseases include the bacterias, which can be treated. Set those aside, even though some of the diseases are becoming resistant to antibiotics, gonorrhea and others. But set those aside, the sexually transmitted bacterias.

One in four Americans has an incurable, lifetime, sexually transmitted virus. They will suffer from it for the rest of their lives. And many will die from them.

You hear an awful lot about HIV. Very few women die of HIV. Some of them do, but very few. Far more die from HPV, the human papilloma virus. If it were not for HIV, HPV would be getting headlines. Four thousand women per year in this country die of cervical cancer as a secondary result of infection with the human papilloma virus. It causes genital warts. It interferes with sexual intercourse. The rest of their lives, their marriages, will be affected by this. And it is spreading like wildfire.

A study done at the University of California at Berkeley a few years ago tried to evaluate just how widespread the human papilloma virus is.

At the University of California at Berkeley, they evaluated all the young women, average age 21, who came into the student health center for routine gynecological exams in the course of one year. And they quietly evaluated them for the human papilloma virus. Forty-seven percent of them had it. It is incredible.

And it is spread despite condoms, because it is spread from areas of the genitalia that are not covered by condoms.

We know genital herpes is out there. That's another one that is not curable. You get it, you've got it. And you will keep it forever. The Congress gave $200 million more this year to safe sex ideology. It is a failed policy. It is a miserable, embarrassing, disgraceful, harmful policy. And the money keeps going up.

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

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

Now, folks, I know all the answers to this, because I've been in conversation with many Republican leaders about this. I've had this conversation with a lot of folks. Spent 45 minutes on the phone with my great friend, Rick Santorum, just the day before yesterday, about this.

I know the answers. I know what they say. They say, "We don't have the votes. You can't expect us to pass things when we don't have the votes. We have a lot of moderate Republicans and only a ten-vote majority in the House. We don't have the votes. We can't pass these things."

Well, maybe. Maybe.

 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the most liberal justice in the history of the United States - an ACLU lawyer, one who will defend abortion to her dying day - was confirmed by a vote of 97 to nothing in the Senate. There was not one conservative Republican senator who had the guts to put principle above who knows what. Ninety-seven to nothing. What a disgrace.

When I ask them about it, they said, "Well, we feel the President is entitled to make those appointments." And I said, "Talk to me again about Robert Bork. Where was that principle when he was appointed?"

Well, I think you see where I'm going.

What bothers me too is that the Republicans who say they don't have the votes also don't have the voice. Maybe even more egregious to me is that the other side is so passionate about what they believe. They advance it and they pursue it and they teach it.

In November, November 8th, 1997, Bill Clinton did an absolutely outrageous thing. He went to speak, and give the dignity of his office, to a group defined by their sexually perverse behavior - a homosexual rights group. He validated them and validated all the things that they stand for, including the redefinition of marriage.

Two days later, he held a hate crimes conference at the White House. Bill Clinton said there that we need to revamp the curricula of all the schools in America to teach pro-homosexual concepts to kids. He didn't put it in quite those words, but that's what he said.

What he said was an attack on every member of the pro-moral community and on their children in school. And this is going on all over the place.

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

So the President of the United States proposes that this be universalized. You know, we always had the idea that parents controlled the education of their children. Here, the President is telling us that we need to revamp the curriculum.

So I wait for the echo. Where are the Republican leaders who stand up and say, "This is outrageous. We will not stand for it?"

There was not a peep of protest from a single Republican leader in the House or the Senate. Not one. Not the conservatives that you know and love. None of them had the courage to speak to that. They're so intimidated. They're so pinned down.

It was just incredible. Only Bill Bennett did it. Bill Bennett wrote an article in the Weekly Standard disagreeing with the President on that. He gave a very rational argument. He was the only one that I saw - maybe you saw some one else. I waited for it.

I've since had Senator Ashcroft on my program, among others. I've said, "Senator, where were you and where was everybody else?" And he said, "I should have spoken."

Why don't they? I don't know. It's a lack of conviction that there is a boss to the universe, and that there are moral standards that we are held to. We need officials who will stand up and represent them.

Speaking of Christine Todd Whitman, she got in trouble in November, as you know, and she was about to lose, and the Republicans came tearing up there to her rescue. Christine Todd Whitman is the most liberal governor - or at least the most pro-abortion governor - in the nation. The Republican Party gave her $1.5 million to help pull her through. These people went up to help her: Jack Kemp, John Kasich, Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle - whom you're going to hear from tonight; I hope you will ask him - Steve Forbes, whom I hope you will ask tonight, Colin Powell, Jim Nicholson, Terry Branstad, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Peggy Newman and Rick Santorum, who stood on the floor of the Senate and gave the most impassioned plea for the unborn child. They went to New Jersey to campaign for the woman who vetoed the legislation that would have protected those children. In one clinic in New Jersey, 1,500 kids are killed by partial birth abortion each year.

I don't understand that. And I don't understand either, why, a month ago, the Republican National Committee went to Indian Wells and dealt away this partial birth issue, a 78 percent issue, on the matter of campaign financing.

What all this conveys to the constituency I'm talking about is that principle does not matter. It's party over principle.

There are some things that you stand for, whether or not it is popular or politically astute to do so. That's what that pro-moral community stands for, and yet it seemed to me what I heard from the Republicans in Indian Wells was that "We cannot have power if we stand on principle. Please don't take away our power."

What good is it to have power if you don't use it for good.?

I will wind this up. I just have to say that the two familiar phrases that came out of Indian Wells really do get to a lot of people I know: "big tents" and "litmus tests."

Do you know that the Democrats never use those words? You never hear a Democrat use the word "litmus test," unless he's referring to a Republican. You never hear them talking about the "big tent." Why? Because they rarely abandon their moral constituency - or immoral constituency.

They're always there for them, with few exceptions. Bill Clinton is still hanging with the partial birth abortion thing, even though the American Medical Association says he's off the wall. But he hangs with it, because they don't disappoint their constituency.

Republicans use those two phrases when they're getting ready to abandon their core values, and they're embarrassed about it. They've got to give a rationale for doing it. Big tent. Litmus test.

Let me tell you guys something. I know you know this. I know you've heard it. But I must say it again. What are we talking about here? We're not talking about partial birth abortion. We're talking about murder during delivery. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about infanticide.

And this baby, this six, seven, eight-pound baby, is delivered, all but the head. Brimming with life, fully viable, can suckle, can look you in the eye, can respond. So quickly, all that humanness begins to unfold. Delivered all but the last two or three inches.

Roll that baby over. He's unanaesthesized, and you pick up scissors, and you cram them into the back of his head, and his whole body stiffens. And then they insert a powerful suction device into the back of the head, and suck the brains out of that baby and deliver a dead baby.

I want to tell you all something from my heart. There is no tent big enough for me and people who will do that.

I must conclude. Let me just say, it comes down to two questions. Does the Republican Party want our votes, no strings attached; to court us every two years, and then to say, "Don't call me, I'll call you," and never mind about the moral law of the universe? Is that what they want? Is that what the plan is? Is that the way the system works?

And if so, is it going to stay that way? Is this the way it's going to be?

If it is, I'm gone. I'm not trying to threaten anybody, because I don't influence the world - but if I go, I will do everything I can to take as many people with me as possible.

I'm speaking for the Christian Coalition in September, and I plan to say it again, and I may say it over and over and over again. I may take a leave of absence from Focus on the Family to say it.

We've been at the back of the bus for twenty years, and it is time now to stop that.

This is exactly what happened in 1858. It's what happened to the Whig Party. They got out of touch with the moral fiber of the nation. They ignored them. They didn't listen to them. And the whole party disintegrated. The Republican Party was born in the crucible of conviction, and courage, and moral rightness. Righteousness.

That's where the Republican Party started. It took a stand against slavery that cost 600,000 lives in the Civil War. But they knew it was wrong, and they took a stand on it, whether win, lose or draw. That's God's business. They took a stand on what was right.

If the party has left that, and it is now going to mouth these things every two years, and then go on to something else, I think we need to look for another. And it would be tragic if that happened. I don't want that to happen. There are many state houses of government where Republicans will suffer if that happens. It will be a disaster for the country.

Somebody said, "If you do that, you have no voice at all." I don't think we have a voice now. I can't hear the voice.

I came here today to say two things to you. One is to beg you - I beg you, shamelessly, to use your influence on the party at this critical stage of our history.

You have a lot of influence on the party, a lot of your politicians. You have an opportunity to talk to them. They're getting a lot of feedback from the other side, from the Rockefeller Republicans who are giving them a lot of money. They don't hear a lot from us.

I beg you to talk to them about what's at stake here, because they've laid the foundation for a revolt. I don't think they even know it because they're so out of touch with the people I'm talking about.

The other thing I came to say to you - and I really am through - is that there is very good news on the home front. We are winning this battle, despite political leadership.

You saw the poll in the New York Times on abortion. People are coming our way. They're moving this way.

You go back to the late '80s, say in 1986 to '87. No one foresaw that the whole Soviet empire was getting ready to collapse. I didn't read one Sovietologist who said, "This thing is getting ready to blow up." Other than Ronald Reagan, who said that we would transcend Communism, I heard no one say, "This thing is built on sand. This whole thing could come down." No one saw that. No one perceived that the wall was getting ready to fall. But it was a house of cards. It was ready to come down.

I have reason to believe that modern liberalism is also built on the sand. The American people don't go with the National Organization for Women. They don't believe Patricia Ireland speaks for them.

The women in this country don't identify with her. She's noisy. She gets a lot of press, but the American people are not with her.

They have, as they claim, 250,000 members. Goodness. We have five million on our list of names. There's no comparison. The people are not with her.

They're not with the American Civil Liberties Union. They don't believe that crazy nonsense. They're not with People for the American Way. They're not with NARAL. They're not with all these organizations. They're still deeply conservative because there is something written on their hearts that they cannot get away from

If we simply had a moral leader, or a party of moral leadership, who had the courage, like Ronald Reagan did with the Soviets, despite everything the press threw at him for calling it the Evil Empire, if we had people in government who stood up for these things we believe, and didn't dance around and try to apologize, and try to avoid criticism by the press, but went right to the heart of it, "This is right, and I stand on it," we could win this thing. And we could do it fairly quickly, in my view. What we need are people of courage.

I started with a Scripture: I'm going to end with one. I've held you too long, and I'm sorry.

This Scripture in the Old Testament, for me, sums it all up in one verse, sums up where we are now, and where the people have been from this time, 4,000 years ago, to today.

It's all right here. This struggle between Good and Evil. Only two ways of looking at it. God is, or God isn't. He has a standard, or he doesn't. There is right and wrong, or there isn't.

We have a choice. The true pro-choice, and here's what it is, from the 30th chapter of Deuteronomy, the 19th verse. I love this verse.

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

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