Alan Keyes
August 13, 1996
Lemon Grove, California

Introduction by Rusty Thomas, of Operation Rescue National:  Brothers and sisters, how many know we are faced with a crisis in this nation? I want you to know, the greatest crisis is not abortion or homosexuality. The greatest crisis is the crisis of leadership. One of the first things that God does when He is displeased with a nation, one of the first chastisements He brings on a harsh nation, is He removes the valiant man. He removes the righteous, godly men from leadership and He turns you over to weak, inept, wicked rulers--i.e., Bill Clinton. Amen? But I'm telling you right now, brothers and sisters, I'm seeing some signs of hope. I'm seeing signs that God is about to restore this land. And you want to know why? Because when God decides to restore the nation, He begins to raise up valiant, godly, righteous statesmen.

And I want to introduce one tonight. His name is Dr. Alan Keyes! [thunderous applause]

Alan Keyes:  I have an account to share with you this evening, a report, as it were . . . [As Keyes begins to speak, it's clear that the sound system is not operating. It takes a minute or so to resolve the problem and get his microphone turned on, whereupon everyone claps and cheers.]

For a minute, I thought I was at the Republican convention.

[laughter, more applause]

Y'all have been here praising, and so forth--so you haven't been watching the convention. I just came from there, and Speaker Gingrich gave a talk. And I forget whether it was right--was it right before or right after? A young lady leapt out onto the stage and started singing. And--I tell you--I think I know now what my mistake was. They never told us that they were auditioning people for singing parts! [laughter, applause]

But that isn't what I wanted to tell you about. I went to something today that I want to share with you. And I want to share it with you because I think it offers us both hope and a glimpse of the truth that you know in your heart, but that I believe many people, including many folks in the media, don't want to share. I went to a debate today. It was sponsored by a group called the Creative Coalition. They were a group of actors and artists and people who are in the media, entertainment area, performing arts. At any rate, they had sponsored a debate. Different panels on different issues. And there were four people, actually--I didn't realize it. You know, usually panels are kind of balanced. This one had four people on the pro-abortion side and two people on the pro-life side. But as I was one of those people, I figured we were more than even. [laughter, applause] If I keep up that kind of remark, you'll start to think I'm Rush Limbaugh. I don't want to do that.

But I wanted to tell you. That they had these four folks. And you know what was remarkable about the discussion, which I have been noticing in this country for some time, and which struck me again as I was there? There was William Weld and Arlen Specter and Ann Stone, champions of the pro-abortion position. And yet, my friends, when it came right down to looking them in the eye and saying, "Can you tell us that abortion is right? That it's okay, that it's justifiable, that it's legitimate?" Do you know that they were saying, "Well, well no, none of us says that abortion is okay." [laughter]

No, seriously! No, don't belittle this! We are living in a time when the folks who are standing out there saying that abortion is a right have to acknowledge that it is not right. [applause] And I request to ask you a question, "If it is not right, how can it be a right? If it is not just, how can it be justified? And if it is not legitimate, how can it be respected in law?"

See? And that is, I think, the question we have come to now. The conscience of this country, when it confronts the true argument, is revolted by this business of abortion. It's revolted by it! Look at the debate on the partial birth abortion. See? How many of the people who stand up ordinarily on that pro-abortion side had to cringe with shame as that procedure was described to a horrified nation and finally join their heads, hung in shame, in a majority that said, "Yes, we must condemn it and ban it." Finally, they had to admit that some element of this abortion agenda was wrong.

What they missed is that they were concentrating on what? They were concentrating on the gruesome nature of partial birth abortion, and when the descriptions were put forward of reaching in, sucking out the brains, crushing the head, the very thought of it makes decent people cringe.

But, you know, the gruesomeness of abortion does not lie in its physical brutality only. If you could--and some of them are certainly trying to come up with ways to make it look clean and quick and invisible somehow. I don't care how clean, how quick, how invisible you make it! I don't care how much it can be done in the most secret places! If it violates the open truth, if it violates the standard of right and wrong and justice on which each and every one of us relies for our claim to human dignity and human rights, then it is wrong! It must be stopped. [applause]

That's what it does. It's what it does, and we know it does. But the thing I found interesting today, too, was that--as I often do. You had folks who were there, who were--Ann Stone, others--trying to say that, "Well, this is an issue of religious opinion. Yes, you have your religious opinion, and I have my religious opinion, and if we disagree, there's nothing to be done about it, and so you can't impose your religion on me."

And I have to point out, as I always do, that if I stand, in the end, before the people of this room, or of this state, or of this nation, or of the world, and I say that abortion cannot be a woman's choice because as human beings we do not have the right to make a choice that denies the life, denies the liberty of another human being, and if I say that I have to deny that choice to a woman, I have to deny it to a man, because it belongs only to the Creator God Almighty--

[applause]

If I speak up, and then I say I am not just speaking as a Christian man, I am not just speaking as someone speaking from my religious heart and conviction, but right there, in the principles on which this nation was founded, right there in the document which states the moral truth on the basis of which each and every American person, man or woman, claims their human rights, they said it with clarity and without equivocation, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed"--not by the Constitution, not by the President, not by the Supreme Court, not by the judges, not by the police, not by the law, not by their mother, and not by their father, and not by any human choice or will whatsoever. They are endowed "by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

[thunderous and sustained applause]

That means, as I tried to explain today, I wonder--I thought that maybe some folks in the audience, when I look at their faces, they hadn't thought of this--I tried to explain to them my own journey of thought on this issue of abortion from the point of view of public policy. You see, I think, from the point of view of one of faith, it's not really much of a journey! Not if you look at all--at all, mind you--at the scripture.

Now, I know that there are some people who will contend that they are Bible-based Christian people, and they can find it in there somewhere that abortion is okay and that this is a woman's choice, but I can't get past those clear and ringing words in Jeremiah: "Before I"--that's God speaking--"Before I," God, "formed thee in the belly, I," God, "knew thee and ordained thee to be a prophet to the nations." [applause]

Now, somebody tell me, if God knew me before I was formed in the belly, then the question of my humanity, and the question of my rights is--from the point of view of the Bible, and of our Christian Biblical beliefs--settled. You can't tell me that a woman has a right to deny my human life on the grounds that I am not yet a human being, when right there, in terms of our Christian faith and doctrine, it says that I am not formed at the time I am there in the belly. Because God conceived of me before that moment of physical conception, and I existed as a human being in the eyes of the Creator God long before the parents who were the agent of realizing that came into the world. And I'll tell you, you know, in a sense that child in the womb, from a Biblical point of view, is like a manuscript. God writes it in secret. He only publishes it in the womb! [applause]

But, I'll tell you what. [applause continuing] So that, I think, is a settled question. It doesn't require a long journey from the point of view of your faith. But it does, to a certain degree, from the point of view of our public policy and belief. It does. And people can stand up and think they can use this language of rights. They can use this language of freedom and of choice to fool our people into believing that they have a right to take the life of their unborn children, and then they can stand up and say that anybody who denies it is imposing a religious viewpoint.

But that's where I turn to the Declaration, and I don't see how you get around it. And some people may say, "Well, that's just a dusty old document, written by a bunch of dead white males, and you don't have to have any respect for it." [laughter] But if they take that point of view--and I don't know about you, but I, at least, will have to fight them on it. Why? If you look at me, you can see that I come from those people in America whose ancestors were at one time held in slavery. And then after slavery ended, we were subjected to racial discrimination and all kinds of abuse based on race.

Now, when slavery was sanctioned by the laws of the country, when slavery was sanctioned even by Supreme Court decisions supposedly interpreting the Constitution of the United States, what was it that gave Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison and also, in the end, Abraham Lincoln the right to stand up and challenge that understanding of the Constitution, and challenge those laws, and challenge even the decision of every majority in any state that had sanctioned the institution of slavery? What is it that gave them that right?

I'll tell you what it was. It was the reverence of our American conscience for the principles of the Declaration, which states clearly that our claim to human rights, and human life, and human dignity do not come from majority votes, they do not come from positive law, they do not come from even the Constitution of the United States. It says unequivocally they come from the hand of Almighty God. [applause]

That's right. And why is it so important? It's important because if you try to tell me that my rights depend on a human decision, then whether I have those rights or not will depend on how many people you can get to agree with you. And that was the problem in the era of slavery. They got a lot of folks to agree that black people had no rights. No matter how many folks agreed with it, it was still a lie. They got a lot of folks to agree that if you had dark skin, you shouldn't be treated equally. No matter how many folks agreed to it, it was still a lie. And why was that? Because, if the Declaration means anything, it means that there are certain choices beyond our choice. There are certain decisions and determinations we don't have the right to make. Because if we claim the authority to make them, then we deny the authority on which all of our claims to human rights and dignity are based. [applause]

And that, by the way, as you can tell, that is an argument--I may be attuned to it, Flip [Benham, director of Operation Rescue National], because of my Christian faith and belief, but I subscribe to it also because I am an American. Because I live in the nation whose institutions have been founded on the principles of the Declaration and on the beliefs that those principles involve.

That's why I don't understand what's happening in our society right now. I don't understand, to tell you the truth, even what's happening in the Republican Party. [applause] At one level, we have a grassroots party that was very much committed to the pro-life principle and affirmed that in the platform, and we can be glad for this. At another level, we seem to have a leadership that believes that it's more important to present vapid, happy-face images to America than to present to people that which is the real source of our hope, which is the truth of our creed and the truth of our courage, to uphold and live by that creed. And from whence does that courage come?

Part of the reason I stand before you here today is because I think you are folks who, a good deal more than many people in the country, you understand where that courage comes from. If we are able, as individuals, sometimes to stand against the odds, and take the initiative in going out on point in the name of justice, when it looks as if the numbers in the world are all against us, what is it that gives us that courage? To go, as our Revolutionary founders had to go, against the greatest military powers; to go, as those who stood against slavery had to go, against the power and weight of history and wrong tradition; to go, as those who stood in the civil rights movement had to go, against the prejudices and habits that had shaped those wrong policies--if we have the courage to risk all, in order to stand alone, if need be, in witness of justice, from whence does our courage come?

I think we know. It comes from that knowledge so deeply ingrained in our great American tradition. It is the knowledge that George Washington acknowledged on his knees alone in the woods of Pennsylvania on the snowy nights, when he did not seek his hope in the strength and courage of his troops, but rather sought his hope in the strength and wisdom of God.

From whence does that courage come? It comes from the same place that Sojourner Truth sought it, when she found the courage to go back in to the very jaws of slavery and possible death in order to bring out those enslaved people, to rescue those enslaved people who were subject still to the slave system. She no more said that, having escaped to the North, she could leave those souls in bondage, than we can say, having come into the light of the world, we can leave those souls in the womb in danger. [applause] From whence did she get the courage to return, time and again, into the jaws of fear and death? She tells us where she got it.

I know that these days--actually, I've noticed that it's almost becoming acceptable now for people to admit that they talk to God. [laughter] No, really! But what is still being stigmatized as a sure sign that you're on the near lunatic fringe of Christian fanaticism and religious fanaticism is the mere suggestion that you believe He might talk back to you. [laughter]

But I want to tell you, though, that you go back into the history of this land, and you will find that the people who braved that dark and ugly injustice of slavery in order to bring souls forth in the Underground Railroad, the people who stood before this nation, like Frederick Douglass, to move its conscience towards right--they confess before all and sundry that every word they spoke, and every step they took, and every action that they took was not the result of their own courage, it was because they had made that deal with God! [wild, prolonged applause throughout next several sentences] And they heard His words! And they offered Him their allegiance! That they had talked to Him, and He had talked back to them, to tell them that they had to take a stand for justice!!

That's right. So I want, also, though, to say a word about the spirit that results from that source of encouragement. Because there's a willful misunderstanding now about that being fomented in the media and by others who have a vested interest in continuing and perpetuating the culture of death that is being grounded in the pro-abortion doctrine. And they want us to believe that somehow, if you are willing to stand up and take a stand, that this somehow means that you are violent and unrestrained. So little, so little do they understand! Because, you see, it is the culture of death that brings the spirit of violence into our world. (amens) We know that violence in the world begins with a motion of the heart. And that when the heart is hardened by the doctrine of selfish self-indulgence, that allows people to believe that their convenience, that their whim is more important than their obligation before God to their offspring, that that does to the moral heart of our humanity the greatest violence of all.

And we find the courage to resist it, to resist not only the doctrine of violence but the spirit of violence. We find the courage because we know that those who can rely upon the mighty word and power of God to move the hearts of men do not have to appeal to bullets, because our prayers will be more powerful than any guns! [applause] And we do not have to sanction or in any way join with anyone who is going to join in that spirit of violence to take a life, because we are willing, if need be, to literally lay down our own! [applause]

And that's the spirit that you represent. You can lay down your life in many ways, you know. People have done so in the course of American history on the battle fields of justice. They have done so, sometimes in the course of our struggles for justice, as those young children did in a Birmingham church, blown up by the harbingers of hate. But you can do it, as well, in other ways. You can do it in the prayer chains and the rosaries. You can do it in the rescues and the non-violent means that we can use to appeal to the conscience of America. Or you can do it in other ways. When braving the ridicule and the abandonment of all, when braving even the dread possibility that you might not get to speak at the Republican National Convention! (laughter, applause)

We stand up before this nation and the world to bear witness to the truth--an American truth and God's truth, that in this instance, are one and the same. The truth that we cannot have the right to take that innocent human life in the womb or arbitrarily to take any human life, because the dignity of that life and the security of that life are ultimately in the hands and for the decision only of Almighty God.

We know this. But I think what a lot of Americans seem to have forgotten is that is not just a statement that we here in this room know, it is also the statement that is the great foundation stone of all our freedom and all our hopes as a people. From all around the world, people have come or been brought to these shores. I marvel sometimes. Black people and white people and people of every ethnic background and national persuasion, people of all different religions and viewpoints. We are truly a nation of nations. A people of many peoples. But I think we also know what Lincoln knew, that for all our different heritage and all our varying backgrounds, we are yet one nation. Because any who are willing to subscribe to those great principles of justice and to bring into their laws and into their communities and into their hearts that mutual respect for human dignity, which is the true ground of justice--any such people are blood of our blood and heart of our heart, Americans all, and human beings worthy of respect.

This is the real ground of our unity.

Oh, they can go out there and offer all kinds of delusive visions of the future; tell them that optimism means that we must have more money and more jobs and more goods and more things. And I, for one, I have no problem with all the promise of prosperity. But I know that it can only be fulfilled on the strength of our dedication to the spiritual truth that is in fact the heart of our union as Americans.

We are not one nation because we have all the wealth and all the riches and all the power in the world. We are one nation because we subscribe to one creed, which promises to all equal respect for life under the authority of God. We are bound together by that faith, which is not a sectarian or denominational faith. It is an American faith and a human hope. In the spirit of that faith, let us go forward in prayer and without fail to offer that hope to the world. And as we rescue each child in the womb, so we rescue from oblivion that hope for humankind.

[thunderous applause]