Burgess Owens at CPAC: 'When you take God out of the equation, destruction is what’s left'
During a discussion on the American Left’s efforts to dismantle the nuclear family at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a retired NFL player turned congressman warned that “when you take God out of the equation, destruction is what’s left.”
Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah, made the comments Saturday at a CPAC panel moderated by Mary Vought, the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund and wife of Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration.
The other participants for the panel titled, "In the Left's Own Words: 'Disrupting the Nuclear Family,'" were former NFL player turned White House employee Jack Brewer, Fox News contributor and former Democrat Leo Terrell, and the CEO of Young Americans Against Socialism Morgan Zegers.
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“Our panel today is going to focus on how the Left hates the nuclear family and, in their own words, how they’re attempting to destroy it,” Vought said. As an example, she mentioned the attempt to replace the word “breastfeeding” with “chestfeeding” to be “inclusive to those biological males that are transgendering.” Doing so “devalues the role of biological women and … it is an attempt to destroy our very unique, God-given role in a family,” she asserted.
Owens, an African American who grew up in Florida in the 1960s, recalled how in the black community at the time, “education, faith, the free market, and the family — everything was about that.”
“We led our country in the '60s in the growth of the middle class,” he said, contending that the economic success that once defined the African American community has “been turned upside down.” Owens pleaded with the audience to not “let the hard Left do to our country what it did to my great community.”
The freshman congressman explained how the American Left reversed the progress that African Americans were making in the economy. He asserted that this reversal of progress was the logical result of what happens when “you take away manhood, you take away the idea of what men are supposed to do, which is to sacrifice everything for their family, their wife, and their name.”
“The reason why our country’s such a unique country is because of the foundation of … Judeo-Christian values that allow us to see each other … inside out versus outside in,” he added. “The left wants to … devalue womanhood, devalue manhood, destroy our kids because when you take God out of the equation, destruction is what’s left and that’s all they have right now.”
Brewer talked about his experience visiting inner-city schools where he saw “kids who can’t read and write” and “mothers who have no clue how to raise their kids,” adding, “We don’t have a problem with our children in America. We have a problem with our parents.”
The former football player urged conservatives to take a more active role in improving the well-being of inner-city youth: “The Bible teaches us to go out and serve our neighbors, the Bible commands us to do that. It tells us, right in scripture, right in James 1:27, ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God the Father is this, to serve the orphan and the widow.”
After stressing that the biblical command to “serve the orphan and the window” applied in a spiritual sense as well as a physical sense, he argued that “We have to get back to putting God into our schools, God back into our families, but more importantly, as Christians, we got to break out of our own bubbles.”
“The family unit is one of the most important values in this country, the mother, the father that makes us a great nation,” Terrell proclaimed. “American values include the nuclear family, the nuclear family believes in conservative values.”
“I had a mother and father who fundamentally felt that it was their obligation to improve our quality of life by making sure I had a better quality of life as well, by going to school,” he said. According to Terrell, the Left wants “to destroy the family unit and make everyone dependent on the government.”
“They attack any nature of the family unit, no mom in the house, no father in the house, let the government do everything,” Terrell said. “That’s what we have to fight against it.”
Zegers slammed those on the far Left for telling people not to get married and have children because they might die in a climate apocalypse. “They are removing every aspect of natural happiness, fulfillment and purpose in our lives and they are creating this soulless, empty society.” She maintained that the Left has even admitted that “they need to end the nuclear family in order to pass a collectivist, socialist agenda.”
Circling back to Vought’s earlier comments on the push to refer to breastfeeding as “chestfeeding,” Zegers pushed back on the idea that “pregnancy is a tool of oppression.” She warned of the Left’s desire to create a “surrogacy system by the government so that women do not have to bear their own children.”
Later, Brewer called the Equality Act the “Sodom and Gomorrah Declaration,” slamming the push to allow children to pick their gender, as 70% of babies in the African American community are born out-of-wedlock and many are “broken and lost and don’t know how to find their way anyway.”
He contended that the country is facing a “spiritual battle” where children without guidance are being told “that they can pick their gender, boys can be girls and girls can be boys.”
“We’re influencing women not to need men and we’re influencing our boys to be soft,” Brewer remarked as the crowd erupted into applause. “Christ Jesus was not a soft man.”
“Are we going to establish our truth through the Word of God? Or are we going to establish through the desires of man?” he asked.
Brewer also mentioned the importance of fathers, noting that children are 20 times more likely to go to prison if they are fatherless and that “71% of all the kids that drop out of school are fatherless.”
