Monday, August 09, 2004
Alan Keyes is making sense
. . . as the Illinois Republican Party’s candidate for the Senate race against Barack Obama. No, really: finally the people of the great state of Illinois will have a devout believer and master logician fighting to represent them, not just some skinny kid with a funny name. Take for example the question of the homosexual agenda and how to stop it. Other conservatives may talk casually about men having sex with dogs and box turtles, but only Alan Keyes will perform the actual intellectual labor involved in proving that gay and lesbian Americans have the moral status of children:
Now, given that that’s the basic difference between the distinction between adults and children, and that it involves the ability to deal responsibly with the impulses of passion, let us say we accept the premise of the homosexual movement-- that premise being that we treat homosexuality and other sexual inclinations like race, and based on that treatment, we assume that individuals cannot govern their impulses and inclinations.
Well, if an individual who is thirty years old cannot govern their impulses and inclinations, somebody tell me what is the difference for that purpose between that individual and a child. There is none, because the basis for making that distinction has to do precisely with that ability, maturely and responsibly, to deal one’s impulses and inclinations.
So if we accept the premise that no matter how old you are when a sexual feeling comes over you, you are pulled into a whirlpool of inclination and condition that, like race, is ineluctable, that “must be the way it’s gonna be,” then for the purposes of that particular passion, in this case sexual passion, you’re a child. You’re a child at ten, you’re a child at twenty, you’re a child at thirty, you’re a child at seventy-- because if, in fact, you do not have that fundamental ability, in light of rational and moral and ethical standards, in light even of your own purposes, rationally, to respond to the impulses that you are subject to, then you are no better off than a child, and your consent and your inclination has no different quality that than of a child.
Now, the reason I make this point is so we’ll think through the implication of this agenda, because if we accept the agenda, you do understand then that the line between adulthood and childhood for sexual purposes is erased. Accept this premise, and you cannot sustain it.
Therefore, and furthermore ergo, Keyes, who has thought and thought hard for decades now about the implication of this agenda, has come to the conclusion that gays and lesbians are uniquely dangerous children-- the kind who threaten the innocence of our children:
What is the implication for this society, for the entire social contract or compact on which it rests, if the government takes steps that withdraw its support for the privileges without which the marriage-based heterosexual family cannot be sustained? At that point the government will have betrayed its compact with the people.
So, I think it obviously has to be thought through carefully-- not just in terms of its individual consequence, but, in terms of what happens when we have so defined our understanding of human sexual passion, purposes, and of human nature itself, that we take sexual behavior out of the realm of moral judgment and accountability and put it instead in a realm like race, where you are not responsible for what you do.
And I think that to do that will ultimately mean, what? The demise of all these institutions: the protection of our children’s innocence, the ground cut out from under it; the expectation of fidelity in marriage, the ground cut out from under it; the restriction of marriage, by the way, to marriage between one person and another person instead of between one person and several people.
But wait, candidate Keyes hasn’t even started to make sense yet. A propos and quondam non propter hoc, homosexuals will destroy individualism and establish tyranny:
And of course, there are people, I guess, who don’t care about this. But I believe they are people who, therefore, do not understand the interconnections between our social institutions and their consequences. Destroy the heterosexual marriage-based family, destroy the notion of family as marriage between one person and another person, and you re-introduce in our society those things which have, throughout human history, been the premises of tyranny, not of freedom.
And if we then allow the social institutions of tyranny and despotism to prevail, what makes us think we will be able to sustain the individualism and the spirit of liberty without which self-government cannot survive?
He’s got a point there, you know-- once the social institutions of tyranny and despotism prevail, it’s really hard to sustain individualism and liberty. So maybe all you Nathan Lane and Martina Navratilova fans should think carefully through the implications before you go around destroying the very foundations of freedom.
For the entire speech, “Against Civil Unions and the Homosexual Agenda,” delivered in April 2000 in Vermont, go here-- and then feel free to root around in the incomparable Alan Keyes archives and send some stuff to the Obama campaign just in case Illinois Democrats decide to take this clown seriously. You know, the way the mass media do.