When voices that defend traditional Judeo-Christian values can be smeared, labeled and dismissed as “hateful” by radical ideologues with impunity, America has turned away from its commitment to free speech.

Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D, is the new executive director of the World Congress of Families who will be hosting their first gathering in the United States this year.

Crouse has dedicated her life’s work to research and policies promoting optimal outcomes for families, women and children.

Dr. Crouse finds it “appalling” that “now only politically correct views can be expressed in the public square. Only people who follow certain prescribed ideology are able to address our colleges and universities.” She worries that “people cannot engage in conversation and exchange ideas, knowing that you share different ideas,” she decried in this exclusive video interview with The Daily Caller.

Once when she was displaying her innately gracious courtesies to an ideological opponent waiting in a media green room with her, the opponent balked and asked, “why are you being friendly to me?” before their on-air battling. Dr. Crouse, taken back, informed the aggrieved that “we are engaging in civil discourse. We’re sharing manners.”

It is “sad to reach a point where manners and civil debate are a thing of the past, where common courtesies are a thing of the past.”

Yet, rhetoric does have consequences, as we saw when the Southern Poverty Law Center framed the nonpartisan Family Research Center as a “hate group.” Tony Perkins, the president of Family Research Council has said, “The Southern Poverty Law Center can no longer say that it is not a source for those bent on committing acts of violence.”

It was what many believe triggered a deranged man to bring a gun and shoot people at their location in August 2012.

When facts, evidence, reason and manners are not welcome in public discourse, America loses. Just as it was discussed in last week’s interview with Kirsten Powers, when elites decide what can and can’t be thought, said or done in public, it is a different America.

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Dr. Crouse is the author of four books, a former head of a think tank in D.C., a former presidential speechwriter, a college professor, and a prolific columnist. By temperament, she is gracious, well-mannered, courteous and meticulous in her pedagogy. Her mission is to speak out, even in a toxic public square, on issues of family, women and children. History tells us what can happen if good people stay silent, she says.

The coming World Congress of Families will be held in Salt Lake City during the last week of October. The early program highlights include: the PianoGuys, Nick Vujicic and Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone among many others.

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