Alan Keyes
July 12, 2002
New Orleans

I have to pause for a minute here.

I hear many introductions of myself--some of them are long and some of them are short. But as with many things in life, the most important thing about an introduction is not what it says, but it's actually the person saying it.

And I have to pause before I start, because I feel that it's a very special moment for me to be here and to be able to say to all of you what has been on my heart for the longest time. I think we--all of us--in the life movement have to have our standards. And sometimes those standards can be found in the inspiration and grace of God and of our Savior, and sometimes, because we are human beings, after all, they take other forms: books and words, phrases and this and that.

But the most important standards of integrity, I think, are those, like Jesus Christ, that are the word made flesh that are embodied in people who have become before us in quiet ways the arbiters of our conscience and of our choices.

And I have a few of those folks in America--very few these days. One of them is Jim Dobson, somebody who is on my mind a lot when I'm thinking about things, and I ask myself (even when I don't pick up the phone to call and ask him) what I believe would be his thought and reaction about something.

One of the other people who has been that way for me for many years--because I have, over the course of those years, found that in everything that matters when it comes before this nation's conscience, she has not only been voice but an active force helping to galvanize the spirit and organize the strength of those who stand on the front lines of the battle for God's way in American life--is Judy Brown. And I want to thank her, because there can be no integrity of conscience except for those who are now alive holding up for us a standard by which we can hope to judge whether God is smiling at what we do. And, for me, you are such a standard.

Now, we live in times when, obviously, such standards are not only important, they're supremely important and desperately needed. We are, in many, many ways--have been for the longest time--in this world, and especially our country, engaged in a life and death struggle.

In various ways, that should have been clear to all of us. This is not something that began recently; it's been going on for many decades. It is not something, the cost of which can simply be measured in terms of the death of flesh and the number of lives that have been lost in some physical and material way. And yet, we human beings being what we are, sometimes it is essential for things to strike us in that forcible way before we can see what's really going on.

In a way, I think, over the course of the last year, sadly, America actually went through an experience like that. Something that, in fact, has been true about our situation for the longest time was brought home to us in [such] a clear and a forcible and a tragic and a terrible way, that, for a moment, like lightning, lighting up the landscape of truth, it revealed that truth. But many Americans don't want to see it, haven't seen it, and, the minute the light disappeared, are quite willing to ignore again.

But they saw it there. And I think it was exemplified, in fact, in a way in the reaction that was articulated behalf of this country, for better or worse, by President G. W. Bush. For better, in the sense that he stood before the world and made it clear that on September 11th we were struck by an evil that ought to revolt the conscience of every decent human being--regardless of nation, regardless of background, regardless of creed. And he declared upon that evil force a war, and made it clear that, in the words of our Savior, you were either with us or against us, but there could be no neutrality.

There was a line to be drawn between the right and the wrong of it, and if you stood on the wrong side of that line, we were going to come for you.

I think that that was a clear, necessary message. But it was also a message that in some ways fell upon ears unused to hearing such a lack of equivocation; upon ears that had, through the course of their education in grammar school and high school and college, been taught that there could be no such clear bright line, that it was all relative and circumstantial and dependent on this and that, and that one man's "terrorist" was another man's "freedom fighter."

Suddenly, in the face of the destruction of September 11th, all that relativism was thrown to the wind and disappeared for a moment, and we understood, in the light of tragedy the truth, that there is a clear line, and that every human conscience is compelled and obliged to respond to it.

I think that just that willingness to be clear about the response that was required and the nature of our understanding of right and wrong--I think that's accounted for a lot of the staying power the President has shown in public opinion.

Unfortunately, I can't say it's entirely consistent for America, though. Because if we are going to acknowledge the possibility of such a clear line between right and wrong, if we have to in the end . . . Now, you see, that clear line, even as it cuts against those who attack us, so it erects for us a standard of the light in which ourselves must be judged.

Now, I know that also, in the wake of that terrible tragedy, the President told us that on September 11th we learned that there was evil in the world. I think that is what he said, or "discovered."

(Well, I can see that you all are not as charitable as some of the audiences I've talked to who, I think, managed to restrain themselves from chuckling at that part.)

[And I've looked for a number of reasons.] And, obviously, it's kind of difficult, isn't it, to entertain the possibility that America was just discovering evil on September 11th, given that we had just completed the 20th century, which, I believe, was arguably a century characterized by the worst evil done by human beings to one another in the history of humankind. I don't think the record ever showed anything that was any worse, and certainly there are a lot of reasons to believe that it was the worst--in terms of the death toll; in terms of the callous and systematic disregard of all promptings of conscience and decency; in terms of the slaughter that characterized the wars and the holocausts and the purges and the killing fields.

I mean, the death toll just mounted beyond any capacity of the human imagination willing to encompass the millions and millions and millions who were fed into the maw of conscienceless evil and ambition and death and ideology in the course of the twentieth century. I think if America hadn't had some real familiarity with evil by the end of the 20th century, then there is something deeply wrong with our perception.

But I also think that God has His way of directing our words even when we are a little bit misdirected. And so there was truth in what the President had to say. But it wasn't quite the truth that he was expressing.

It's not that we discovered the evil in the world or discovered that there was evil. No. I think on September 11th what we confronted--in a form that for many people was tangible enough, clear enough that they could make the discovery of truth--what we discovered that day was the real consequence of the evil in ourselves.

Now why would I say that?

I think it's very clear. The evil that struck us on September 11th, for all the lives that it cost and all the destruction and damage that it did to buildings and materials, the evil that hit us wasn't in fact characterized by that material structure or even by loss of life. Earthquakes can cause such devastation, tidal waves can cause such devastating destruction. They are grievous things, harmful things, hurtful things, but they are not evil.

And the reason that we know that they are not evil is because we understand what Christ said, that evil doesn't come from without.

Evil isn't like rain that falls down on your head or snow or earthquakes that well up from the earth. No. Evil wells up from the hearts of human beings. It strikes from the depth of human choice and human will. When you want to find the root of evil, you must look, as Christ directed us, into the human heart.

And there, on September 11th, what did we find? I think it's clear. It's exemplified by the use and abuse of the airplanes on that day. It's the thing that I think most clearly shows that there was [evil].

When the terrorist looked at that airplane, he got a kind of stroke of genius--in an evil sense. And he saw something that the rest of us wouldn't see. He didn't see a passenger plane, he saw a guided missile. And he realized that he could put, as the computer that was guiding that missile, he could put in place the most sophisticated computational device available to human beings. Which is to say, the human mind.

And he could do it with a technique that didn't require huge sophistication, it required just a simple implementation of one of the oldest terrorist tactics there is: hijacking. And, all of a sudden, he had at his disposal an awesomely powerful guided missile weapon, and all that it required was a simple, almost Copernican shift of perspective to see the airplane as a missile instead of as a commercial passenger conveyance.

Why didn't you think of that?

Well, obviously there's a good reason why you wouldn't think of it. The reason you didn't think of it, and the reason I didn't think of it, was the same reason that my wife and I would have noticed as we got on the plane today. Because, you look around you and there are kids getting on the plane, the schoolkids and their teachers, there are the businesspeople; there are folks who are in all kinds of [states]--some of them of excitement, some of them of quiet, some of them apparently of dread. And, depending on the faces you look into, you will see on any given day at your airport the whole range of human possibility.

But in seeing that range of human possibilities, you will be, each and every time, if you have heart and conscience, reminded of the truth: that you are, in fact, surrounded by people who have feelings, aspirations, and lives that express in a very unique way the will of God for them and for this world.

Of course, I could look at a passenger plane and see a guided missile--we can't help but see the people on the plane. And we can't help but regard the people on the plane as folks who, as a result, not of our choice, but of God's will, have a claim to be respected in the words that they have to speak. And as they are stepping on and off that plane, meaning harm to nobody--[and especially to us]--we have no right to think of it, we have no right destroy their lives.

The terrorist didn't think about that. He saw the fuselage. He didn't see the people. He didn't see them in terms of their innocence, of their innocuousness, of their God-given right to life.

At the heart of the evil that struck us on September 11th--and I can't say this often enough--at the heart of that evil was the terrorists' disregard for the intrinsic worth of innocent human life.

And what does that mean? It's obvious what it means. It means that on September 11th, we weren't struck by new evil. That evil may have come from Osama bin Laden, but it was not the discovery of new evil. No. What we saw on September 11th, what we saw in the collapsing buildings, what we saw in the death toll that we could finally appreciate, what we saw in the grief of the families was the awesome consequence that arises when we ignore the intrinsic meaning and worth of innocent human life.

But let us not pretend that we made such a discovery on September 11th. For, long before Osama bin Laden struck his blow against the innocent lives in the planes and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there has been throughout this land--in the cities and the towns and the byways--blows struck against innocent life that should have been more sacred, more precious to us even than those lives should have been to him!

As we declare war upon terrorism, as we declare war upon that principle of evil which lies at its heart, we are declaring war upon that that evil which--for the sake of this agenda, and that convenience, and that fanaticism--is willing to raise a hand of force and deadly force against innocent life.

But if we pray down destruction on the head of Osama bin Laden for that violation of innocent life, we had better be aware that we pray down destruction, as well, on a nation that is willing to enshrine in principle a right to administer the selfsame blow to those innocent lives of our offspring that ought to be more sacred in our obligation to God than any others.

I believe, though, that in a sense, the cause that brings us together here represents the cause that lies at the heart of the American war against terrorism, at the heart of that struggle, which, even though we are--some people are--scared, is the life and death struggle of our soul.

Yes, it is. In various way, I think, we're not quite seeing it yet. Terrorism doesn't just threaten our lives, it threatens our way of life. It threatens the liberty, it threatens the openness, it threatens the trust that is at the heart of our commerce, that is at the heart of our politics, that is at the heart of all that liberty which we hold dear.

In our fight against it, we already are witnessing those encroachments upon right, and upon prerogative, and upon due process that are the indispensable safeguards of liberty for every citizen in this nation, but which--for the sake of our security--we are already showing a willingness to sacrifice.

The sad truth is that the danger from terrorism is as much what we do to fight it as what they do to destroy us. And when it all comes together, it adds up to a lengthening shadow over the prospects of freedom and liberty and self-government in our land.

We are in the midst of that fight for our nation's survival which is inevitable, in some sense, in each generation, but which takes a new form in every one. And in our generation, it is no accident that this crisis comes upon us in such a way that it focuses, or ought to focus, our attention on this one simple truth: that liberty cannot survive when we have rejected that Authority which enjoins upon us our respect for innocent human life.

Turn your back on that principle, and you will inevitably destroy the foundations of your freedom.

That's not a new argument, I've made this argument for years. Sad to say, my friends, what we're witnessing now is the implementation, the consequential realization of that argument's truth. We are in the midst of the crisis occasioned by the embrace of the evil principle that all the judgments we make about our actions and about one another can be made in the light of our purposes, and our goals, and our creeds, with no respect for the Absolute Will of our God.

But do we think that this kind of corruption only exemplifies itself in abortion, only exemplifies itself in this crisis of [unintelligible: terrorism]? We should know better. What I find interesting is that there is now a general crisis spreading through the society. Much as cancer metastasizes through a body, so this wicked principle metastasizes the canker of its destruction through our body politic and through our economic life. I read the articles in which people are lamenting the lack of business ethics and the lack of morals and so forth and so on ...

C'mon, you guys ...

We have been through now, all these years, when in the context of business life we were told that "it's all relative," that "what you do for the sake of your stockholders excuses you from the requirements of decency and morality and conscience, because at the end of the day, it's all relative, and the good you do over here balances out the evil you do over there. Make enough money and give it to the poor, and it doesn't matter how you made it in the first place."

How many times have we bought into these lies?

And what made us think that a generation of business leaders taught to believe that they can do anything for their corporation wouldn't, at the end of the day, conclude that they were right to do anything for themselves?

Relieved of that sense that there is a higher authority, a higher standard to which we must answer, the human will runs rampant, friends, in such a way that there is no standard that it will not violate, that there is even no such [accountability] by which it will be restrained.

And over the course of these last weeks and months, I think many of us have also [witnessed another that has been, probably for me, a most painful and disappointing experience]. As we have watched the canker of that same evil and corruption bury itself in the very heart of the Christian church, in the very head of the Catholic Church. The hierarchy.

Now, I know, there are some people who talk about it [like the priestly abuse is the worst crisis]. No, the worst crisis in the Catholic Church wasn't the priests who abused. Sin is not the worst crisis you can encounter. Individual sin is so familiar that those of us who are true Christians know good and well it's already been defeated. It's already been crushed down. That head has already been smote by the most powerful and important force there can be: the force of Christ's salvation.

There is nothing in sin that intimidates a Christian heart.

But I'll tell you something. There is something else, though.

When one starts to accept that easy corruption which does not understand and recognize the line to be drawn--not by our convenience, not by our beliefs, not by our feelings, but by God's will--between the right and the wrong, between the sinful and the righteous action; when one succumbs there and starts to move in that grey area that destruction is possible, the clear way that has been laid out, the footsteps that have been put down for us by our Lord have become obscured by our own pride and own self [gratification].

[I think, sadly, that a lot of it's especially on sexual terms.] The Catholic Church, the Christian Church--people who think it's possible to have it both ways. I can, over here, say that I profess to believe in Christ and I profess to believe that God created all, and I profess to believe that human sexuality is about God's plan for procreation, and then over here I can wink at homosexuality and wink at a hedonistic understanding of human sexual indulgence as if that could be part of some plan of self-fulfillment and happiness.

What lies we are preaching to ourselves and to our young when we tell them that there can be a happiness that contravenes the most basic will of God! This cannot be so.

He said that we were made--man and woman--and that we were made in that context to cleave to one another for the sake of fulfilling God's plan of procreation. Reject that plan of procreation, and I don't care what you call your lifestyle, it cannot lead to your salvation. It must lead to your destruction. [applause]

Obviously, it can't embrace the hedonistic and secular understanding of sex and call itself Christian. But at the same time, I'll be honest: I know the truth of my experience in my Diocese that we've got bishops who see it differently, who, in spite of all the [unintelligible] reject a Christian understanding. And I wish I could say that this is confined to the Catholic Church, but we know it's not. We know that there are many folks wandering around out there in this world who think that you can fornicate on Saturday and praise the Lord on Sunday, and that somewhere in between you will still be "walking the walk." I don't think so.

You know, what's at the heart of it isn't just the behavior and misbehavior. For we shall be forgiven for such things, not just seven times, but seventy times seven, and our hearts truly changed and accept the saving blood of Jesus Christ.

Now tell me, what shall happen if we accept to be blinded to the possibility of that salvation, by views and ideologies that efface for us the true meaning of God's being and [from our eyes]? That cuts us off from the truth in such a way that we, by embracing a life that rejects His authority, stand on ground oblivious to His mercy, His love, His favor and to His will.

I think this is what's happening. It's happening in many walks of life. We just don't see it. At the root of all of these things--the abortion, and the sexual perversion, and the difficulties that we face in our business life and other areas--is just the simple truth. A truth that ought to be suggested to us by the simple example of our Lord. His chief characteristic, I believe, was that He looked always to the Father. [And I think we're called upon to acknowledge, to accept, His existence--not just willing to except it when it serves some agenda of your own.]

That's not the way God is, I don't think. If God is what the Bible says He is, if God is what the Lord said He is, then God is such that He cannot be different on Friday than He is on Sunday, on Saturday than He is on Monday. And that means that He has a being [constant, that keeps] for us a standard of truth. And that we depart from that standard at the peril of our lives.

Now that has spiritual consequences, and it also has material consequences for the hopes that we can [aspire to in the protection of life]. But especially it does so in a land like ours.

Over the course of many years, one of the reasons that I believe that folks who are willing to look at this kind of truth as so vital to the future of America is that America isn't like other countries.

America wasn't founded on some abstract notion of what human power can do, and so forth. No. It was founded on the notion that every human, regardless of their station, regardless of their background, regardless of their education, their intelligence, their riches, their poverty, that every human being has a worth, has a dignity that must be respected by every human power, and that dignity comes from the hand of Almighty God.

If there is no God, if there is no hand, then there is no dignity. There can be no freedom.

We do not, therefore, come together here today, just as some might people might think, because we have our particular little cause that we care about. That's something the pro-abortion people often like to say: "Well, why do you care so much about that mass of tissue in the womb?" and so forth and so on. "You're just some other special interest," or, "What's with that emotional obsession you have with fetuses?" and all this stuff like that and so on.

Now it is true that a decent conscience must feel the terrible loss of that word that the Lord spoke into the womb, must wonder every day what we have missed, must wonder every day what mercy we have foregone when we have suppressed out of our world all of those millions of thoughts in the mind of God, thoughts intended for us. I do care about that.

I think that at the bottom of it all, I know that God is powerful enough that there is no way that human injustice [and inhumanity] is going to triumph in the end. That every time we act against His will, He's just still going find some other way to fulfill it, even if He has to create some other universe. He can do that, too, if He feels like it.

So I think what's really at stake in all of this is not just the lives, it's our true life. It's the life of our spirit, the life of our soul. It's the life of our country, the life of our world. It's the hope that is there and that is held out by the mind of God for the salvation of human beings, just as it was in His first loving act of creation, had we not blindly turned away toward the power of lies that offered us godhood with our [pride].

Isn't this the very lie that today is at the root of so many of the temptations that beset and will destroy us? That with our science, and with our technology, and with our economic power, and with our military might, and with our will, and our willingness to stand united and strong on the [faith] of our will, we shall be capable of being as gods in this world?

"You will be as gods."

There is the temptation of pride, but it is also the last temptation of folly.

If we come together here not [only for the cause of innocent babes], but to save it, if we can, the hope for life. [That God has the power in this world.] To save it in the ways we can--in our communities and in our family--and to come together to save it in the ways we can in our country and in our world.

I think that, if we understand the true nature, therefore, of the pro-life cause, we know that in the end, it is because of the primacy we give to that moral and spiritual life which attaches us to God. It is because of that primacy that we focus as we do on this terrible evil in our time. Because it exemplifies, perhaps more than any other, that turning away from God's truth that is substituting a human will for God's will--which will, in the end, be the gateway to our perdition.

If we see this, and think we can, we can see ourselves being on the front-lines of many battles, the broad nature of these issues has become increasingly clear with all [these other things being important]. It's not just about babes in the womb. It's about whether we shall [correct] ourselves in such a way that we shall stop abusing human life and creating whole new classes of artificial human beings to be oppressed by our awful will .

It is about corruption in every form that it can take when you surrender your life to that serpentine mind. "And ye shall be as gods."

We are fighting to return our world back to a [homeward truth], to a truth that is really not to impose itself by forcing violence upon the helpless and innocent babes in the womb but instead to back calmly away from those lives, defenseless as they are against us, because we willing to acknowledge in their existence a Power beyond our power, a Will beyond our will, to which--even in its most helpless and innocent and vulnerable form--we are willing, humbly, to submit.

It is that spirit of our humility which must answer the answer the spirit of pride which is killing us in this time.

It is our willingness to embrace the power of God even in the most helpless form of the babe, that must put before the world once again our understanding: that there is no human power that can raise us beyond the level of that helpless babe when we stand before the omnipotence of God.

Remember this, and I think we are on the way to restoring hope to all areas of our lives.

Restoring hope for intact families because parents' hearts once again humbly submit to the will of God in the service of their children.

Restoring integrity once again to an educational system that will motivate the children and motivate the young because we will no longer offer them the false hopes of their self-indulgence and their self-fulfillment, but instead will fire up that engine of human achievement which comes when we dedicate ourselves to those things which transcend our own purposes and our own selfishness and our own will.

We will fire up once again the decent integrity of our business life.

We will fire up once again the courage that it takes to withstand every temptation, even in the face of things like [unintelligible], for that liberty which we trust in ourselves because in ourselves we are willing to trust in Almighty God.

I believe that this is what the pro-life movement represents in America today. A movement that, as we have focused on the essential nature of the sin that besets us in all these areas, also represents a standard of hope that can help galvanize a spirit of right-thinking people and conscience in order to move against that evil bondage [unintelligible].

It makes us, in a way, what I hope we fully appreciate: people who stand up in front-lines of security in our nation and in our world.

People are so obsessed with security these days. You know, I think that it partly results from the fact that on September 11th people felt really insecure. I've often said to people that I think that's one of the reasons "God Bless America" became such a popular song then: because it was not only a genuine prayer, but it was a statement of our national security policy.

See, I tend to believe that is a statement of our national security policy. That, if we truly mean it, if we want God to bless America, then we must have prayers of a different kind: prayers of hand and voice and heart and courage and example; prayers that stand in action to change the heart of our nation so that we can once again walk a path that it is in God's blessing, once again stand in a light that represents God's will.

In this way shall our nation renew its strength as we wait again upon the Lord, serving Him and patiently accepting that Authority through which He prepares for us the true fruition of His Will.

If we are going, with integrity, to be what we must for the moral conscience of our nation and our world, then I think we can be part of that which represents in the world the true hope that is always there in the Lord. And that will mean that no terrorism, no fears, no sense of corruption will ever daunt us or truly upset our sense that it will, if we are faithful, all turn out for the best.

For, the best, as we know, is the Will of God. And, as we know, it will prevail.

Stand in that hope and we shall, in the end, triumph for the sake of all those things which in His mercy, God still promises and will fulfill for all those who are willing acknowledge His existence in their acknowledgment and acceptance of His authority and in their willingness to open their hearts to the presence of His love and of His mercy.

God bless you.