Tony Perkins
Role at the time: President of the Family Research Council, speaking at the Declaration for Life unveiling
Statement summary
Speaking at the unveiling of the Declaration for Life, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins said the Republican Party had lost its voice on abortion after removing a national abortion ban from its 2024 platform, and praised Hawley for stepping into that vacuum. He said his organisation would circulate the declaration as a standard for candidates to commit to.
“Unfortunately the Republican Party has lost its voice on the life issue and in that vacuum there are leaders that are stepping forward like Sen. Hawley calling upon the church, communities and the country to step up on behalf of the unborn.”
Contemporaneous reporting on the September 16 event, naming Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and the Christian musician Sean Feucht as joining Hawley at the unveiling, and recording Hawley's request that candidates in both parties sign the pledge. The page blocks automated retrieval; its full text was obtained through the Firecrawl index on September 18, 2026, and the same quotations appear in the syndicated version carried by Yahoo News.
Why we used this label
The case's fixed reference point is Hawley's proposition that Congress should ban mifepristone by revoking its federal approval. Perkins endorses both the proposition and the campaign to bind candidates to it, and commits his organisation to enforcing it. The closest competing label is condemns, because the sentence is framed as criticism. That loses because its target is the Republican Party's retreat from the issue, not Hawley's proposal, which he praises; classifying on the emotional tone of the criticism rather than its stated target would reverse the label.