Michael Knowles visited CPAC this year and gave a speech regarding the national identity crisis he sees playing out in current events. What follows are excerpts:

The decline of religion in America has eroded our identity at every level — from national politics all the way down to the basic unit of society: the family. Marriage, after all, is nothing other than a symbol of God’s love for his people. It’s no wonder, then, that many people today don’t even know what marriage is. Many people today seem to think that marriage can be whatever we want it to be. …

[Liberals] think they’re gods, who can create the world anew through the power of their words. But they aren’t and they can’t. They can’t really turn men into women. They can’t really turn a couple of men, or a couple of women — or three men and a billy goat, for that matter — into a marriage.

That’s just not what marriage is. No disrespect intended to anyone. Some people don’t want to get married. Okay, there’s no obligation. Marriage is not for everyone. But marriage has a meaning. Marriage is and always has been the union of a man and a woman ordered toward the procreation and education of children. If you don’t like that, don’t blame me. I didn’t make the rules. It wasn’t the mean old conservatives who invented marriage. Marriage is a natural institution. It just is what it is. …

We aren’t God and increasingly we aren’t free. We’re less free today than we’ve ever been in this country. Because there’s no such thing as freedom without limits. Everything in this life comes with a tradeoff. It comes at a cost. People gain the “freedom” to get rid of babies they don’t want; the cost is that babies lose the freedom to live. Men gain the freedom to use the women’s bathroom; women lose the freedom to have their own bathrooms. Foreigners gain the freedom to enter our country as they please; Americans lose the freedom to make our own laws. Drug addicts gain the “freedom” to shoot fentanyl on the sidewalk; citizens lose the “freedom” to walk their sidewalks in safety and peace. …

The “freedom” the liberals promise is liberation from all limits: liberation from borders, from laws, standards, norms, family — even from biology. It’s a false freedom — a siren song. To liberate a nation from its borders is to erase the nation. To liberate a people from its family and its laws and customs is to erase the people. To liberate a man from his body is to kill the man.

True freedom is not the license to languish alone in ever-stranger fantasies but rather the right to flourish — all of us together — in reality.

Daily Wire subscribers can read the whole thing here.