It was a far-right speech, but it was not without some core conservative truths. Like this one:
Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity. Dependency is a culture-killing drugwe have got to fight it like the poison it is!
Amen. But this is from the party that gave us the Medicare prescription drug benefit. And it's foolish for conservatives not to notice that liberalism has indeed changed since the 1970s. It was a Democratic president who signed welfare reform, remember? You can't run against Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jckson for ever. Then there were some real oddities, e.g. an argument that "tolerance for pornography" leads to illegitimacy. Can you run that logic by me one more time? Then these non-sequiturs:
The development of a child is enhanced by having a mother and father. Such a family is the ideal for the future of the child and for the strength of a nation. I wonder how it is that unelected judges, like some in my state of Massachusetts, are so unaware of this reality, so oblivious to the millennia of recorded history. It is time for the people of America to fortify marriage through constitutional amendment, so that liberal judges cannot continue to attack it!
It is not an "attack" on civil marriage to seek a way for gay people to belong to it. It's an endorsement of marriage! And "liberal judges" did not invent this issue, any more than they can invent the millions of gay people, and hundreds of thousands of gay couples, who seek mere civil equality. The last thing many of us want is an end to traditional marriage. We are one of the few segments of society enthusiastically endorsing it. Was my own marriage an attack on my own family? An assault on my own niece and nephews and in-laws? I wonder how it is that Republican party candidates are so unaware of this reality, so oblivious to the fact of homosexual human beings and the need to find some way to integrate them into their own families and their own society. Romney once knew this. He hasn't forgotten it. He has decided that getting power by appealing to fear is a more promising career option. When that isn't appalling, it's simply sad.