- MUST READS
- PRODUCTS
- RESOURCES
- MULTIMEDIA
- ENFACTLOPEDIA
- FSM AUTHORS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
- FSM BLOG
- DONATE
- PRESS COVERAGE
SEARCH FSM
- IN THIS SECTION
September 16, 2008
Gov. Sarah Palin and the Left's Religious Bias
Editor’s note: This is a transcript from a speech given by Speaker Newt Gingrich at the Family Research Council's Values Voters summit.
SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: Gosh, thank you all very much for being here. I am delighted and I am honored to be back with you once again. And I want to take my limited time today and focus in on – I couldn’t imagine a better moment for you to be here than after last night’s stunningly distorted interview with Governor Palin on ABC – stunningly distorted because of one particular set of questions, which I want to spend my time explaining and putting in context.
I don’t know how many of you have seen either the original interview or excerpts since. But there is a point where Charlie Gibson asks Governor Palin about whether or not she believed that our soldiers were on a task from God. And he quoted one-fourth of something she had said in her church. He quoted, quote, “our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.”
Now, the rest of the quote – this is the full quote from the June 8th, 2008 Assembly of God at the Pentecostal Church – quote, “Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending U.S. soldiers out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan.”
Now, as Governor Palin tried to explain to Mr. Gibson last night, she was paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln. But you could tell from the look on Gibson’s face that the idea was just beyond him. And I want to take a minute or two because I want to put in context how bad things have gotten in the elite media and how utterly alien from historic traditional American culture some elements of the elite media are. And I will let you decide for yourself as you watch them which people accurately fit this.
But there is a secular – at a minimum, skeptical to religion, at a maximum, overtly hostile to religion – bias in the mainstream media. And let me tell you why this is so dramatically different. As many of you know, I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Rediscovering God in America, which carried you through Washington as a walking tour and showed you from the Declaration of Independence, which says we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, and ultimately carried you all the way through the whole city showing you again and again how our monuments relate to a deep belief in God.
And then last year, Callista and I made a film called Rediscovering God in America working with David Bossey and Citizens United. And in doing it, we came across several quotes. And the reason the film was kind of nice is you are not taking my word for it. Now, I didn’t come today prepared to show you the film. But I did come prepared to quote some of the quotes where we actually have on tape. So I am only going to use people who have lived in the age of radio and television.
And I am only going to use liberal Democrats because I want to show you how dramatic the change has been in the last 30 to 40 years from a common culture rooted in the Declaration of Independence, based on a belief that our rights come from God, based on the idea that of course our leaders should be praying, of course our leaders should be worried about exactly – not whether God is for us, but whether we are trying to understand what God wants – fundamental difference.
Now, I want to take just two leaders – President John F. Kennedy, arguably the leading icon of modern liberal Democrats, at least in terms of their version of him, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, without question, the most powerful, the most successful Democratic president in the 20th century, the father in many ways of modern liberalism, and an extraordinary figure. I want you to listen to their words and then go back to Governor Palin’s words.
In his inaugural on January 20th, 1961, President Kennedy said, “finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, all of us have the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth, God's work must truly be our own.” Now, can you imagine today if Governor Palin simply went around quoting President Kennedy how confused the elite media would be?
Second, President Kennedy. “The world is very different now, and yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe – the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.”
Now, the reason this matters so much and the reason I am urging all of you to go back home reinspired by Governor Palin, reirritated by Charlie Gibson – (laughter) – and to say to every school board in America and every state legislature in America it is time to teach American history accurately.
Let’s have every child in America learn in elementary school that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights.
And then let’s actually have them wrestle in school with the question: What did the founding fathers mean by our creator?
And there is zero doubt, as you will see both in our movie and our book – they meant God. It is inconceivable they meant anything else. And it takes somebody who is a tenured faculty member at Harvard or Berkeley to figure out that they meant anything except God.
And then maybe by middle school, we could have them actually read Lincoln’s second inaugural, which while you are here in town, if you get a chance, go to the Lincoln Memorial, stand there, and read out loud – it is only 703 words, the shortest – actually it is not the shortest. It is the second shortest inaugural address. March of 1865, Lincoln, who has been in the pressure cooker of the Civil War, has seen a war which killed 620,000 young Americans in a country of only 50-some million people. And in 703 words, Lincoln refers to God 14 times and quotes the Bible twice.
And I challenge any college in America and any high school in America to figure out how you are going to explain Abraham Lincoln without having people read that and understand this man read the Bible every afternoon in agony because he knew what he was doing was causing enormous human suffering. And he believed desperately that he had to find a justification and a cause which would bring the country together, and which to this day we remember from things like the Gettysburg Address. But read that sometime and ask yourself, how can you possibly describe the American Civil War and not encounter the real Abraham Lincoln?
Now, let me go back to things we have on tape, which is post-Lincoln, of course. And let me go back to our good friends, the liberals. The greatest Democratic president of the 20th century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected four times. When our young men are landing at Normandy, and I recently had the opportunity to do some filming at Pointe du Hoc, where President Reagan in 1984 gave that brilliant speech about the boys of Pointe du Hoc where our rangers landed.
We landed 157,000 allied troops on D-Day. It was the great crisis of the war. President Reagan – I mean, President Roosevelt went on national radio at 10:00 that night and led the country in six-and-a-half minutes of prayer, asked American to join him in prayer and pray. He didn’t just say God bless America and do some civic culture thing to make us feel bonded together without having to think. He said at one point in the prayer that friends had asked him to call for a national day of prayer. And he said no. This war is going to be too hard. I want every one of you to pray every day until the war is over. Every day should be a national day of prayer.
Now, think about where that is compared to –
Now, this is the opening of that prayer and I just want you to remember this is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat. “Almighty God” – and this is, by the way, available. You can go to newt.org, my personal site, or you can go to the FDR Library at Hyde Part site, and you can actually listen to this. And last year, we had over 1500 stations that ran this on the 6th of June. It would be great for some of you to get your local radio station on D-Day, the 6th of June, to just run this once that day. It has a huge effect on people here because Roosevelt had such a great radio voice.
He said to start the prayer, “Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.”
Now, I will let you decide whether what Governor Palin was saying was in a great tradition of John F. Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But notice, he describes this as a war between our religion, our civilization, and later he talks about evil. And he said, by the way, routinely – this is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, liberal Democrat – that this was a war between, quote, “our Christian civilization and barbarism.” Now, I just want you to place that there because after all, in the modern world, anybody who would say anything like that would spend the following six weeks being attacked in the elite media over and over again.
Roosevelt went on to say, “these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home. Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.”
Now, in terms of what Gibson was asking, Franklin Delano Roosevelt believed American troops were fighting for the cause of civilization, of justice, of freedom. And he believed they were fighting as quote, “Thy heroic servants,” that is, the servants of God. Now, think about how different that is from a modern left which will not even allow ROTC on the Columbia University campus. Fundamental difference.
Sometime in the 1960s, the left – the hard left went sour and they became less and less part of the American historic tradition. And they represented an increasingly secular and an increasingly anti-religious tradition. And to be candid, they find Governor Palin quite horrifying because she actually believes in God, she actually believes in family, she actually has five children, and she actually is a conservative. And that combination to them is literally inconceivable.
It is as though John McCain had gone to Mars and brought back an alien in terms of their world.
I want to go back to Governor Palin’s quote in her talk on June 8th and point out something that I think none of our friends on the left understand because she doesn’t assert that we are always right. And she doesn’t assert that we should be arrogant. She does just the opposite. She says – this is her opening. “Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right.” Think about the difference. She is not saying they are perfect. She is not saying they always achieve. But she does believe that most of the time, American men and women in uniform try to do the right thing.
Well, maybe it is a sign I am too much of a conservative or I am too much of a historian. But you know the truth is if you look at the history of human warfare, we have a pretty darn good record of trying to do the right thing.
I want to mention one other topic where I think the gap is so big and the elite media will try to disguise it so decisively. And that is the topic of life. Governor Palin has made several difficult choices. And I suspect by the values of virtually every person in this room, they have been the right choices.
She knew that her youngest child would probably be born with Down syndrome. And she decided that she would love him and cherish him and raise him. And that was a heroic choice. And sadly, for many of our elites, it was the wrong choice. That is why the Democratic chairman of South Carolina could say her only qualification for vice president is that she did not have an abortion.
Now, that was two days ago, and I thought it was sick. It wasn’t quite as sick as the Democrat from Tennessee who stood on the floor of the U.S. House and implied that the right comparison for Senator Obama was Jesus Christ, and the right comparison for Governor Palin was Pontius Pilate. That was truly sick. But it tells you how rattled they are.
And then Governor Palin was faced with a challenge in her own family – a challenge, by the way, which many families have had, and many families have lived with, and many families have grown up with. And every one of you, I will bet, could search somewhere in our extended network of relatives and friends and see people who have made these decisions.
Now, that will be characterized by the elites as a hard right intolerant position. And they will desperately – frankly, they are faced with the great crisis of their movement. Governor Palin violates every norm they have. She is tough.
She is tough. She is smart. She is articulate. She is happy.
She has five kids. She has a very hardworking husband who is a union member.
She is an NRA life member.
She actually goes to church and prays.
I mean, the list just gets worse.
She negotiated with big oil, got a really good deal for Alaska, and gave it back as a $1300-a-person tax cut.
If you see that much money leaving bureaucracy and going to people, you know as a liberal there is something really dangerous about this woman. So they look at her, and she poses – this is the threat. And you all need to understand what the next seven weeks are going to be like. She poses two enormous threats to the left. The first is existential. If a person that I just described can survive as a national figure, she has shattered the ability of left-wing feminists to define legitimate behavior by women in America and they will never recover.
But there is a second threat. Up until Thursday a week ago when Senator Obama went out on the Britney Spears production stage – (laughter) – that is what it was in a Greek temple. It was a Britney Spears production stage done by Britney Spears’ production company. It is the weirdest thing I ever saw. They were really mad because the McCain people ran a commercial that had Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. And they then hired Britney Spears’ production company to do the – (laughter) – I mean, how can you be mad when it is accurate?
But if you go back and read that speech – as of that night, Senator Obama was sort of confident. He thought he knew what Senator McCain was going to do. He thought he knew it was going to be a traditional Republican ticket that looked like a traditional Republican ticket. And he thought he was going to get away with the great mistake of his career, which was the failure to pick Hillary Clinton.
Now, why is that mistake? I know many of you probably would never vote for Hillary. She got 18 million votes, okay? Biden got 9,000.
Now, that means Senator Clinton got 2,000 voters for every vote Biden got. (Laughter.) And had he picked her, had he shown that he was strong enough to have both Bill and Hillary with him without being intimidated – (laughter) – I think that he probably would have had a ticket that would have been very, very, very hard for us to beat. But he didn’t do that. He flinched. And when he flinched – remember, this is the candidate of change. This is the candidate of a new politics. This is a candidate who is going to change Washington. He picked instead of Senator Clinton, he picked a U.S. senator who was elected when Sarah Palin was nine – (laughter, applause) – and who has spent 35 years riding Amtrak from Wilmington to Washington.
That means that Joe Biden’s entire travel career is less than from Anchorage to Fairbanks.
Sarah Palin has had an entire state. He has had a railroad car. (Laughter.) You decide who has had more experience.
And what John McCain did the next day – you know, Thursday night, Obama is at what he thinks is the peak of his experience. He is really ready. He knows exactly the campaign he is going to run. He knows exactly what McCain is going to do.
The next day, McCain changes the entire game. And by the way, on this experience thing, just remember there are – the state of Alaska has an $11 billion annual budget with 29,000 full- and part-time employees. A U.S. Senate office has a $4.2 million budget with 60 employees. So if you want to start getting into who has done what –
In addition, let me put it a step further. If you want to talk about experience, Governor Palin, as the commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard, has spent two days in Kuwait and Iraq, and Senator Obama has spent five. So his massive experience is three extra days.
Let’s just understand here. They have got themselves into a fight. So they have both an existential, ideological reason to want to destroy Governor Palin, and they have a very practical campaign reason, which is she is now more interesting on college campuses on Obama. She is more of a change agent than Obama.
And the contrast between a mother of five raising all five children and the Obama defense of infanticide by abortion doctors and the legislature in Illinois is such an enormous gap that I believe when every American understands that Senator Obama and the state legislature blocked a bill to require abortion doctors to help babies if they were born alive and blocked the bill after a nurse talked about holding a baby for 45 minutes while it was dying because the doctor wouldn’t help. I think the gap in these two views – he has got about 15 percent of the country. And the other 85 percent is going to find it totally, utterly unacceptable.
Two quick closing comments. You have been very generous with your time. One, on September 27th, we are going to have our second annual Solutions Day at American Solutions. We are going to deal with energy, education, the economy, and health. We are going to launch a new movie that day called “We Have the Power.” Callista and I have done it. It is a terrific film that shows you we both – we have the power as citizens to make our government not be stupid. And we have the power as a country to not have an energy crisis. We would love to have you be involved. It is going to be available on the Internet. It is going to be available on dish television, on DirecTV. I think you will find it interesting.
We have a book coming out in two weeks called “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less.” It takes all of the different ideas about energy from hydrogen, to wind, to solar, to clean coal, to nuclear, to biofuels, to oil and natural gas. And it shows you we are – we have the most energy of any country in the world. We have more coal than Russia. We have more solar power than Russia. You look at the totality. It has taken a remarkably stupid series of government policies to cause the current problem. And we have a chance to change it.
Lastly, we need more leadership. I am delighted to be here today. What you are doing, the action efforts you undertake are really, really important. I am delighted to have a chance to come and to be with you to share these ideas. And I just want to let you know that one of my close friends and associates, Rick Tyler, is working to develop an entire leadership program working on action items on things like making sure that every child in every school in America learns about real American history. And if Rick and I can be of any help, we really want to work with you.
Thank you very, very much.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Newt Gingrich is the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and author of "Winning the Future." Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (0)
| Print This E-mail This |
|
