Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has shaped his life, but he barely mentioned it as he spoke to graduates at an evangelical university Saturday.
And he hardly touched on hot-button social issues like abortion and gay marriage, instead offering a broad-based defense of values like family and hard work.
"Culture â€" what you believe, what you value, how you live â€" matters," Romney told graduates gathered in the football stadium on Liberty University's campus in the Virginia mountains. "The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and at the foundation, the preeminence of the family."
Instead of a red-meat conservative policy speech, Romney discussed his own family and offered a defense of Christianity, saying that "there is no greater force for good in the nation than Christian conscience in action." Still, he was inclusive: "Men and women of every faith, and good people with none at all, sincerely strive to do right and lead a purpose-driven life," Romney said.
AP
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney delivers the commencement address at the Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va, Saturday, May 12, 2012. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Close He had one sustained applause line in a 20-minute speech delivered days after President Barack Obama historically embraced gay marriage. "Marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman," Romney said to a cheering crowd of students who have to follow a strict code of conduct that considers sex out of wedlock and homosexuality to be sins.
On Saturday, Obama was not seeking to revisit the issue of gay marriage. In his weekly radio and Internet address, the president didn't mention his history-making endorsement. Instead, he repeated his call for congressional lawmakers to take up a "to-do list" of tax breaks, mortgage relief and other initiatives that he insists will create jobs and help middle-class families struggling in the sluggish economy.
Having spent part of the week on the West Coast raising money for his re-election effort, Obama appeared in the Rose Garden of the White House to honor award-winning law enforcement officers.
It was Obama's first joint appearance with Vice President Joe Biden after Biden, according to aides, apologized to the president for pushing gay marriage to the forefront of the presidential campaign and inadvertently pressuring Obama to declare his support for same-sex unions.
Obama and Biden were all smiles as they walked to the sun-splashed ceremony together. Introducing Obama, Biden credited the president's commitment to law enforcement and the two quickly embraced before Obama spoke.
The late Rev. Jerry Falwell founded Liberty University in 1971 to be for evangelical Christians "what Notre Dame is to young Catholics and Brigham Young is to young Mormons," as his son, University Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr., said on commencement day. It's become a destination for Republican politicians looking to speak to the religious right, and Romney's campaign team â€" planning the speech long before gay marriage became a central issue â€" viewed it as an opportunity to address the kind of socially conservative audience that had been wary of him during the prolonged GOP primary fight.
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