Alan Keyes
May 15, 2000

Ambassador Keyes' remarks at a press conference held by Senator Cardinale of New Jersey introducing S-869, a bill which would initiate the practice of students beginning the school day by reciting the first section of the Declaration of Independence.


I want to say a couple words. First, I want to thank the Senator for inviting me here today and giving me the opportunity to say a few words to a subject that is probably, in terms of my own personal life and political stance, among the most important that there is. I believe that Lincoln was right. He said at one point in his career that everything that we did in American public life was based upon the principles in the Declaration of Independence. And I full well understand that and try in much of my life to do whatever I can to reappoint that same thinking.

When I read the accounts of what had happened when this sort of simple and forthright suggestion was made, I couldn't believe what I was reading. I found it, in fact, utterly incomprehensible that there were actually people in this country who would stand up and try to suggest that there is something wrong with teaching our children and impressing upon our children the powerful importance of the central tenets of the Declaration of Independence--tenets, without which the country would not exist as a free country; and without which, among other things, the fight for certain important aspects of justice in this country, including of course the abolition of slavery, would probably never have occurred. And I think that that is powerfully important to remember. Ideas, in spite of what some people try to argue, have deeply shaped the destiny of human beings.

And so, all this time, the masses of people in the world could be held enthralled by handfuls of human beings. And it wasn't, by the way, on the basis, as some people try to suggest, of overwhelming force and all that. No few people ever have enough force to overwhelm the masses. At the end of the day, you hold masses of people enthralled--not because you intimidate them with physical force; you only enthrall because you have enchained and enslaved their minds and spirit.

It's why I've always thought that, around the Jefferson Memorial, there's a famous quote of Jefferson's inscribed in which it says: "I swear eternal enmity against every form of tyranny." But he doesn't stop there. It's tyranny "over the mind of man."

And I think it's powerfully important to recognize that that insight into the real source of enslavement, if it is kept fresh and alive, is the only thing that will prevent human beings from being enslaved once more: to remember that slavery is not a matter of physical shackles, it's a matter of spiritual, mental and psychological chains. And that those chains are decisively broken when every individual human being, regardless of their condition, their status, their background, regardless of their purse, regardless of their wealth, regardless of their education, regardless of what the world may say about them--when every individual can act with the certainty that they possess a dignity that does not depend on the power and opinion of other human beings, because it depends upon the transcendent will of the power beyond human power, which is the power of Almighty God.

That insight as to the source of human dignity, that encourages people in the fight for their dignity--I mean that literally, it gives them courage to stand up and do what they have to do no matter what the threat. And that's not an abstract statement. In American history, it has been proven time and again. You cannot look at a struggle for justice in this country from the very beginning, through slavery, civil rights, women's rights, you name it, but you will find that the leaders and spokesmen of every great movement that advanced the cause of human rights looked back to the Declaration of Independence and challenged this nation to do what was right by those principles. It has been the key, the source, of those battles, and the source of the courage that was required to fight them.

Now I frankly have to look with some suspicion on the forces in our society today who come forward in an effort to destroy our understanding of and our allegiance to the principles of the Declaration. They use all kinds of phony arguments. They come forward and tell us, "Well you can't respect that because Jefferson owned slaves." This is a remarkable piece of intellectual chicanery. I find it amazing that anybody with half a brain can't think through to the sickness that lies behind this argument.

Based on a simple premise, "How come slavery is wrong?" we get on our high horse and say, "We're going to condemn Jefferson because he owned slaves." Okay. How do you know it's wrong? On the basis of what principle, on the basis of what argument is slavery rejected? It wasn't rejected for most of the thousands of years of human history--anywhere in the world, by the way. And you can look at traditions, you can look at practices--it doesn't matter the race, the region, you will find slavery practiced and sanctioned on the basis of a simple premise: might makes right; the stronger actually have the right to rule over those less strong. And if you happen to be unfortunate enough to fall in the way of somebody stronger than you, then you've gotten what you deserve. The gods were against you, fortune was against you, fate was against you, life was against you--but that's just the way it is, and those that happened to come out on the more powerful end, they got all the respect. And sadly, this has been characteristic of most cultures in the history of the world.

And it doesn't matter, but I often have to remind people--especially when they try to pretend that there is something integrally racial about slavery itself. No, American black people suffered slavery which was, after the fact, by the way, justified by this inventive regime of racism. What really motivated the slave institution wasn't racism, it was the same thing that motivated that institution throughout all of human history. Power and greed are the roots of slavery. And then people come along with their racialism or their ethnocentric this's and thats or the "religious" games they play to justify the evil that they practice using the "superstructure" of these kinds of things. But at bottom it's all just about ugly, filthy, greedy human beings going out and treating other human beings like dirt because they have the power to do it and will get something out of it. That's all. Here's what is clear all around the world--by the way, it's wasn't just whites doing it to blacks. It was whites doing it to whites.

You know, the very concept of slavery, we forget it--and where do you think the word "slave" came from? Because, one of the most enslaved peoples in the world, especially during the period of the Islamic ascendancy, were who? The Slavs. That's right. They were the preferred slaves during the period of about one thousand years of human history. When they were bought and sold and tracked all throughout the Near East, all throughout what we now think of as Eastern Europe, people would run raids to get these very desirable slaves which were then used in the great empire that stretched across Spain and Northern Africa and into the Near East. But we think that slavery means something to do with black and this and that. No! Slavery is a human evil, it's been practiced against everybody. And the root of it is in this notion, that somehow or another, might makes right. That the people who end up on the top of the power chain get to do what they please to others. Because you lack the power, you have no dignity, you have no claim.

So what is the principle that then allows us to see that the ownership of slaves is--yes, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. I'll give him this though. At least he had the decency to acknowledge, as few in the course of human history before that era had ever acknowledged, that what he was doing was wrong. You know that's the first step toward changing human life. The first step is to acknowledge the principle by which we see what justice is.

And that's why I will never lose respect for the founding generation. I'll lose respect for this one, because when we want to do wrong we just pretend there's no difference between right and wrong. They were doing wrong, but at least they had the decency--and there was no requirement by the way, they were under no necessity to acknowledge this principle. They had the power in America, the people who fashioned that document, they could have set up a monarchy or an aristocracy, just the way there was in Europe at the time. And there were people clamoring for them to do it! They could have even based this nation on narrow principles that acknowledged the rights only of one group. And there was actually a school of thought at the time for the rights of kings and nobody else. But no. They instead embraced an understanding that acknowledged in human nature itself the basis for a claim to dignity and rights. And they based that acknowledgment, not on some human decision, but on a decision out of the reach of human power and rejection: the determinations of the Creator God.

So they wanted there to be no misunderstanding. Just because you were weak and this and that, nobody was going to have a claim. And that was the basis in thought--and therefore, by the way, the practical basis, for what came after in America, the struggle against slavery. And what motivated folks in that struggle was that profound sense of justice, of principle, of the contradiction between slavery and that basic American principle. If the Founders hadn't set up that contradiction, you wouldn't have had, in the course of the decades that followed, the enormous crisis of conscience that eventually made this nation [face the injustice of enslavement in order to abandon it once and for all.]

So the truth of it is that we owe a lot, both to the truth expressed in the Declaration, and to the Founders who were willing, in spite of their own human failings, to speak of that truth that condemned their own actions and institutions. And they knew it. That's why Jefferson himself wrote, "I tremble for my country," he said, "when I think that God is just and that His justice will not sleep forever." I often tell people, they had more honesty about the wrong of slavery than we do today, for instance, about the wrong of things like abortion. We want to pull the wool over our eyes. We want to spit on the principles of truth so we will no longer have to be constrained by them.

So I just have to come and applaud the folks who are moving forward here--to do what? I think to renew the foundations in the hearts and minds of our young people and our citizens, to renew the foundations of their sense of what is the basis for their liberty. Because we use the words "freedom," "liberty," throw them around like, "it's always been here, we'll always have it." That's a lie! Nothing's harder in the whole course of human history than to win your way to the point where you actually acknowledge that human beings have a right to participate in their own government, not to be abused by those who have power, not to be accused in ways that do not acknowledge that kernel of dignity that's inside every one of us. Hardest struggle in the course of humankind.

This nation represents one of the great fruits of that struggle, and it will not survive if we don't remember, throughout the course of our history, the simple true premise that human dignity is not based on human power, or human votes, or human choices, or human determination, because it is based upon the power and will of the Creator to whom even the most powerful human beings end up ultimately being subject to.

That truth emboldens people to fight when they might otherwise give in as human beings did for thousands of years to the cowardly behavior that allows tyrants to reign, oligarchs to rule and dictators to oppress. I think that the work that is being done here reintroduces into the soul of our young people the fiber that they will need in what I think will prove to be a very challenging century. We've got all kinds of scientific advances, in all kinds of ways, increasing the power that we have to manipulate human nature itself, so that we can block out of human consciousness even the thought that individuals have the right to confront power with dignity.

I think it's going to be powerfully important, in the face of all those [false principles] that could undermine us, to keep alive a kernel, a spark of that recognition that your right to fight for your dignity doesn't come from human beings, it doesn't come from their knowledge, it doesn't come from their power. That was the true statement of the Declaration. I can think of no better way to shake the minds and hearts of our young people than the contemplation of that wrestling with its meaning; to have them every day stand up and remind themselves of what it is. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and endowed, by the way, not by you, me, the vote, the judge, the President, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights--none of these scraps of paper are the source--but by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights.

I think that, to the extent that our new generation remembers that they will have the courage to work for it, fight for it, and hold up their liberty and the institutions that require it, they will also have a sense to acknowledge what the Declaration also represents and what a lot of people want to forget: that if you claim your rights are from the Creator you can't use those rights in a way that destroys, undermines, and spits on the authority of the Creator and expect to keep them for very long.

So, contained in the Declaration there are also the seeds of an ethic of responsibility, an acknowledgment of our obligations to God which then leads to the acknowledgment of our obligation to one another. It becomes the basis, therefore, for shaping character in our civic culture in such a way that we eschew being serfs and subjects but at the same time refuse to be bullies and slaves because we know that we owe to one another the same respect that we demand on account, not of our demand, but of the will of God.

All of this comes together, I believe, in a powerful tool for spiritual, moral, motivation and renovation, and in a context, by the way, that is uncontroversial. Because, last time I looked, nobody's come up with a substitute for the Declaration. I find all these People railing against it all the time, and I'm deeply suspicious of them. Why would you want to take away that which is the key to the resistance to tyranny, and then not offer anything that is going to be a viable substitute that will then do what the Declaration has throughout history done: motivated people to fight for their rights, motivate soldiers to die on the battlefields for the sake of freedom?

This isn't an abstraction, this isn't some game we're playing. Many, many tens of thousands of people risked and gave their lives for the sake of this freedom and fought in battles that the rest of us have relied upon for our states in life because of the courage that their beliefs gave them. When we give them up, exactly what is it that is proposed to replace them? How shall we then motivate folks to do what they did not do throughout many thousands of years: to fight, not just on one family or ethnic basis, but on a basis that respects the claims of all humanity to the dignity that all humanity has the right to?

I think that this is one of the great distinguishing hallmarks of American life. And I can't come here today saying that I'm speaking these words in some special way to Black America or anything else. I do find it incongruent that Black America, whose ancestors have been enslaved, would spend their time trying to destroy our allegiance to the principle that made the fight against slavery viable. I find this so amazing, I don't even know where to begin comment on the blitheness and stupidity of all this. So I won't. Let it speak for itself. But I do feel like I am coming forward today to speak as an American and as a human being and as someone who understands and deeply believes in the significance our nation is suppose to have for humanity. And that significance, I think, is made in the end on the basis of the universal implications of the Declaration principles.

Oh, you have those folks that come forward and say, "Well what about that 'man' thing," and so forth and so on. I hate the way these liars come forward acting as if they could simply get everybody not to go back, not to read, not to understand anything that was going on, so that we are to forget, aren't we, that every word written in the Declaration was drawn from a philosophic corpus that made it crystal clear that what was being discussed was not male but human. And that what was being referred to had nothing to do with gender, it had to do instead with what the philosophers wrote about it, called "our nature"--a nature that was universal to all human beings, and to men and women, by the way. And I can prove that, if anyone wants to know.

Go back and look at people like John Locke, for instance, look at their discussions from which our Founders derived this idea, and you will find in the chapters that discuss the derivation of the principle that all people are equal. You will find arguments that, by the way, among other things, mark the first cogent and decisive arguments made in favor of the equality, within the family context, of men and women; that you could not make a distinction between the authority of the father and the authority of the mother, that there was no basis for it whatsoever. Far from the lies we are told that this was somehow a big line-gender thing. It was far from it. It was, in fact, the first true assertion that all human beings have a claim to be treated with respect that had been made in the course of humankind's history, and the only one that ever became the basis for our lives and relationships.

What we are to decide is whether we're going to stupidly throw that heritage away on the words of people who play on our ignorant resentments, but who offer no substitute for a solid basis for our true hopes. I think it would be the greatest folly in the world if we took the key that opened the shackles from the minds of humankind and tossed it down the sewer of history on the say-so of people who can express their resentments but cannot give any viable sense of what edifice of human spirit, and intellect and moral understanding they would put in the place of this great principle.

I will simply say that I applaud what is being done here because I believe as previous generations have: eventually, the fight for this principle must be taken wherever it leads. In the past, people have been willing to give their lives to make sure that it survives. And I, for one, am quite willing still to do the same.

Through the course of human history, there has been articulated by the mere hand of human beings, no more important principle of justice. I think that we do well to remind our children of its importance throughout their lives, so that they may be led to do what each of us can do. Go back and take a look. You don't have to take it on the say-so of others. Read the works, read the books, think it through for yourself. That's part of the challenge of our liberty. But in order to be challenged to do that, you have to know that it's there and you have to be led to take it seriously. And that's what I think education, in the end, involves: challenging our children seriously to take a look, seek the truth and think it through for themselves.

I therefore have to say that I can think of nothing that could be more powerful for the start of the educational day, indeed as a basis for our educational philosophy, than the notion that we wish to shape our young hearts and minds in the new generations in the light of those principles which have been the basis for our freedom and that lead us to acknowledge that our freedom comes not from our power, our status, our pride our knowledge or anything else that could be dependent on our mere power and status and will, but it comes instead from the transcendent will of that Power that is the source [for all our rights and justice.]

Leaving that kind of transcendent basis behind the human claims that we make, I think, is the only way they will be safe. I don't ever want to see my children living in a world where they think that their human dignity depends on the will of others. Instead, let them understand that it depends upon the will of God--and, knowing this, let them act with courage to defend it.