Press Conference:
Before I spoke to a massive audience during CPAC's 2012 conference, I spoke to a small group of conservatives in one of the side rooms about reforming our entitlement system and encouraging poor communities to adopt the free market system.
I mentioned that although the black community attends church more regularly than any other community in America, those values expressed in their lives are absent because the community has experienced a disturbing breakdown. This breakdown is directly attributed to the growth of the welfare state. When government grows, socialism and secularism grow.
As we began the war on poverty, we saw an increase in sexual promiscuity. For example, in the early 1960s, 70 percent of black children were raised by a married mother and a father in the same home.
Today that figure is reversed. Today, 70 percent of black children are raised by a single parent.
This is a cause for concern because when a child is raised in a single-family household, one of the first lessons he or she learns is that commitment is not valued.
Without valuing commitment, children don't commit to their studies, to society or to relationships. So as liberals have engineered society, they've perpetuated the breakdown of the black community, and increasingly other communities, and there's no end in sight as government grows.
Please take a few moments to watch my speech and, as always, I'd love to know what you think.
Your foot-soldier for freedom,
Abortion? Right move is crisis counseling, birthPlanned Parenthood, which rakes in hundreds of millions in the abortion business, actively discourages women from going to crisis pregnancy centers. (comments)
Mark Sanford, welcome back to WashingtonThe irony does not drip but pours forth like a tsunami when liberals start talking about morality and ethics. (comments)
Planned Parenthood targets black womenBlack Americans are bearing the brunt of the cost of a nation that has lost its moral rudder as a result of wantonly legal and available abortion. (comments)
How abortion changed AmericaAs our reverence for life has diminished, so has our reverence for the institutions that surround and support it. (comments)
Philadelphia abortion doctor isn't an exceptionNational pro-life leaders were demonstrating outside Kermit Gosnell's abortion center as early as February 2011. (comments)
Ben Carson endures predictable liberal assaultCarson, through diligence and traditional values, achieved on his own what trillions of dollars of government programs were supposed to deliver. (comments)
Reject Gang of 8's immigration reform dealEmployment set-asides designated for unskilled foreign workers, with wage levels determined by the government, are nothing but a stick in the eye to competing low-wage workers in the American market. (comments)
School voucher ruling supports religious freedomThe purge of religion and traditional values from our public schools has produced a new generation of with values different from those of their parents and grandparents. (comments)
Detroit's financial debacle holds lessonsIf we are going to save our cities, we need to get back to what built them in the first place: Freedom, enterprise and entrepreneurship. (comments)
Let Israel trip open President Obama's eyesI saw a once-barren land -- a land once described by Mark Twain as "a desolate country ... a silent and mournful expanse" -- now fruitful and ripe. (comments)
Will gun-sale background checks really help?No gun-sale background check could have prevented the Sandy Hook tragedy. (comments)
More GOP governors drink Medicaid Kool-AidMedicaid is a pure welfare program. (comments)
Preserve gun rights, save black livesGun control initiatives mask the issues that really need attention. (comments)
Ben Carson owes no apology for honest talkAt the National Prayer Breakfast, Ben Carson reminds us that religious ritual devoid of content is pointless and destructive. (comments)
Does the Republican Party have a future?No matter how hard you squint and try to discern the values of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass in those now wielding the money and power at the top of the party, they've disappeared. (comments)
Push for gun control misplaces blameWhy are the president and Feinstein so ready to compromise basic American freedoms with gun control measures to solve a problem that Obama acknowledges we don't understand? (comments)
Overreliance on entitlements harms U.S.It is no accident that as the American welfare state grew, the American family collapsed. (comments)
Are MLK's Christian values welcome today?What was once understood as religion and tradition is now called bigotry and pushed off the stage. (comments)
Roe v. Wade, 40 years laterAn ultrasound picture, showing the growing and moving fetus, has raised awareness that this unborn child is alive and that abortion is murder. (comments)
U.S. fiscal policy is detached from realityEconomic growth happens when success and risk taking is rewarded and sloth and failure is not. (comments)