Alan Keyes
April 8, 1995

"The Principles that Unite Us as a People"

Ambassador Keyes was the closing speaker among Republican Presidential hopefuls at the Delaware State Republican Dinner on Saturday, April 8, 1995 in Wilmington. His remarks followed immediately those of Senator Arlen Spector, who received mixed but vocal response to his exhortation to take abortion out of politics and the pro-life plank out of the Republican Party platform. Senator Specter devoted most of his speech to economic issues. The other candidates who spoke were Senator Phil Gramm, Senator Richard Lugar and Congressman Bob Dornan. Their speeches centered around economic and defense issues.

Thank you. Every now and again when I am about to begin a speech, I am reminded of someone who once told me about speeches, that they are a little bit like war--that it's not who's standing before the battle, it's who's standing after. This evening we're going to have a real test of that, because I really have to get something off my heart today.

We, I think, are pretty much all in agreement about certain things. This is true. And on any given day you could lay out 10 or 15 things on which every Republican who is in this room, probably--and every one of us who is standing for the Presidency--would agree.

We would agree on less government, and we would agree on lower taxation, and we would agree on balancing the budget. We are coming to an agreement on the need for a radical overhaul of our tax system, and to restore to our families, and our businesses, and our private sector control over a greater share of this economy and its resources--to take that control out of the hands of government bureaucrats and politicians and put it back into the hands of the American people. We agree about this.

And so you could lay out some principles, and we could stand on those principles, and we could act as if it was all over and we could smile at one another and go forward. And we might serve the purposes of the Republican Party. But I didn't know that's what we were about.

I guess I didn't become a Republican to serve the purposes of the Republican Party. I became a Republican to serve the good of the United States. I became a Republican to serve the principles of this country. I became a Republican to stand up for that banner of principle without which this nation cannot survive.

That means that there are going to be times when, in order to stand for that nation, I must do what I must do. And we must do what we must do--no matter what the difficulty, no matter what the controversy, no matter how many people tell us we must stand back and be silent. Because America will not heal from that silence. She will perish.

There are times when as a people we face some really serious challenges to our fundamental principles, times when we pass through those moments in history when the American people are faced with what I call Declaration issues.

Declaration issues, my friend, they go deeper than the things on which we can unite as Republicans, because they touch the things--the only things, in fact--on which we can unite as Americans.

There's no substitute for the Declaration. I listen to people talk. They come up with all their little lexicon of things we can agree on, but it's not going to be enough to substitute for that one succinct statement of the principles of right and wrong, justice and injustice, that was laid down by our Founders at the beginning--and that has become, throughout our history, the banner of the struggle for justice and right for which so many people in each generation laid down their lives on battlefields in this country and around the world.

That is a heritage that we cannot replace, and I think it's a heritage we cannot throw away lightly.

And yet, if we reach one of those moments when we are faced with a Declaration issue, and we decide we're going to throw it away, then we're making a judgment to abandon that heritage, to defile those sacrifices and to try to stand up on some ground and claim we are Americans, when we have abandoned the principles that unite us as a people.

We can't do it. Or at least we cannot do it and survive.

Quiet as it may seem today, I realize that the issue of abortion is not an issue that has slave auction blocks dirtying up our vistas in our cities, and it's not something where you can go down to the fields and watch the people toiling beneath the whip. And so, we might think that we can put it aside and be quiet about it.

The struggle that we are engaged in is not one which armies will engage. As a matter of fact, it's a quiet kind of struggle.

But you know, if we look back in our history, even in his youth Abraham Lincoln had the wisdom to recognize that when the decisive moment of America's destiny came--that moment which would decide whether we will survive as a free people or not--it was not going to come through some dramatic invasion. It was not going to come through a foreign threat or a foreign enemy.

He said in a speech in his youth in 1837 to the Young Men's Lyceum, he said that it would come from within--the quiet corruption of our character, the abandonment of our respect for law as the foundation of our freedom.

It would be a quiet controversy, silently hidden away, maybe in sterile abortion clinics, maybe in the private places of the heart.

But, you know, it's in the private places of the heart that freedom is made or unmade by the discipline we create there.

If we claim for ourselves as individuals the right to trample on the basic principles enunciated in the Declaration, then we will not be able to reprimand our government when they stand upon the same ground and trample the same principles. If we want to live in a society that is free of despotism and tyranny according to the great words of the Declaration, then we ourselves in our lives and our choices must respect its principles.

And we must be willing to accord to every other human being and every other human life the same respect that we demand from government and from every power on earth.

Because, in the great Declaration of our principles, it didn't say that all are created equal "if you so choose." It said that all are created equal by the power and the will of God, and that we must respect their rights as we respect that will.

And so, when I hear folks stand before Republican gatherings and tell us that, well, we should just take the abortion issue out of our politics and forget about it by being silent on it--it's just a "private issue"--that's to me like saying what they said in the 19th century.

Do you realize there were people in the 19th century who thought slavery was a private issue? They did. An issue of private property, they said.

Now, some of you might not feel as closely touched and affected by that view as I do. But I often tell people that what this whole debate boils down to is whether some of us get to decide whether others of us are human, whether we get to draw the line and on one side of the line will be the human beings and on the other side of the line will be the non-humans, and we get to determine that.

Don't you realize that that opens the door to every form of tyranny? Because all I have to do if I want to snuff out your life or trample on your rights is decide that you're not human. And, of course, you'll look at me and say, "But you can't do that." And I'll say, "Well, I remember a time in this history, the last time the American people decided they were going to draw the line, my folks ended up on the wrong side of it."

And I don't think it was because we had the poor judgment to draw the line in the wrong place. I think it was because we claimed a right we do not have. We do not have the right to draw that line. God drew it, and all we have the right to do is respect His will!

I believe as a party if we are going to re-establish the fundamental discipline of freedom, then we are going to have to be willing to look our people in the eye--not just as a people but as individual men and women--and say that they, too, are bound by the Declaration.

Bound as government is bound. Bound as courts are bound. Bound as the legislature is bound.

Bound as every individual should be bound by the same respect for human rights. Because that respect is not a matter of law and courts and government. It is a matter of the basic principles of our identity and our respect for those principles which accord the ultimate authority to the will of God.

Now, of course there are going to be those people who say, "Well, preacher, that sounds pretty good, but I thought you were a politician. I didn't know this was a pulpit."

Now, I have to tell you, there are those folks who remember every now and again that Teddy Roosevelt was right, and that the Presidency is a bully pulpit. And it would be a good idea every now and again to put somebody in it who knows how to use it.

But aside from that, I think we should remember that the only things we have in common as a people are these moral principles--and that if we abandon them, it does have very practical consequences. It really does.

Consider, for instance, that most of the speakers who come up here will talk about how we need to deal with the welfare problem, or the crime problem, or the budget problem. But when you read the studies and surveys, it turns out that all of those problems are related to, what? The disintegration of our families. And whenever you look at the collapse of that family structure in so many families and so many communities, that's related to the breakdown of our basic sense of moral obligation and self-discipline and commitment.

We do not have in our families money problems only. We have problems of moral commitment. We have problems of moral perseverance. We have problems of moral self-respect.

We have problems that arise from the inability of individuals to recognize that they, too, must limit their choices and their will in order to preserve the basic institutions of our freedom and our identity.

And all of a sudden our adherence to those basic principles becomes a very practical matter. Because you know we're going to go on spending money until we have spent this country into total bankruptcy. But if we don't get a grip on ourselves and begin to understand that we do, as individual citizens, bear a deep responsibility for the moral destiny of this nation, then we will never recover.

It won't matter how many bills we pass to balance the budget. It won't matter how many times we pass the flat tax or the sales tax or any other economic reform, we will still go over the brink. Because what we really need to restore is the balance of our judgment and the balance of our moral will.

Our Founders understood, I think, the real nature of conservative principles that sometimes we are tempted to forget: if you want limited government, then you must have self-government at every level, starting with the individual. Without that self-government, without that discipline, limited government is a curse.

And we as conservatives have to be honest about this. If we lived in a society of uncontrollable thieves and murderers and rapists, we would not want a limited government. We'd want a government powerful enough to control their depredations. So if we are going to champion the cause of limited government and the return of power to the people, then we had better stand up for the principles on the basis of which we can restore the strong and decent character of our nation.

Without that character, freedom will be a curse. We will not pass it on as a blessing to future generations.

And I know that sometimes it can make folks uncomfortable to be reminded of this. But you know, it's not a really bad discomfort, because it's that discomfort that helps us to build the future. It is that discomfort that can have us looking around for what it is that we really value.

In the last few weeks and months, as I've put my toe in the waters of Presidential exploration and been bowled over by the tidal wave that swept me along as a result, I have been struck by one thing: from our media and our entertainment industry, from our writers and our movie people, you get the thought that America is a corrupt country in decline, having abandoned all its moral standards and having lost the sense of its direction. And maybe in their minds, and the minds of so many of these elites, that's true.

But I'll tell you something. There are families all over this country, and they're out there doing their best to raise their children decently, to keep their families strong, to keep their businesses straight, to put their communities on the right path.

And do you know the one principle we need to establish to get things right for a change at every level of government and society in this country? What we need to begin to do is put this country back where it used to be, where those mothers and fathers struggling to rear their children to be the future of this country will get our respect and our support, instead of getting a tax system that devours their resources, and movies and TV that tear down the values they are trying to inculcate in their children, and schools that are out of control and teaching their children not even to respect their own moral capacity.

So, as a party, I think we need to restore--and make it our vow now to restore--as the fundamental goal of all our politics, the respect that is owed to mothers and fathers and people who are doing their best to rear their children in decency to be citizens who can preserve our freedom and our peace.

I think if we recognize that, we'll all of a sudden realize that the practical and the moral side of our agenda come together in a perfect harmony.

This is not something that will divide our party. It is not something that will divide our nation. It is something that reminds us of those high principles, on the basis of which we can come together, whatever our race, whatever our creed, whatever our backgrounds. We can stand together on the common ground of decency, uniting as Americans in pursuit of that great destiny laid before us in the beginning, that we should be a shining example to mankind of the way in which this human race will come together, beneath a charter of law and of liberty, to realize the better destiny of us all.

Thank you very much.