Quotes from the Conservative Principles PAC Conference

On Saturday, March 26th, the Conservative Principles Political Action Committee held a day-long conference in Des Moines, Iowa. Featuring prominent conservative figures such as Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachman, and Rep. Steve King, as well as representatives of right-wing organizations such as the National Organization for Marriage, Family Research Council, and Susan B. Anthony List, the gathering was infused with conservative themes. For your edification, below are a few quotes from the Conservative Principles PAC conference. (To watch C-SPAN's video recording of the event, click here.)

First, at the 7:00 mark, Conservative Principles PAC founder Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) told a story about a bill he submitted as a freshman state representative in 1997. King emphasized the role of God in the actions of the founding fathers, as well as his belief in "Judeo-Christianity" as a source of U.S. strength.

I was reading through [the Code of Iowa] and I came to the education chapter in the Code of Iowa, and . . . it said "each child in Iowa shall receive a global, non-sexist, multicultural education." That'd be all the accredited schools in the state. The parochial schools too would have to teach the global education, the non-sexist education, and multiculturalism. Well, you know I haven't actually been a fan of any of those things.


And so I took out a pink bill draft request form and I wrote "write a bill to strike all that language out of there." . . . Then I thought, you know what though, if I just strike the language out that requires the global, non-sexist, and multicultural education, then they'll just accuse me of being an "againster" He's just against things. He doesn't have anything proactive that he can offer. And so . . . I wrote a bill to replace it. Strike out this language about globalism, nonsexist, and multiculturalism, and replace it with this: "Each child in Iowa shall be taught that the United States of America, of which Iowa is a vital, constituent part, is the unchallenged greatest nation in the world, and we derive our strength from Judeo-Christianity, western civilization, and free enterprise capitalism."


. . . The next morning I went and sat in the house chambers and every Democrat had their light on. They wanted to talk. Every one of them. And I'm sitting there, this innocent babe, and one would get up and say, "Steve King introduced this bill. You can't believe what he did! The audacity to say that America's the unchallenged greatest nation in the world! what arrogance to think such a thing! And he wants to get rid of multiculturalism! How evil can that be?" They took turns beating on me . . . and I'm sitting there thinking, wait a minute, what is all this hyperventilation about? Aren't these things true? And I'll go further. I believe that God guided our founding fathers. I believe he moved them around like men on a chessboard to shape this nation.

Next, at the 2:31:05 mark, NOM president Brian Brown discouraged opponents of same-sex marriage from scaling back their efforts.

The bad news is that regardless of all this evidence, all of the empirical data that shows that the people of this country still understand that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, elites -- many of these Democrats, but some Republican -- think that somehow we should throw in the towel on marriage issues. And don't be deceived. Truce essentially means unilateral disarmament. That's what truce means. The other side is not calling for a truce. They're working in our schools, they're working in our legislatures to redefine marriage. We have to stand up and protect it.

At the 2:56:38 mark, Emmett McGroarty, the Preserve Innocence Initiative Director of the American Principles Project, fumed at alleged liberal "indoctrination" in schools. After caricaturing liberal views, McGroarty included jabs at environmentalism in his speech as well.

I want to address the youth issue. A lot of that disaffection I think rises from the education they're getting. It rises from the bias and indoctrination that is going on in the schools and the classrooms. It's not just on social issues. It's on economic issues. The liberal viewpoint is that humans are not inherently creative. That's the elitist viewpoint, that you have a couple of really creative people in the ivory towers and corporate boardrooms, and they're going to tell us what to do and how we should live our lives . . . It's different from capitalism, which the premise is people get together and create things. And they infect our children with this. They infect it through environmentalism, radical environmentalism, which looks at the world as a set of finite resources, and it means that people ... have to struggle, compete for those resources. It's not an expanding pie, which it is in the capitalist mentality. So this is something we really have to buckle down on.

Finally, at the 5:39:25 mark, Jan Mickelson of WHO AM Radio in Des Moines accused President Obama of dropping reference to God in the Declaration of Independence, calling it "deliberate" and "evil."

It's interesting that President Obama has left out "equally endowed by our creator" several times now from the rights clause of the Declaration of Independence, even as he has been told several times that he is in error. Therefore, this is not an accident, this is not an oversight. It's deliberate, it's purposeful, it's evil.

For additional news and commentary on the Conservative Principles PAC Conference, visit the following links.

NPR: Conservative Conference Brings GOP Hopefuls to Iowa

Politico: Rick Santorum Nixes Steve King's Conservative Principles Conference After Family Emergency

Huffington Post: GOP Hopefuls Begin Long Slog To 2012 In Iowa At Steve King Event