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Alan
Keyes’
Pro-life Advocacy
Faith
and Freedom Foundation
PO Box 1310
Herndon, VA 20172
info@faithandfreedomfoundation.com
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Renewing American Principle Tour
kick-off
Alan Keyes
August 24, 2001
Declaration Foundation event
Thank you very much, thank you.
Praise God, thank you very much.
Good evening! Well first I'd like to say in my formal capacity as Chairman of
the Declaration Foundation, how pleased I am that y'all would come together
this evening and help us kick off this effort. It's gratifying to me to see
so many folks turned out in our support, and it's also been a really great
thrill and pleasure for me to be here on an occasion when we have a chance
and have had a chance to say thank you to so many folks that I deeply admire,
and the people who have made a leadership contribution to the effort to
restore this nation's heart and integrity and get us back onto a track of
principle that will in fact preserve our liberty for generations to come.
That in fact is, of course, the whole aim of the work we do and will continue
to try to do in the years ahead in the Declaration Foundation.
At one level, it's almost a sad comment that we would have to put together a
work aimed at keeping alive our sense of the importance and relevance of
these founding principles. I say it's a sad comment because you would think
that in the natural course of things, a free people would understand that, in
every home and hearth and in every school and in every church and in every
political campaign and on every occasion where we come together to exercise
our judgment as citizens--that would in fact be a living embodiment and
application of the principles that make us free. It ought to be that way, but
it's not any longer. And that's because we live in an age when not only are
the principles of our founding forgotten, those principles are actively
challenged. And everything is being done by certain groups in this country to
try, in hateful fashion, to discredit not only the principles but the founders
themselves who articulated them for us.
I was involved not long ago in something that arose from an effort just like
that, a very good friend of mine who was being assaulted by a group of
individuals. And why--what was his terrible crime? What had he done that had
justified them in attacking him and calling him a man of bad character and
saying that he treacherously betrayed all principles of faith and reason?
Well, he had actually praised Thomas Jefferson and said that he was somebody
worth considering. Think about what it means when we live in an era in
America when somebody's going to stand up and take you to task because you
praised one of the Founding Fathers. It's not only sad, it's ominous.
And the interesting thing to me is that so many times this assault takes the
form of criticizing the Founders for not having somehow waved a magic wand
and abolished the evils which the principle they articulated allow us to
recognize. Don't you think that's kind of ironic? I suppose it's an example
of how "no good deed goes unpunished." And so here you have the
generation that actually set in place, for the first time in human history, a
republic that was founded on principles that recognized the universal claim
of human dignity, and because they could not, with a wave of their magic
wand, rid the world of every evil that had arisen from the principles of
injustice, we must now take them to task and discard those very [founding]
principles.
One of these days somebody's going to wake up and realize how stupid that is,
I think. "Since you guys weren't perfect when you articulated this
truth, we shall now disregard the truth." I wish it were so simple as
that though. I wish it were just a matter of resentment or hurt feelings or
people saying, "Well, Jefferson owned slaves and therefore he couldn't
have been a good guy," and so forth and so on. It's not that, though. It
is actually far more ominous than that, and rather faster than I would have
thought. We are already moving into the era when the crisis of principle is
translating, even as we watch, into the decisions that will determine, for
good or ill, the future of humanity.
I've been thinking a lot about that in recent weeks as I witnessed the long
period of anticipation for the speech that President Bush gave about stem
cell research. Part of me, I have to confess, watched this whole period of
time with a lot of trepidation because the newspeople
kept reporting--I think in ways that the White House folks thought were
suppose to give us a sense of the conscientious application of the
President's mind and judgment to this--and they kept telling us how he was
"agonizing" about it. "Oh, this was a terribly difficult
decision. It was agonizing decision," and he was consulting everybody
and agonizing about it. Every time I heard the word "agonize"--and
they used it a lot, I mean, he must have been in terrible pain to be
agonizing so much about this--but every time I heard the word
"agonize," it would give me a kind of creepy, uncomfortable feeling
because I kept looking at this and I kept thinking, "Well, what's he
agonizing about?"
As I often used to tell people during the course of the late unlamented
presidential campaign when we got into this and that about who stood where on
abortion, and I would look at the audience and say, very simply, look at
this. If somebody comes to you, and, knowing that you're somebody who has a
wealthy grandmother who in her will has left you all of her money and wealth
and everything, and they come to you one day and they say, "I'll kill
your grandma for you if you give me fifty thousand bucks"--now tell me
y'all, what does a decent person do with that suggestion? I mean judging by
what I see sometimes, I suppose there are some folks who think that a decent
person is supposed to hear that proposition and say, "Okay, give me a
little time to think about it." Or I suppose if you're President Bush
you would say, "Well let me go into my library here and agonize for a
while over this decision. Should I kill grandma for the inheritance?"
Now see, you all are snickering. I understand why. You're laughing because
the very idea that if somebody comes to you and proposes that you take an
evil step--if you have to spend a lot of time agonizing about whether or not
you're going to do it and so forth, that's not because you have a hard
decision to make. That's because there's something awfully wrong with your
conscience.
And that also goes to the heart of the principle that was involved in this
particular decision, the question of whether or not one should benefit from
the evil actions of others. Because after all is said and done, if people are
going to go around murdering folks because they're in your way there are a
couple of attitudes you could take toward that. One might be that you just
wake up every day thinking, "Well, I didn't do it but I'm sure glad to
benefit from it." And the other might be that you'd report them to the
police because even though you're enjoying the benefits, you can't stand the
thought of the evil.
We are coming into a time when it's going to be critically important to the
maintenance of our own liberty that we be able to think clearly in terms of
moral principle. A lot of things militate against that for us because we have
gone through so many decades where people have tried to persuade us that
we're a "money people," and we're a "power people," we're
a people that are characterized by our scientific breakthroughs and our
wonderful military establishment and all these sorts of things. They try to
convince us that we're all about success and we're all about "practical
things" and so forth. And you want to know the truth? Look over this
country someday, look at the diversity of our backgrounds, look at all the
races and nations that we represent, look at the differences that we
represent in terms of background and creed. And then try to convince yourself
that somehow or another what brings us together, what makes us one, has to do
with all these material aspects that in point of fact are what define our
differences. When you want to understand who we are, as one people, as one
nation, in spite of all this diversity, there's only one way to do it. And
that is to look past the surface, look past the material things and the
material success, and to look at the beating heart of true principle that
defines the common ground on which we stand in spite of all our
differences--as one nation, understanding our common humanity in terms of
those great principles, in the light of which that humanity was revealed in
history.
It is those principles that we are here this evening both to celebrate and to
promote; the principles that allow us to understand that justice isn't just
for some but for all; that the authority that stands behind the human claim
to dignity is not just a matter of our decision, and convenience, and profit,
and benefit, but that it rests on a transcendent will and judgment on which
we all can rely--but which none of us, however numerous and powerful we may
be, have the right to disregard.
We are a people that can be confident of our future life in freedom only if
we remember that the basis of that freedom is the Will beyond our will, the
Power beyond our power, that our Founders understood to be the Will and Power
of God.
We are in the midst of the crisis that results from so many years when we've
been turning our back on this truth. And we've been listening to those who
offer the siren's song of self-worship to our people, convincing us that
because we've made these and those great truths and we have all this
wonderful wealth and we have triumphed so often against our enemies, that
that's all we need now, we just need that power. And if we can open up new
avenues and vistas of success, then through that science we shall be, as the
serpent promised in the Garden of Eden, as gods. You want to know the
interesting thing, though? That's no longer a kind of abstract speculation,
is it? No. We have folks who are standing right now in the precincts of our
science and they're offering to us this very prize: "And ye shall be as
God." And one of the first things they're trying to tell us is that we
shall now be the creators of life.
I've been trying to be careful in my own speech about a lot of these issues
to avoid the fallacy that is now being promoted in the media discussion of
things like stem cell research when they talk about how the scientists are
"creating" life in the petri dish. I beg
to differ with you. No scientist that I've seen has said, "Let there be
light," and had any results. And that being the case, the fact that they're
able to read in nature the pattern of the Creator's will, and through mimicry
then reproduce in circumstances other than the Creator intended the outcome
foreshadowed in His Will--that doesn't make them the Creator!
It might be engendering life in that petri dish,
but the principle of that life, the Authority that established the laws by
which that life is engendered, is the same authority today that it ever was.
It is not the authority of science, it is not the authority of President
Bush, it is not the authority of Constitution or government. It's the
Authority of God!
We deny that authority, and we are running a risk that goes way beyond the
lives that we are in fact taking when we destroy embryos in the womb or the petri dish or where ever they are. We run a risk that we
shall kill not just that life of cells but the very life and soul of our
republic. That's what's dying, and it's dying at a time when its life is even
more important than it ever was to the future of humanity.
For, one of the things that I think was so important about the founding of
America was that we didn't just see a generation that asserted the right of
the people to rule themselves, that indulged in a lot of rhetoric about the
importance of democracy and all this. We saw that in some other parts of the
world, you saw it in places like France during the French Revolution. The
beautiful thing about the American founding wasn't just that on behalf of the
many, on behalf of the "people," on behalf of the masses, claim to
power was asserted, no. It was that it was done on the basis of a set of
principles . . .
[--SPLIT
IN TAPE--]
. . . That sense, that we live in freedom because we accept an Authority
higher than our own is what I believe has made possible our decent life in
liberty. It is what has made possible the progress in justice, and away from
injustice, that has characterized the history of this country. And the sad
thing is that, as we stand here at the threshold of the 21st century, as we
walk these first steps into the future, we have those who are offering to us
these tempting mimicries of divine power to tell us we can throw off the yoke
of that discipline, that we can stand alone as creators, as gods, unto
ourselves.
But what will the result be? I think we actually saw that result foreshadowed
in this discussion about stem cells. I remember watching one of these
"talking head" programs, and I can't remember whether it was
Senator Hatch or Senator Gordon from Washington state, but they were basing
their position on the fact that you got to treat life engendered in the petri dish in a different way than you treated life
engendered in the womb. When you're grasping at straws to come up with the
basis for your position, you will make all kinds of strange distinctions. And
so, if the embryo comes about in a way that is the consequence of the usual
act of sexual procreation, then, they're claiming, we respect it. But if it
comes about in the petri dish then we don't.
Have you ever thought about the consequences of that distinction? Because the
first thing you should ask yourself is how far are we going to take that? And
one of the sad things is they are now seeing this distinction and saying,
"But, but, you must make sure that if you engender life in the petri dish, you do it ONLY in order to destroy it."
See? So the first thing you have to understand is that if you're going to
engender that life, it must be for the sake of murder! Because if you carry
it beyond a certain point, well, see, that's the danger, isn't it? A person
whose life starts in the petri dish, but who by
some mischance manages to escape the headman's ax and ends up sitting some
day at a dinner like this one--do you think that person is entitled to the
same respect in their dignity that you or I are entitled to?
There's the rub, isn't it? We think that we're debating the fate of some
cells in a petri dish. In fact we may be debating
the misery, the oppression, the enslavement, the manipulation, the
destruction of whole new classes of human beings. And here we sit, looking
back on a history filled with the saga of human oppression and tragedy,
filled with the wars and the conquests and the oppression and the slavery and
the holocaust--how many people went out to die, how many speeches were given,
how many times have we, in this generation and the ones just before, declared
our adamant opposition to all these evil things for the sake of which our
forebears fought and died in war after war after war! And now we stand on the
threshold of a new era in which we are about to give license to science to
create new classes to be oppressed, to create new millions to be destroyed,
to create new races to be enslaved to the whim of some domineering future
people.
This is what we're deciding. It's not just a decision being made about here
and now. We are in the position of those who might have spoken up against the
first enslavement, against the first conquest, against the first domineering
repression of human decency but who instead found some excuse to go along.
And so we have around us now so-called "leaders" who are finding
this excuse--thinking that, because we may not live to see the awful fruits
of our corruption, we shall not be cursed until the last stage of the world
for opening the door to it. But we shall.
What is the antidote to all of this? Well, I think it's pretty simple. I
think that if you simply remember the principles whereby we claim our rights
and dignity, you can see with crystal clarity what are the limits on our
claims to power. The principles that are the basis for our claim to freedom
limit our claim to the abuse of power. It's very simple. And I know this for
a fact because I just sat there thinking to myself during the whole course of
all this "agonizing" Bush was supposedly doing, that if the man would
just sit down and read the Declaration of Independence and think about what
it means, this issue would have been really simple. Because the Declaration
says we're all of us created equal. It doesn't make a distinction between
whether that creation is published in the womb or in the petri
dish. It just said that God's Will determines our dignity, not human action,
not human intervention. In the forgetting of this principle, you open the
door to a plethora of evils. In the remembering of it, you lay the solid
foundation for further human progress but in dignity and in decency and in
honor. I think that that is the real meaning of our gathering tonight.
I can't decide as I contemplate the future that lies in front of us whether
we are at the threshold of a golden age or at the threshold of an age of
darkness and misery such as mankind has never seen. Whether we are at the
doorstep of a time when the blessings that God has showered on our nature
will reveal themselves in "a thousand years of peace and hope and
prosperity," or whether we stand instead at a time when our own corrupt
willingness to disregard the Creator and to put ourselves in His stead will
introduce us to a thousand years of darkness and misery in which our nature
itself will be monstrously distorted and destroyed.
The difference between the darkness and the light could very well for us, as
a people, lie in our willingness to look back in our won history and hold
fast to the torch of principle that our Founders lit for us: the torch that
directed us to a Will beyond our will, that directed us to an understanding
of justice grounded in something other than our own selfish interests and
benefits, and that therefore makes possible a foundation of discipline, and
responsibility, and dignity that we could continue to offer to all our people
and to the world.
How can we assure that that positive force of understanding will do its
saving work in this generation? Well that's the question that, in part, the
Declaration Foundation seeks to answer. What do we do? Well, the first thing
we have to do is to try to make sure that that flame of principle is not
extinguished in the understanding of our young; that they will grow up with
some sense that these are principles that must be known and understood and respected
and applied.
But that can't just be a work of historical renovation. That's necessary, but
you and I both know that the most important instruction for our young comes
not in what we teach them from the history books--however beautifully Richard
[Ferrier] writes them. No, what's really going to teach them the most is how
we apply those principles to the great challenges that we face in our
economic, in our social, in our political, in our scientific, in our moral
lives. If we are no longer willing to accept the limits to our lust, to our
greed, to our hunger for power that are implied in those principles, then
whatever we teach our children from the books, they will learn from us in the
world that there is no constraint, that there is no claim to dignity that
should not be violated for the sake of profit and power. The Declaration
Foundation exists in the hope that if you can renew a sense of knowledge and
understanding, you will at the same time renew a sense of commitment that can
then work itself out in action and decision. Knowing, of course, that in a
society still governed as we are for the time being by its people, if you can
but shape the judgment and conscience and heart of the people, then you will
have done what is necessary, most necessary, to reform the practices and the
laws.
It is to this task that we invite your attention and support this evening.
It's not, I guess, quite as immediate or urgent as it might be if I was
standing up here and saying, "Go vote for this one," or "Let's
storm the bastions of the Legislature and pass this or that bill," no.
Because there are some things that we have to do that go beyond the elections
of the moment, that go beyond the choices of today, that are about how well
we are preparing--not the moments of the present, but the whole future on
which our country depends.
We have a chance, if we are willing to grasp it, to have an influence on that
whole future, right here tonight. We have a chance, if we are willing to
grasp it, to make sure that this nation will remain in the 21st century what
it was in the 20th: a great reserve for decency, a great resource in those
darkest moments when it looks as if the evil will triumph, but when the
reserve of righteousness that remains in the American heart is still there to
help renew and save our world. That's what has happened. Will it happen
still?
I think that if we simply look at what's going on in the councils of our
leadership these days we might not be very sanguine about the future. But if
we're willing to look into our own hearts and, based on our own commitment to
the things that we know to be the truth, to those things that we know to be
the real sources of our nation's strength--if we are willing to act on that
commitment then we here tonight will make the difference. We will guarantee
that there will be more Rick Greens and Colleen Parros--that
they will come forward in all the places and all the communities and all the
times when they are needed, because we have taken pains to guarantee that the
principles of heart and mind that in the end make it possible to shape the
character of such leaders will still be there amongst our people.
That's what the Declaration Foundation is about, the understanding that this
nation, like the bodies we ourselves enjoy, will not die so long as the soul
still lives within it. And the Declaration principles--they are the soul of
America. And like our own soul, they depend in the end on our willingness to
hold fast to the truth and glory of our God.
If we can keep our nation secured in the acknowledgement of that One Source
of true and living power, then, I believe, we will be able to face the
difficulties and confusion of this present age, and walk into the sunlight of
a better age--secure in the knowledge that this nation will still represent
its light of freedom, will still offer its hope of dignity and decency to all
the world. God bless you.
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