To: Friends & Supporters
From: Gary L. Bauer
"Obama The Liberated Liberal"
That's how one left-wing British newspaper described President Barack Obama after yesterday's inaugural address. Obama's second inaugural address was not much different than his standard campaign stump speech, just delivered on a grander stage.
But don't take my word for it. The Washingon Post's David Ignatius panned the speech as "flat, partisan and surprisingly pedestrian." Just days after a leak that his speech would be about uniting America, we got a speech that seemed designed to divide us and to condemn conservatives to the fringes of American political life.
Twisting Self-Evident Truths
Obama's speech relied heavily on the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
This is the fundamental idea of America's founding. It is a profoundly moral idea. Abraham Lincoln relied on that paragraph to make the moral case that one man cannot own another. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., built his entire life's work on that paragraph, declaring it America's "promissory note" and arguing that its promise was still incomplete. He begged for an America where the color of a man's skin was irrelevant. The only thing that should matter was the content of a person's character.
King began his quest for civil rights for black Americans at a time when by every measure the injustice of racism was obvious for all to see -- separate water fountains, unequal schools, etc. Barack Hussein Obama's election is a testament to how far we have come.
How jarring and strange it was to hear Obama cite this same central statement of our Founders, used by Lincoln and King to overcome slavery and racism, to redefine the institution of marriage. Obama said:
Barack Obama made history by being the first president to promote homosexual rights twice in an inaugural address. Does he seriously believe that in a nation that is wrestling with moral decay, runaway debt, broken families and a coarsening culture, men "marrying" men is the issue of our age?
In vast segments of America, minority children are suffering because they have no fathers. The young mothers trying to raise them alone have little prospects. Their streets are unsafe. Their schools are controlled by special interest unions more interested in their own benefits than in academic results. But for Obama, sanctifying sodomy is the challenge of our time.
Still Waging Class Warfare
The inaugural message was also heavy on the class warfare that Obama seems to instinctively gravitate towards. He complained that the "shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it." Obama said he believed that "America's prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class."
But recent policies of higher taxes, more regulations and bigger government have resulted in an "unprecedented period of economic stagnation." And more government spending isn't the solution. We are spending the equivalent of $60,000 a year per poor person on welfare programs. A substantial portion of that money ends up in the coffers of left-wing pressure groups or in the pockets of federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
A lot of families in our inner cities are successful. They are almost always two-parent families. The president could have declared war on the gangs making their streets unsafe. He could have taken on the teachers' unions that are failing our children. He could have challenged the failure of young men and women to form families.
But he did not. No, to many on the left like the Occupy Wall Street crowd, it's not the gangs, irresponsible unions or the breakdown of the family that are responsible for the plight of our inner cities or those struggling in poverty. It's the "shrinking few who are doing well," who still aren't paying their fair, who are to blame.
The War On Carbon
The signal was clear. President Obama is going back to the idea that manmade activity helps to determine what the climate is, even though science tells us that the climate regularly changes in cycles. But the left sees another opportunity to grow the government and transfer wealth, to punish the successful while frightening people into believing that the earth is doomed unless they follow big government, socialist policies.
Again, don't take my word for it. Here's how the New York Times described the failed cap and trade tax scheme back in 2009: "Since companies would pass their costs on to customers, Mr. Obama would have the government use most of the revenues for relief to families to offset higher utility bills and related expenses."
"Most of the revenues" amounted to more than 90% of what the government expected to raise from new carbon taxes. Clearly, cap and trade was nothing more than a vehicle for redistributing wealth. Congress, already bogged down at the time with Obamacare and facing strong conservative opposition, abandoned cap and trade then. President Obama intends to make it a centerpiece of his second term agenda now.
The Power Of Our Potential
Today is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court decision based on the same misguided philosophy as Dred Scott -- that some humans are not "people" with rights we are bound to respect. There is considerable irony that the first president of color, a supposed constitutional scholar no less, refuses to see this.
But I have confidence that the day is coming when every child will be welcomed into the world and protected under the law. The abortion-rights movement has spent the last 40 years trying to "normalize" abortion, and it is only now acknowledging the failure of those efforts. You can read more about this in my latest Human Events column.
I also hope you will take a moment to watch a brief video produced by American Values celebrating the potential of each life. Please share it with friends and family members. Tweet it and post it to your Facebook page.