On Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily, Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America, talked about her recent homecoming trip to Liberty University and how it gave her a chance to talk with a large number of evangelical women about their feelings about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
“They fell pretty neatly into three camps,” she said. “The first camp I’ll call the Beth Moore camp, the camp that just are so turned off by the things they’ve seen, the Access Hollywood tapes, they can’t take it. And often there’s things in their personal lives that they are just so hurt and offended by what they’ve seen that they just can’t go there.”
“Then there’s the other group. There’s the group that I will call the Burke Mom group,” she continued. “I named this after a Bible study that I was speaking to in Burke, Virginia, in which a home-school mom helpfully suggested that perhaps they should hand out barf bags, and I quote, to people after they vote, so they can go do what they need to do, and then if they feel like they need to throw up, they’re taken care of.”
“And then, there was the third group, and those are the Die Hards. These are women who could care less. They are not looking for a husband, or they’re not looking for a pastor, and they’re certainly not looking for a friend. They want someone who will swim the Washington moat with a knife in their teeth, and that’s what they see Trump as doing,” Nance concluded.
“The last two groups will be voting for Trump, and they’re sticking by him. And I would say that makes up the majority, I think, of evangelical women, as I’m talking to different people. They may not like him, or they may love him, but they’re gonna stick by him, and they’re gonna vote,” she predicted. “And let me just say the first group, the Beth Moore group, are still voting down-ballot, so it gives me hope for these Senate races as things unfold.”
Nance and SiriusXM host Alex Marlow looked back to previous campaigns in which conservatives held their noses (or, as Ann Coulter humorously suggested in 2008, got drunk) and voted for GOP Establishment candidates with whom they were not entirely happy. For many Republican voters, the flaws in their own candidate paled beside the threat of a Democrat victory.
Likewise, Nance said many women view the 2016 election as a “binary choice, and rightfully so, and they recognize they really only have two choices, and they don’t want Hillary Clinton.”
“That’s why you’re seeing the race tighten. You’re seeing people coming back to reality, setting emotion aside and saying, ‘I don’t like it, but I’m going to hold my nose, and this is how I’m going to vote,’” she said.
“But I will say there’s something that I’m concerned about,” she told Marlow, “and I want to talk about this more after the election. And that is this division within the Church. We’re seeing Christians – just last night, I was looking on Facebook on the Liberty page, the way people were coming after each other, it’s just wrong. At the end of the day, there needs to be unity within the body of Christ, as a believer, and we have to give each other room for conscience.”
Nance said she would not participate in such vicious infighting, granting that Beth Moore has “reasons for the way she feels; she’s been through a lot,” and those experiences inform her refusal to support Trump for president.
“At the same time, I’m voting without emotion here,” Nance said of her own perspective. “I’m voting purely with my head, and I’m voting based on what I know is going to happen. There’s between one and four Supreme Court justices, there’s about five hundred lower court judges, and 5,000 leaders that are governmental appointees who make huge decisions.”
She cited transgender bathroom directives and changes to Obamacare employer mandates, as examples of the huge, society-changing decisions made by such appointees.
“My husband I and were just discussing that. That’s devastating for churches,” she said of the employer mandates. “How do you have someone running your youth group? Now you can’t afford them. You can’t pay them overtime. There’s serious issues that affect the lives of the church and religious freedoms. You’re forced to bake the cake. Can you practice your faith just inside the walls of the church, or can you live it out in every area of your life? The government is getting between us and our ability to do what we believe, and frankly I think it’s gonna get worse under a Hillary Clinton administration.”
Marlow brought Ann Coulter into the conversation again, citing her recent column “Our New Country – Women and Minorities Hit Hardest,” in which she argues that “minorities and women are the ones who stand to suffer the most from another Democratic administration.”
Nance agreed with Coulter’s point, beginning with “moral issues” like abortion, which “not only ends the life of the baby, but it harms the soul, and sometimes the body, of the mother. There’s one dead and one wounded, walking away.”
“But I also can talk about just the pocketbook issues,” she continued. “We have seen the devastation – there has not been the recovery that there should have been. The African American community has suffered so much under this. Minorities have certainly suffered.”
“Even at CWA’s budget, these new directives blow our budget, and so we have to think it through, whether or not I can keep all of my employees,” she elaborated. “We’re a non-profit organization, we have to live within our means, within the money that our donors give us. Businesses have to do the same. And so it’s often that lower-level employee that has to go, and now doesn’t have a job.”
“We want to herd everyone on to Medicaid and onto the welfare rolls, food stamps? Is that really the answer?” Nance asked. “No, a job is the answer. Work is meaningful. It is redemptive. And what is important is we grow the economy, and we uncuff the ability for the free market to roar back to life and to be able to innovate. We reduce regulations so there can be new entrances to the market.”
“And honestly, when we talk about the system being rigged, there’s this collusion I believe between big companies that can afford all the lawyers, and can jump through all the hoops of regulation in order to make money, and in order to be able to thrive – and then there’s the little guy who can’t afford to do that, so can never compete, can never get into the market,” she added. “All of this, and there’s other things we could talk about, at the end of the day, keep us stuck, and keep people from being able to grow their businesses and offer new jobs, and give their employees better salaries, and be able to do better.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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