Alan Keyes
June 16, 1995

Moderator: Ambassador Alan Keyes is the writer of a weekly nationally distributed column on current affairs and host of the Alan Keyes Show, "America's Wake-Up Call," a nationally syndicated call-in talk show. During Ronald Reagan's presidency, Alan Keyes was ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and later served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. Following government service, he was president of Citizens Against Government Waste, and founder of Citizens Against Government Waste's National Taxpayer's Action Day. He served as Interim President of Alabama A&M University. He's been twice nominated for the United States Senate in Maryland, and Ambassador Keyes is author of "Masters of the Dream: The Strength And Betrayal of Black America." He's also appeared on ABC's "Nightline," NBC's "Today Show," the CBS Morning News, PBS's "McNeil/Lehrer Report," and CNN's "Larry King Live." He was born in New York City, and he's married to Jocelyn Keyes, and their children are Francis, and Maya, and Andrew.

Right now, I'd like you to join me in welcoming Ambassador Alan Keyes.

[applause]

Alan Keyes: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

It is customary to tell everybody that you're glad to be here. I say that more to this audience than I might to some, but more than anything else, I don't know if I'm so glad to be here as I am glad that you are here. Because of what I think you represent for this country's future. I wouldn't be really so glad that you are here, if I wasn't so apprehensive about the country's future. And I want to talk about those two things a little bit, not so much because I'm going to tell you anything you don't already know, but because I think that every now and again, having somebody else tell you what you already know will perhaps give you a greater heart for what you know you have to do.

The first side of what we have to look at is not so pleasant, is it? And that is America today. And I'm not one of these people who generally deals in pessimism, and I'm not saying what I'm about to say because I think that pessimism is necessarily warranted. But I do know that if you look at the general state and condition of this country right now, there is every reason to believe that if we keep going the way that we are going, in the course of my lifetime, which is to say a generation down the road, the republic as we know it in this country will be gone. And we will no longer be able to claim that the people of the United States are a free people in a free land, having successfully passed on the heritage of freedom to their children.

Now I've got to tell you, I make that statement with a lot of anguish. Because, as you can see, I come from a people in America who haven't been at the table of freedom for all that long. And the thought that we are just now able to sit down and enjoy the meal in full recognition and equality, it looks like the roof's going to cave in on the whole operation--this is not a thought that I care for one bit. I don't care for it when I look at my children and consider the world in which their children are likely to grow up. But we have got to face the facts.

Since the 1960s, in this country, at least--though starting in intellectual and spiritual circles rather before the 1960s--has been engaged in a dangerous experiment. We've been engaged in an experiment that has been tried, I must tell you, by other countries in the past, other civilizations in the past. It is the experiment of living in a state that denies all of your basic principles, all of your of your moral values all of your most precious institutions. We have been living with the belief that we could throw away the rule book. That we could disregard those things which have been common sense, not only in free countries, but all countries for several thousand years. And that we were going to get away with it.

We thought that we could disregard the sexual rules, and we could disregard the importance of the basic family structure, and we could disregard the sense that there does in fact have to be a sense of discipline and self-government that goes hand-in-hand freedom and liberty. We thought we could do without it. And we had some rather fancy intellects putting together books telling us it was going to be all right, too. People in the social sciences and people in the biological sciences--there to offer us the belief that we didn't need any of the guides that had in fact been the foundations of this nation's life.

I want you to consider for a moment--I know you already have--what the consequences of these beliefs have been in the last twenty or thirty years. I want you to consider the state of America's families and the state of America's children and the state of America's cities. And I want you to consider the state of America's government. I want you to consider the fact that today we have in this country the worst crisis we have ever seen in the most basic and essential institution of our nation's life. We have children growing up more and more in broken families and absent-father families. In some communities, like the black community, already in a state of total collapse, only 36% of the children being raised in two-parent homes. In the community at large today, the illegitimacy rate right now touches 30%--and is where the rate was in the black community when Pat Moynihan looked out over the landscape and declared "a tangle of pathologies and a major crisis that threatened collapse."

And where does it all come from? We live in schools where children are afraid of each other and teachers are afraid to teach. And people live in cities where the rising tide of urban violence in fact makes them prisoner in their own neighborhoods and on their own streets, living in fear of the stray bullet that will cut short their lives. This is the America we have to face today.

And as if the reality weren't bad enough, we then have to put up with the "projected reality" in the media, and the journalism, and the afternoon talk shows--where we not only have to know that that depravity is out there, we have to watch as people worship that depravity, and try to pretend that there is no essential difference between those who try to live a life of decent principle and those who have thrown away every decent principle in order to indulge every indecent passion! This is the country we are living in.

Now, I've got to say that there are some people in this country who look at all of that, and they go into a state of denial, I guess, I don't know what it is. I considered that when I was watching--if you don't mind a little semi-partisan byword here, I was watching the 1992 elections. When Bill Clinton had his famous slogan, "it's the economy, stupid"--remember that slogan? "It's the economy, stupid." I guess they think people bought that in 1992. It seems to me in 1994 people had wakened a little bit, because they actually had firsthand experience at what somebody like that would offer. And it turned out that finally and at long last, the American people have begun to wake up. They have begun to realize that in this nation where we have indeed mastered the business of how we deal with the money and put together the businesses, and so forth and so on, we've got all the complicated stuff down pat. We can put together the big banking systems and the great corporations. We can build the huge rockets that send off into space. We have mastered the science and the technology.

The sad truth is that we've only forgotten the most simple and essential things. We have forgotten how we teach our children to respect themselves and each other, and to grow up to be decent mothers and fathers in a state that acknowledges sexual responsibility and its ties to parenting. [applause] We have forgotten. We have forgotten. We have forgotten apparently even how to teach them to discriminate between what is right and what is wrong.

I saw the appalling statistic yesterday in the newspaper. They did another survey among so-called high achievers in the government schools, seventy-eight of whom acknowledged that they had cheated in the course of their--seventy-eight percent! You know what this means? I don't even want to contemplate it.

So you see, we've got all the complicated stuff right. But the simple and most essential things are all going wrong. And I believe we know why. And it's not because we don't know what to do with the money. It is because we have come to a state of moral incompetence. We have come to a state of moral helplessness. We have come to such a state that even that I should stand before you and dare to speak about morality is considered "courageous" and "unusual." You know what that means about this society? It means we are no longer of the border edge of depravity, we have already tumbled over the abyss and are on the way to the bottom. And we had better wake up soon and put the breaks on, or there'll be no turning back! [applause]

You know that it's true. But you know, our leaders are in a state of denial, and they're in a state of denial across the board. I've got to tell you that in my little jaunts around the country, when I started this "effort" that I'm involved with--and I'll confess to you, I'm like most Americans. Somebody comes to me and asks if I've ever thought about running for President. Would I think about running for President, and I look at them and figure I should go lie down for awhile and let it go away. [laughter] So it's not exactly a thing you would do if you're in your normal state of mind. I've got to confess. So when I put my little toe in the water and started going to some of these Republican gatherings, my thought was, "let's just deliver a clear, straight-forward message." You know, get up and since you don't have anything to lose--aren't in the drink--just tell it straight. Exactly the way you see it. [applause]

And so I went to Louisiana and I decided to do this. And I got up and I talked about the importance of confronting the deep, moral issues, and the fact that the Republican party in particular couldn't back away from the pro-life plank in the platform, and the need to confront the basic issues of moral values in our society. But I've got to tell you, my friends. And I know nobody wants to hear it, but there wasn't a single candidate, not a single one at that convention (including one, Pat Buchanan), none of them--none of them--had a word to say at that convention about the pro-life issue or the moral issues. They talked economics, they talked internationalism, they talked GATT, they talked this, they talked that. They didn't say a word about the moral crisis facing this country.

Now, I've got to tell you that it was necessary to put those issues on the table, to push them and push them hard. And I'm glad we finally got everybody to be preoccupied with them. But we have got to know that in our hearts, this isn't where they wanted to be. Because they figure it's too dangerous, it's too controversial. But it's time we stood up and face the danger, and face the controversy of introducing the truth into politics. Because if we don't, we're going to face the danger that this country will fall apart utterly, and we will never get it back. [applause]

So what is the truth? What is the truth? I think the truth can be stated fairly simply. First of all, the truth is that we don't have money problems, we have moral problems. Those moral problems are exemplified in the collapse of the marriage based two-parent family. Every problem we face, all the money we're spending in the budget, the deterioration in the educational system--all related to that single phenomenon. We are allowing the deterioration of the building block of our society. The bricks from which this mansion is built are being eaten away, eroded, they are disintegrating. And so the house is falling and the foundations are rotting.

Now, we know that that's the truth. But what is the source of that disintegration of the family? Hillary Clinton wanted to tell us the other day it was money. It's economics, it's those nasty bad old rapacious capitalists. I beg to differ.

I look back on the history of the country and I see, for example, the Great Depression. And I read all the stories and the sagas, and what I learned from that is that the Depression and the economic vicissitudes did not destroy families. In fact, it was families that kept people from being destroyed by that depression. [applause] I look at the history of black Americans. People oppressed in every way. Victims of the worst system of economic oppression. You know what? Even during the depths of that worst system of oppression, slavery, there were more children born to slaves and growing up in two-parent households than are growing up in two-parent households in the black community today. And that clinging to family, even in the depths of oppression, it continued during every period. Jim Crow. Segregation. The Depression. Lynchings. You name it. And there too, it wasn't economic repression that destroyed the family, it was clinging to that family's bond, that family identity, that respect for the truth of family life that kept people alive through decade after decade until finally in the Civil Rights movement, they could stand up and move the conscience of America.

Family is not destroyed by those vicissitudes, it is what helps people to prevail in spite of them.

And so if we're going to look for the causes of the disintegration of the family, I think we ought to look for something else. We'd better look for that which strikes at the heart and soul of family life. And what is it? This is one audience where I can ask the question I'm about to ask, and I know you all will immediately know the answer: what is it that is the heart, the soul, the lifeblood and foundation of family life and practice? That glue that holds it all together and makes it all possible, that makes the motivation of what you do in your heart? What is it? It is love. That's what it is. It is love that comes from our understanding that that family bond is a trust and obligation that comes to us from God. And the love we give to each other is a reflection of the love we owe and the love we surrender to God Almighty, Himself. And it's what keeps families going. [applause]

Now, I've got to know. These days you've got to be careful when you say a word like love, though. Because it could be misinterpreted. So I have to tell you clearly that the kind of love I'm talking about is not Bay Watch love, it's not Melrose Place love, and it's not 90210 love. It's not the kind of love you'll see on the fancy screens from Hollywood, or the TV screens from the television producers. It's the kind of love that you'll read about somewhere else. It's the kind of love that endures all and forgives all and hopes all, and it's the kind of love that's there when you fit into the bathing suit and there when you don't. It's the kind of love that's going to stick with you when you're young and when you're old. It's the kind of love that's there in the good times and in the bad. The times when you need rejoicing and the times when you need forgiving, and the times when you don't need anything at all except a hand in your hand, knowing that it's there. It's the kind of love that parents give their children, and children give their parents, that will endure through everything and never be gone until that moment comes to stand before God Almighty and bathe in that One Love that is greater than family love. The love of God, Himself. That's the kind of love we're talking about. [applause] And I want you to think. It's also the kind of love that I see in this room and in this crowd. And you know what its essence is?

This is one time when I feel as if I shouldn't say these words, because I'm in the presence of people who probably understand far better than any people I can think of that it's the kind of love that puts yourself aside. It's the kind of love that Christ talked about when He said that you would lay down your life for your friend, but not just in death, no. It's the kind of love that lays down life in all the hours when you could do something else, but instead you devote to building and strengthening and growing those whom you love.

It's the kind of love that puts aside the aspirations that are your own, and the career that could have been your own, and the hopes that might yet be your own, in order to build up the hopes and the aspirations and the strengths and the character of those in whom your future resides, and place their trust in you. It's the kind of love that puts itself aside, so that a future can be born out of its womb. It's that kind of love. And families can't survive without it, and children can not grow except when bathed in the sunlight of that love, and watered with its tears and with its hope."

But what then kills the family? Whatever kills that love. And we live in a society now where what kills that love has been erected into a principle of life. When people are defining the freedom that is supposed to be the be-all and the end-all of America's existence as the freedom to do what you please. To have what you want. To put yourself first in every situation. To care about nothing, no principle, no life, no sense of right or wrong or good or bad, if it stands in the way of you being number one and staying on top and always having your way. That definition of freedom is epitomized in the greatest tragedy and the greatest wrong and the greatest harm being done in this society today. When we tell women that they can reach into their womb and for the sake of what they want and what they are, snuff out the life that God has planted there as if it were garbage, that's what kills family love! [applause]

And so I'll tell you, I think that the logic is real simple. We live in a society where the death of the family is, in many ways, in poverty and crime and deteriorating education and deteriorating streets, in teenaged suicides and growing gangs. That deterioration of the family is destroying America. And what kills the love is killing the family. So if that's the number one problem, will somebody tell me why it is that nobody wants to face up to the thing that is contributing to and causing that problem, which is the death of America's spirit, and the death of America's conscience brought on by this corrupt definition of freedom enshrined in the abortion ideology? We will not recover the strength of our families until we have killed that spirit dead and driven it from the conscience of America. [applause] Until we have liberated ourselves from the yoke of Roe v. Wade and the abortion mentality, we will not put our families right. And we've got to deal with that, I think, if we're going to deal with anything. Because it's corrupting everything about us.

That sense of corrupt freedom is leading people to redefine family in terms of sexual irresponsibility. And in our government schools, it's establishing whole curriculums based on premises that deny even the capacity for moral self-government in our individual hearts and souls. I have a feeling that's why a lot of you are in this room, and doing what you're doing. Because you know, somewhere in your heart of hearts that you simply can't entrust that precious trust from God to a government system that has not only separated church and state, but God from country and faith from education in a way that makes moral education impossible. That's why you're here! [applause]

So I think we have as a people right now, we have to commit ourselves to the task of restoring that. And I want to say that I think you're on the front lines of that task--the very front lines. You're the soldiers in the most important battlefield in the war for America's soul and its future. As Christ says, "If the salt lose its saltiness, wherewith shall we season it?" And America's "salt," its supposed leadership, its supposed elites, its supposed wise people and experts--they have lost their saltiness long ago. Wherewith shall we season the future of America? I'm here to tell you that I think we shall season it with your children. With their hearts and with their dedication and with their learning. Honed in the light of an example that is immeasurable in its impact.

I honestly believe that the most important thing that you have done, which goes beyond all the hours you put in to instruct your children in the way that they should go, and teach them things that they should know, the most important thing that you have done transcends any knowledge you can put into their heads, and any precepts even you can engrave upon their hearts, and it was set by that moment of example in which you dedicated yourself to put them first in this most important area of your life and let nothing else intervene!

That is the example that can move the conscience of America and shape once again the conscience of our generations to come. And the people born in light of that conscience, and brought up and nurtured by those capable of such dedication are people who can once again show to America what it really means to be free. Because freedom isn't a state of licentiousness and an effort to do whatever you please. It is grounded on the acknowledgment that the source of our freedom is God and His authority, and that only when we accept the discipline that is implied by that authority are we truly free.

And do you know what the discipline of parenting is? The discipline of parenting is realizing that on the day those precious bundles were born into your life, you didn't cease to matter, but you surely ceased to matter very much. [laughter] It is. And you have seen that truth and you've accepted that discipline in the spirit of love that God intended. And what you do is not just about educating your children, it's about educating all of America to the true meaning of family love and family life, and all the dedication it involves.

You are the leaven that can make once again the spirit of this country rise, and I salute you for that. And more I salute you because you have not shrunk as well from the fact that that example makes you an important part of the revival that I believe is taking place in America today. In Promise Keepers and in everything that's going on, people are turning back to their responsibilities, [applause] because they know that without that turning, America can never return to its true foundation. And I think that that returning is very important, not just for us, but for the future of the world. Used to be quite commonplace to say that, but people have forgotten it because they don't want us to remember that God has His hand on America. They don't want us to remember that our mission is not just to make sure that the wallets are filled and the businesses run and the money's taken care of, no.

A materialistic American Dream was not the dream that brought the people to these shores. It was not the dream that sustained even the hearts of those oppressed in slavery to dream of something more. No, the dream of America was the dream of human dignity and human justice that comes only from recognizing and accepting the source of all our worth is in the will of God, our Creator, as stated in the Declaration of Independence. [applause] That was the American Dream.

And I know that those of you who are here today, you're reintroducing that dream. You're passing it along as it was intended to be passed. To light up the fires in the hearts and bosoms of your children so they can light up the fire in the heart and bosom of America again. Because in any walk of life . . . I know it myself, I'm working very closely with a homeschooled young man, who's my aide and driver, and I'll tell you it makes a big difference. It makes a big difference in the light and the countenance. It makes a big difference in the sweetness of the heart. And that's not something you see in America much anymore. But it's something we will see again, I believe, in no small part, thanks to you. So keep on. Keep the faith.

It looks hard sometimes. Especially when your enemies attack you and put you in the company of that which is destroying America. Have you noticed that? This is strange. But don't worry, because those who are your enemies are those also who are the enemies of America's freedom and the discipline and the survival of this Republic.

So you just stand where you've got to stand, because I know you will, and set that example that will get the rest of us to do what we have to do--to put one foot in front of another and your hand in the hand of God, to move forward to where He has directed us, to that goal of right and righteousness that I think is still the high goal of America. The dream not born in our selfish passion, but in the plans and mind of God. The dream of mankind's better destiny. A destiny of faith and hope and human cooperation. A destiny of love and truth and freedom. It's still a destiny that we here in America can example to the world, if we are willing to fight and struggle to regain the character, the soul, and the spirit that can make it so. That struggle is especially in your hands. I commend you to it. And I commend you to God.

Thank you very much. [applause]