Bob McDonnell

"We are broke, have an unconscionable amount in credit card debt already, and this Inaugural is killing us!"

"Republican policies must aim at the most destructive trend in the family disintegration: the undermining of parental authority through parental abdication and government usurpation. Notwithstanding Democratic rhetoric to the contrary, it is not uncompassionate and anti-family to mandate parental consent for all decisions made by minors in and out of school, and to refuse government aid to those who reject the traditional values of responsibility and accountability. While no government program can make people be good, policies should reward people when they are, and not subsidize them when they are not. For example, every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals and fornicators. The cost of sin should fall on the sinner not the taxpayer. While such thinking may be attacked for lacking political realism in a changing world, it is imperative that government stand firm in support of traditional family values."

"As the family goes, so goes the nation."

"This has been both a heartbreaking and humbling period of time for me and for my family. But what I can control is how I react to things and what I can control is how to make Virginia a better state."

"The vast majority of American children have been educated in the American public school system, in which textbooks and courses of instruction are increasingly oriented to reflect humanist views and a secular philosophy. The undermining of respect for parental authority in favor of state direction or individual autonomy, and the contemporaneous purging of religious influence in the public schools has impaired the development of healthy family members. Values that had historically provided strength to the family, such as firm discipline and corporal punishment, patriotism, and academic achievement, were either attacked, or given token attention."

"The United States Supreme Court dealt among the harshest blows to the American family and traditional morality. A century ago, the Court demonstrated profound respect for the traditional views of marriage and family, stating in Maynard v. Hill that "marriage is the foundation of the family and of society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress." However in 1965 with Griswold v. Connecticut, the court embarked on [a] dualistic path by attempting to create a view of liberty based on radical individualism, while facilitating statist control of select family issues. The Court postulated a new view of marriage by asserting that "preservation of marital privacy" precludes state interference with the right to use contraceptives, even though the state had long been empowered to regulate the legal and sexual relationships of marriage. In Eisenstadt v. Baird the activist Court illogically extended the Griswold notion of "marital privacy" to unmarried persons, at a time when every state in the union made sexual intercourse between unmarried persons a crime."

"In 1973, the Court in the Roe v. Wade decision gave the individual the right to destroy the unborn through abortion, and three years later in Planned Parenthood v. Danforth it extended the supremacy of individual privacy over parental authority in the childs abortion decision. In his seminal article on the Courts role in shaping a national family policy, scholar Peter J. Riga suggests that in Danforth, "marriage is seen as a tenuous union formed by the consensual agreement of the two individuals who remain autonomous and independent throughout the relationship." He further asserts that by the end of the 1970s, the Court had, for all practical purposes, obliterated the difference between marriage and non-marriage, replacing the sacred covental view of marriage with the "positivistic view that a marriage is but an act of the state, which powers the state may delegate in appropriate cricumstances." In other cases, the abuses of the judicial doctrines of "in loco parentis" and "parens patriae," particularly in such areas as education, discipline of children, and child custody, have fostered subversion of the role of the parent in favor of ultimate decisions on family and children matters by the state and federal governments."

"The giftedness of the Republican philosophy is that it embraces the talent and worth of all peoples, while Democrats seek to shepherd a nation of powerless incompetents."

"Professor Henry Holzer of the Brooklyn Law School believes that together the Belle Terre (1974) and Moore (1971) decisions stand for the proposition that it is a collectivist-statist ideology, not a concept of individual rights, that lies at the base of official government thinking about the family. Further, when the Court reviews state definitions of, or intrusions into, the family, "the determinative criterion will be the importance of the state interest involved." Riga concludes that in 15 years of Supreme Court cases ending in 1979, the view of marriage as an indissoluble lifelong commitment had been abandoned. In its wake is the perverted notion of liberty that each individual should be able to live out his sexual life in any way he chooses without interference from the state. The consequences of such thinking have been previously discussed, and ironically create the very problems that society now calls on the federal government to solve."

"In Republican rhetoric and policies on crime and welfare reform, one discerns a view of man as an accountable and responsible moral agent. In their positions on economic growth, Republicans endorse the provision of opportunity, not guarantees, by getting "government out of the way, off the backs of households and entrepreneurs, so the people could take charge." In principle the party has supported a pro-family agenda: religious freedom to include voluntary prayer in public schools; a human life amendment; the appointment of judges at all levels who respect the sanctity of human life and traditional family values; and the right of private property as the cornerstone of liberty."