Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) talked to Family Research Council president Tony Perkins at a recent FRC summit where Perkins asked the congressman how he viewed the increase in turnout of evangelical voters in the Republican presidential primaries. The congressman, who also chairs the conservative Republican Study Committee, said that the energy among conservative Republican voters this election year is a generational moment that he compared to the Biblical account of Esther delivering the Jews of Persia from genocide, the Founders defeating King George III, the Union Army in the Civil War ending slavery, and the Greatest Generation overcoming the Great Depression and battling the Nazis.
Jordan: There is an anxiousness that American feel about their country, they think there is just something not right and they feel this anxiousness, they know there are real concerns, a real change in direction, a real change from what we view and value of what America has always been so you are seeing people of faith step forward and participate in a big way, which is exactly what we want to see happen. I love the example of the teenage girl, and everyone in this audience knows this story but it’s so important to think about this, the teenage girl who saved her people and the best line in that narrative is when her relative said to her ‘Esther, maybe the only reason you’re at where you’re at is for such a time as this,’ and I think Americans get that, I think Christians get that, they understand, this is a critical time.
John Fund, I heard him give a speech and it’s interesting, and it kind of parallels what Senator Blunt said, he said it’s every third generation that has to do something big in this country. He started with the Founders who put it on the line, lost their lives and many of them lost their business, we remember Franklin, Jefferson and Adams but most of them lost everything, and then it was three generations later when we had this evil of slavery that Americans said ‘we will get rid of this and we will keep the union together,’ three generations later those people in America at that time said we can deal with the Great Depression and we can deal with the evils of Nazism in the Second [World] War and we can with that. And they did it. Now here we are three generations later and it is our turn. It is our turn to do what Esther did way back when, it is our turn to do what they did at the founding, and at the Civil War and at the Second War, it is our turn.
After likening anti-Obama Republicans to such esteemed people, he also told Perkins that the Left is leading an “attack” on the family in order to topple society at large:
Perkins: I think that as I see it the threat is so great because whether the issue is life, whether it’s marriage, whether it’s family, it all hinges on our freedom of religion and our ability to transfer the values that we gained from that faith to our children and to future generations and that seems to be exactly what they are zeroing in on.
Jordan: It’s that and I would also add it’s an attack on the key institution of our culture, the institution that ultimately in my judgment determines the strength of the entire society and it’s the name that you have, Family Research [Council], so it’s an attack on that institution, the family. When you think about it, the first institution that the good Lord put together wasn’t the church, wasn’t the state, it was the family. So if you believe in big government as the answer, sometimes not in a direct way but in an indirect way, sometimes it’s direct even, there is an attack on that fundamental institution, that building block institution to a healthy culture so that’s why you see the Left so adamant about going after family, the bill to school your kids at home, the bill to have school choice, and a host of other things where it’s manifest, but it’s an attack on that key institution.
