Following are excerpts from the forum last night attended by Republican presidential candidates John McCain, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, Steve Forbes, and Alan Keyes.
MCCAIN: ... I believe that we must begin a dialogue and a discussion on the issue of abortion. Both prolife and prochoice people believe very strongly that we need to eliminate abortion. I and my wife, Cindy, are proud adoptive parents. We need to encourage adoption in America.... We need to improve foster care dramatically in America. We can work together. And my party, which is proud of its prolife position, and I am proud of it, should send the word: We want you in our party.
BAUER: We've got a real disparity in American education right now. Many of the suburbs have a lot of resources that they can use, and they can get better results. But in the inner cities, we've got schools that just aren't working. I believe one of the things we can do to solve that is to provide educational choice for those parents. If we can give low-income parents vouchers, then they can go to that local principal and say, ''You're not teaching our children the math and the science that they're going to need to be competitive in this world.''
HATCH: ... Here are people being killed in our society today because they're not enforcing the law. Parents are afraid to have their kids go to school because they don't know whether those kids are going to be safe in schools. They're worried to death about it, and the reason they are is because 12,000 kids and adults took guns to school in the last two years in violation of law. Guess how many prosecutions by this administration? Thirteen. And I can go down through every law that this administration hasn't enforced over the last number of years. ... I'd pass the Juvenile Justice bill, which has a number of provisions in it that would help to alleviate these problems.
BAUER: ... I was very troubled when the leadership of my party in the Congress got themselves into the box of taking the position that average Americans shouldn't have the right to sue an HMO if it provided inappropriate medical treatment. Now, I'm against big bureaucracy in Washington making health care decisions. I just have an aversion to bureaucrats. But it's not just government bureaucrats. I don't like HMO bureaucrats and insurance company bureaucrats either. And I think we need to level the playing field.
KEYES: ... I believe they should continue to fund these [space] programs. I think we have to remember - and even when we look back at the heritage of the country, when we opened up our frontiers, the Louis and Clark Expedition, so forth and so on, those were not privately funded matters. As a matter of fact, it was considered by our Founders to be one of the important functions of government to explore this great continent. ... I think not only for the sake of this country but for the sake of humanity we need to follow in the inspiring and visionary footsteps of our Founding Fathers.
FORBES: The problem with health care in America is not that we want more health care. As you get older, longevity is not such a bad thing in your eyes. (Laughter.) And yet, to hear these experts talk - that the problem is we want more health care. In a true free society, that demand should be an opportunity. And I have put forth specific proposals to do just that, putting you in charge. Whether it's on Medicare - or if you work for the federal government, you have your choice of hundreds of different health-care plans - you, as a Medicare recipient, should have that kind of choice.
MCCAIN: ... I can't support the legalization of marijuana. Clearly, scientific evidence indicates that the moment that it enters your body, one, it does damage, and second, it can become addictive. And as you say, it is a gateway drug. There is a problem in American with alcohol abuse, and there's no doubt about that. We have to do whatever we can to - prevention, education, and that applies to drugs. too. My friends, we're losing the war on drugs.
KEYES: Well, it seems to me the first thing that we should understand is that we're not dealing with a material problem, we're dealing with a moral problem. When I was born in 1950, we didn't have a huge plethora of laws dealing with all kinds of drug use and abuse, and yet we also did not have an enormous drug problem in this country. The reason that we proliferated the laws is because the fundamental discipline that was prevailing in our society when I was born has broken down. And I think sometimes we get all caught up in discussing what steps we will take to deal with the consequences of this problem; we don't want to deal with the problem. And the problem is very simple: You can't sustain self-government without self-discipline, and the drug problem is a symptom of that.
FORBES: I will hire people who are qualified for the job, people who can do the work at hand; people who are there to get something done, not to make a political statement about a [gay] lifestyle. That's incidental. And so if a person wants a job to make a statement, they're not going to get it. If a person wants a job because they're qualified and have the same principles, the same philosophy, they will be actively considered for it. And in my campaign again, I believe in equal rights for all, special rights for none.
HATCH: I think that worst thing that I've seen in public policy in many years - it's hard to say, because there have been a lot of worst things - but one of the worst things I've seen is the way some of our federal judges have become activists on the bench. They have usurped the powers of the other two branches of government and have started to become super-legislators on the bench in black robes.
MCCAIN: People say that perhaps John McCain gets angry. My friends, I get angry when we spend $350 million on a carrier the Navy doesn't want or need; 500 and some-million dollars on an airplane, a C-130, that the Air Force has said for years they don't need. And meanwhile, my dear friends, we have 12,000 enlisted families, brave young men and women, on food stamps. That's a disgrace! That's an outrage. I am going to fix it as president of the United States, and I promise those men and women in the military that's my first priority.
HATCH: Well, naturally, I favor throwing out the current system and getting rid of this awful IRS code. In fact, if I had my way, we'd get rid of the IRS and come up with the most fair, simple, decent, honorable system we can have. And if I'm president of the United States I'll get the best actuarially sound accountants, attorneys and everybody else who are tax experts to sit down and show us how to do it. Because the flat tax is the thing I worry about, and I'm for it. I'd be happy to have any change that would simplify this code, that would give people a chance to be able to save more of their money, that basically would be simulative to our economy. But I'll tell you something, I worry about a flat tax because I'm on the Senate Finance Committee. And I can tell you - (laughs) - we spend a lot of time just figuring out where all these little things go.
