Yesterday, Mitt Romney passed his first audition with evangelicals as he gave the commencement speech at Liberty University, a private Christian university founded by Jerry Falwell, who infamously blamed gays, lesbians, feminists, the ACLU and others for the attacks on 9/11. Most of the main stream media reported glowing reviews by, you guessed it, evangelicals. The one newspaper which seemed to to a decent job reporting on the speech was The Christian Science Monitor. The LA Times reported that Romney received three standing ovations, one at the beginning of the speech, one at the end, and another after Romney spoke this line, “Marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman.”
Romney also regurgitated Rick Santorum’s Brookings Institue study line.
The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and, at the foundation, the pre-eminence of the family.
The power of these values is evidenced by a Brookings Institution study that Senator Rick Santorum brought to my attention. For those who graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and marry before they have their first child, the probability that they will be poor is 2%. But, if those things are absent, 76% will be poor. Culture matters.
As fundamental as these principles are, they may become topics of democratic debate. So it is today with the enduring institution of marriage. Marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman.
As Crooks and Liars pointed out back in January, this is cherry picking at its finest. You can go through the presentation pdf by the Brookings Institute yourself, but what Santorum and Romney both did was leave out important parts of the study such as:
- If you are born poor, chances are you will remain poor.
- The middle class is treading water
- The need to improve education at every level
But these types of thoughts don’t jive well with the Repbublican ideology. They’d rather preach to the choir with their empty and hypocritical message on family values.