While the Reform Party Platform is silent on what have come to be called the social, cultural and moral issues, I do not believe presidential candidates can remain silent.  For most Americans today believe their country, in moral terms, is headed in the wrong direction; and these issues define who we are, what we believe, and what we stand for as a people.  Moreover, social and moral decline and cultural decadence go hand in hand with the death of republics and the end of empires.

In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt declared: "Our concerns, thank God, are only with material things."  America's concerns today are less with the material than the moral.  Though we are the envy of mankind in medicine, science, technology, prosperity, and power, how we are using our unprecedented freedom does not command the respect of millions of our own people, or much of the world.

In three decades, almost forty million unborn children have been aborted in America, scores of thousands by the horrifying procedure of "partial birth abortion," in which a baby is stabbed to death in the final moment before it sees the light of day.  Incredibly, a U.S. Supreme Court has given its blessing to this act of barbarism.  When one reflects that German doctors were executed after World War II for having participated in Hitler's euthanasia program, what does this say about us as a nation?

The family, the institution ordained by god for the procreation of children and human happiness, bedrock institution of any good society, is under assault and crumbling.  Rampant homosexuality, a sign of cultural decadence and moral decline from Rome to Weimar, is celebrated, as our First Lady parades up Fifth Avenue to share her "pride" in a lifestyle ruinous to body and soul alike.

Our popular culture once supported the values of faith, family and country, and related the stories of America's history and heroes.  Today, that popular culture is as polluted as was Love Canal.  Movies, plays, books, TV, magazines, museums, all feature the vulgar, the profane, the blasphemous, the salacious.  No one can escape it.  Societies abroad that once looked to America as a moral teacher now try to shelter their young from our X-rated exports.

In order to love one's country, said Burke, one's country ought to be lovely.  Wealth, power and prosperity we have in abundance, but is America still the lovely country our parents gave to us?  America's heroes whom schoolchildren were taught to revere -- Columbus, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lee, Lincoln --- are maligned as hypocrites or exemplars of an execrable time.  Schools are renamed, flags dishonored, statues vandalized.  it was Ronald Reagan who said: "If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are...I am warning of the eradication of...the American memory, that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."

The God to whom American leaders once offered prayers of gratitude for His blessings on our country has been purged from our public schools.  and even the most jaded must see something amiss in a nation where steel, auto, and textile plants close down, while porn sites on the Internet explode, gambling houses rake in record profits, and abortions replace tonsil removals as America's most common medical procedure.

No one political leader can reverse these indicators of social decline.  But a President can put himself in the vanguard of those who wish to make America God's Country; to do so, however, he will have to stand up to an establishment which considers much of the above to be milestones of progress.

The Democratic Party does not even perceive a moral crisis, while the Republicans slip silently out of the Camp of Life to seek a separate peace with the Log Cabin Club.  A party with its ear to the ground and its eyes fixed on the polls -- with its motto "Above all, avoid controversy" -- will never take a stand in the cultural and moral struggle of our time.  So, let me tell you where I stand, and what I will do.

1. Only pro-life conservatives and constitutionalists will be nominated to the Supreme Court.  The revolution imposed by the Warren Court and its successors will be rolled back by Congress and the President, as it should in a democratic republic.  The court's power will be circumscribed, as provided for in Article III, and by amendment.  We will use the powers in the Constitution to restore the people's Constitution.  Term limits will be imposed on all federal judges, and the era of judicial dictatorship will end.

2. Taxpayer funding of abortions and fetal tissue research will be ended and Mr. Clinton's anti-life executive orders overturned.  Planned Parenthood and UNFPA will not receive another dime from the Treasury.  Americans who belive that abortion stops a beating heart should not be forced to pay for acts they consider shameful and abhorrent.

3. Government has shown itself more proficient in breaking up families than in building them.  Hence, all proposals for changing U.S. social policy should carry a family impact statement.  All tax reform plans will be vetted to guarantee that they solidify families and give mothers  the option of spending their children's infant years with them in the home.

4. Every American, whatever his or her sexual orientation, is entitled to the same constitutional rights.  Hatred of, or derision for, men and women for an orientation they did not choose is wrong.  Violence against these individuals must be condemned and punished; and everyone's contributions to our country and society appreciated.

However, that does not mean that public homosexuals merit designation as a protected class under civil rights laws.  Nor can a good society enshrine in law the falsehood that a homosexual union is the moral equivalent of traditional marriage.  All men are sinners and all need to be tolerant of the failings of others; but there must zero tolerance of falsehoods in the moral realm, just as there is in the scientific realm.

In a Buchanan administration, homosexuality will again be incompatible with military service; and the armed forces will cease to be used as laboratories for experiments in living by the Clinton School of Social Research.

5. War is a horrible but sometimes necessary evil, its purpose: to kill as many of the enemy as necessary to impose one's will.  It is a brutal, dirty, dehumanizing business in which women and children should remain non-combatants.  Thus, American women will be exempt from military service, except as volunteers; they will be kept out of combat as they have been throughout our history, and they will be provided with separate barracks and training facilities.  A country that sends its women out to defend it is a country not worth defending.

6. Mr. Truman called the presidency "preeminently a place of moral leadership."  I will put the moral authority of the office behind the causes of life, family, and country, and support a rule of law based on a moral order that is rooted in Biblical truth and the laws written by God on the human heart.

"America was a good country before she was a great country," DeTocqueville reportedly said, "and if she ceases to be good, she will cease to be great."  Our fear is that America, the greatest nation on earth, is becoming less and less a good country.  High among the purposes of this campaign is to build a party that will set about making America a godly nation again.