What Is the Heart and Soul of the U.S. Constitution?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is that the American family is “the spiritual heart and soul that animates [the] Constitution” (Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation). According to an article written by Jacob Adams a journalism fellow at The Daily Signal, Roberts spoke Tuesday at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. and explained that the American family “has grown weak, fractured, and hollow.” Adams reported the following about Roberts’ speech. 

The president of The Heritage Foundation says America’s Founders couldn’t possibly have foreseen what he called the regrettably “weak, fractured, and hollow” state of the family today and offered some prescriptions on what should be done about it….

Roberts, a historian who has served as the president of The Heritage Foundation since December 2021, explained how the median age for marriage for men and women has risen by many years since 1776. He also cited the dramatic decline of marriage and birth rates in the country.

“Since the 1970s, Americans have consistently said their ideal family size is about two-and-a-half children. But reality has fallen short. Financial pressures, cultural hostility to marriage, and the erosion of hope have opened a tragic gap between the families that Americans desire and the families they believe they can achieve,” he said….

The Heritage leader noted that Pat Buchanan, a longtime conservative stalwart and former presidential candidate, had predicted the state of American affairs many years before.

Buchanan observed as far back as 2001 that many Americans had seen their God dethroned, their culture defiled, their values polluted, their country assaulted, and themselves demonized as extremists and bigots for holding on to beliefs Americans had held for generations, Roberts said.

The Heritage president said that emphasis on restoring the American family was key to determining what policies to support.

“We must do intentionally what the Founders did instinctively, stake our future on virtuous and ordinary mothers and fathers as conservatives,” Roberts declared.

“Will [the policy] advance the common good of the American people? Will it cultivate the virtues without which liberty cannot endure? If the answer is ‘no,’ even if the proposal aligns with some past ideological commitment, prudence requires that we reject it,” he continued.

Roberts concluded by describing the importance of long-term thinking – not just in decades but in centuries.

“Can we have the courage to plant oak trees whose shade we will never sit in? Can we labor to build cathedrals whose spires we will never see completed? And will we embrace the sacrifices necessary to make America’s next 250 years greater than her first?” he asked.