Monday, May 12, 2008
Alan Keyes and other religious radicals are preventing the Republican Party from attaining its rightful place as America's majority party.
Feb 7, 2000 | A summary moment occurred during the primary in New Hampshire, with interesting omens for the Republican future. The primary itself was a contest pitting the party's two viable presidential candidates against the three amigos of its parochial right. Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes have never been elected to any political office (Keyes has actually been trounced twice), but that has not prevented them from considering it their moral prerogative to launch nonexistent political careers by running for the highest office in the land.
"There will be no abortion on demand in a Gary Bauer administration," Gary Bauer has pompously promised. What administration can he be thinking of? He has never had the slightest chance of gaining the party's nomination or of winning any truly contested federal office in any electoral district in the entire United States. Nor has Keyes or Forbes.
But thanks to the absurdities of the primary process, all of them have the opportunity to pretend that they represent an important constituency in the Republican Party. Democrats and their fan club in the nation's press are happy, of course, to collude in this pretense while enjoying a spectacle that confirms their every cherished prejudice against their conservative opponents.
The summary event I mentioned took place during a debate in the New Hampshire contest, moderated by Tim Russert. It was a moment when the redoubtable Keyes -- a preacher without a church -- stepped forward to call Sen. McCain to judgment. McCain's mortal sin was to reveal that he had been to a rock concert with his 15-year-old daughter and had liked a band called Nine Inch Nails.
Unfortunately, Nine Inch Nails is a heavy metal group whose cacophonies are spiked with four-letter words. McCain's inept bid to join the popular culture was reminiscent of other failed Republican efforts, as when Ronald Reagan's staff tried to appropriate a song by Bruce Springsteen as its campaign theme back in the '80s, whereupon Springsteen threatened to sue. The Reagan team had neglected to note that the rock star was so far over the left cliff he thought the communists were the heroes in Vietnam and Republicans the aggressors.
In New Hampshire, McCain's misstep allowed Keyes to turn his lamp of righteousness on his hapless opponent.
Keyes (sternly): Don't you think that as leaders we ought to be a little bit more serious about the kind of influences that are now destroying the lives of our children, instead of aiding and abetting the cultural murder that is taking place?
McCain (to Russert): Can I get a life-line? (laughter)
Russert: Who do you want to call?
McCain: My 15-year-old daughter. (laughter)
Keyes (glowering): I'm a father and I've got to tell you -- I'm not laughing.
It was as if Keyes had caught the senator making whoopie with the Antichrist.
Many people, especially on the left, find Alan Keyes funny. One Maureen Dowd column suggested that Keyes sounds like Marvin the Martian. Others have been less kind. "Hectoring megalomaniac," "shrill fanatic," "paranoid egoist," "Harold Stassen on steroids" -- these are labels that stick easily to the frenetic moralist.
And no wonder. At various stops along the primary trail, Keyes has referred to the U.S. government and George Bush as "massa," compared abortion and taxes to slavery, and accused the media of "racism" for not taking his candidacy as seriously as Keyes himself does. In these puerile outbursts, Keyes actually achieved something remarkable -- a racial mugging delivered by a religious conservative reminiscent of the Sharpton left.
I do not find Alan Keyes particularly funny. I find him angry, hysterical and mean-spirited -- which is pretty much a voter's-eye view. All that keeps Keyes from attaining Sharptonesque proportions as a public menace is his political irrelevance. Unlike Sharpton, Keyes has no following of resentful radicals and hate-whitey blacks that is large enough to affect the direction of his party or, given the right circumstances, provoke mayhem in the streets.
Keyes' audience does contain a cohort of moral zealots, but his main constituency consists of pale-faced conservatives so desperate for a black face to defend them against radical attacks that they don't seem to appreciate the way in which their candidate himself is a radical.
In Bedford, N.H., Keyes spoke about abortion to a group of 10- and 11-year-olds in a manner more suited to an Act-Up missionary than a conservative presidential contender. "Now tell me something," he said to the children. "If I were to lose my mind right now and pick one of you up and bash your head against the floor and kill you, would that be right?"
"No," the children answered.
Keyes then turned to a 10-year-old girl. "Do you think it was OK to kill you when you were 1 year old, or 6 months old?" When she shook her head no to that question too, he said: "You sure? Because we live in a country right now where according to some of our courts and some of our politicians, it is OK."
But if Alan Keyes thinks that abortion at any stage of the gestation process is the same as bashing out the brains of a 10-year-old, why is he being such a hypocrite about it? Why isn't he calling for the execution of the million-plus women who had abortions last year? Not to mention the men who impregnated them and went along with their decisions? If the issue of abortion is more complicated than that, why doesn't he get off his moral high horse and stop pretending that he has all the answers straight from his source on high?
According to Keyes, America is experiencing the most serious "moral crisis" in its history and there is no more important issue in the political campaign than getting the American people's morals right. The country needs a president, he says, "who votes conscience and principle and nothing else." Yet, out of the other side of his mouth he concedes he would be ready to compromise and permit abortions to save the life of the mother or in cases of incest or rape, as a practical matter (since the votes aren't there).
If abortion is murder, however, how can these exceptions be anything but the cheap political double-talk that elsewhere Keyes condemns? Is a mother's life more valuable than her child's? Is the child of a rape any less human, because of the manner of its conception? Is the child of incest any less deserving of the right to life?
Because most pro-life conservatives embrace the mother, rape and incest exceptions, they are involved in the same kind of moral tangle, a moral tangle that underscores the rhetorical excesses of spokesmen like Keyes. The very complexity of the moral issue is an argument for taking it out of the political debate, to which conservatives should be especially sensitive. Complex personal issues like abortion are properly confronted in the private sphere, where families and religious communities can address them, without bureaucratic interference. There are no simple answers to these issues, except perhaps that government is the institution least likely to be able to "solve" them.
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