Alan Keyes
July 4, 1999

Thank you very much. Can everyone hear me there? Yes. This is wonderful.

Well, first of all, I want to say a hearty thank you to everybody for the wonderful welcome that you've given to me and to the family today. We've been having a pretty busy time. I was happy that we were able to arrange it so that we are just able to come, finally, at the end of our efforts in the course of the last few days, and spend a good leisurely Fourth of July with all of you. And it's been a great afternoon. Thank you very much.

In gratitude for the wonderful warm feelings that you've engendered in me and my family, I have to spend the next few minutes doing my best to depress you as much as I can--so I'm a grateful fellow. Now, why would I say a thing like that? Well, I'll tell you why.

We are here today, the Fourth of July--we often say now that we're celebrating our independence. Strictly speaking, you know that's not true. On July 4th we don't celebrate the independence of America. Our independence was actually declared by our Founding Patriots on July 2nd, the actual vote that declared independence from Great Britain took place. What happened on the Fourth of July was the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

What we celebrate today is not just the deed, but the declaration of principles and beliefs--taken together, the American Creed--that was laid as the foundation stone of this nation's life on July the Fourth. And the reason I started out saying I have to spend a few minutes depressing all of you a little bit is because, if we're honest with ourselves on this Fourth of July, then we ought to look at the condition of our country, and acknowledge the truth that if the Declaration of Independence and the truths and principles that it represents are still the creed that defines the American identity--that states to all of us those beliefs that are at the heart and soul of our national life, that our heart is dying, and our soul is in danger, and our liberty is almost gone--then it's time we woke up and admitted it.

We celebrate this Independence Day in an era when, if we don't wake up as a people--and I mean now, not tomorrow or the next day, but urgently, soon--then that liberty which we celebrate, those ideas which we celebrate, will no longer be embodied in the practices and the institutions of our nation.

If I were talking to you several years ago, I would have made that statement as a possibility. I would have said, "Well, if we wait a few years, or in a generation, or this or that. . . ." The course of the last couple of years have convinced me that we are in a greater danger than I think any of us would have anticipated. If you had told me several years ago that there would have been a president sitting in the White House in the United States of America who had stood before the American people, broken his oath, perjured himself, shown contempt for our judicial system and every decent value of heart and mind necessary to sustain our family lives, and that, after all of that openly done and admitted, he would still be sitting in the White House as president of the United States, I would tell you that you lie. But today we know it has happened. It's true.

The crisis that produced that some people want to say, or wanted to say at the time, "Oh that doesn't matter, that's his private life." First of all, when you put your hand on the Bible and swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, when you violate it by perjuring yourself in those courts of law that you are supposed to respect, that perjury is not your personal matter.

But what's even more important than that, when you have shown yourself to be someone whose word can't be trusted, who does not have the integrity that's needed to tell the people of this country the truth--I had a simple question in the course of that whole impeachment business; I have it now. How can we place in command of the most awesome military power the world has ever seen, a military power that can, at a stroke, account for thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of human lives, how can we place such an awesome power in the hands of anyone whose moral judgment and character we cannot trust? The president leads our nation not only in peace, but in war.

And I remember during the course of the impeachment--because everybody would say, "Well, we're not at war. We don't have to worry about that." Isn't it a coincidence that the first thing he does after the perjured Senate lets him off the hook, the first thing he does is take this nation into war? And into a war, by the way, that we had no business being involved with, that involved issues that in no way threatened the United States of America and its people, and that was conducted according to the most immoral strategy of any war that we have ever conducted in the history of this country.

You keep an immoral president, and he leads you down the path of immoral conflict.

I say all of this by way of illustrating, though, that the crisis of our nation's institutions is not for tomorrow. It is happening now. Just as this president took us into war without a declaration, remained in that war in violation of the War Powers Act and every stricture of our law and Constitution, so every day in many ways, we are seeing the president, the courts, and others hold in contempt those things that are necessary to sustain our freedom. Why is it happening? And more importantly, why do we tolerate it?

I think that's a question we need to be asking ourselves every day now, if we want to see our children grow up to the same heritage of liberty that we ourselves have been able to enjoy. If we are letting it slip, we need to ask ourselves, "Why?" And though it seemed incongruous to some people at the time, I remember getting calls on my radio show from people that said, "You know, if this person is guilty and his people are guilty of such treasons, why are they going after him for this sex stuff?" And it was as if they looked at the situation, and rightly realized that our national security interests have been fundamentally betrayed over the course of the last six years.

I understand that there are some people in this country who don't want to say it out loud, but when I see, during the course of an administration, that an enemy halfway around the world with the will (as they have just recently declared) to take down our way of life and our system is being handed the secrets of our technology, is being given the codes to all of our nuclear weapons--and when I find that, in the course of it, the people who have perpetrated it aren't being pursued, and are not being prosecuted, it gives rise to the suspicion that this wasn't theft at all. They didn't steal it; this leader gave it away. And I think it's time that we called it by its right name. That is not incompetence, it's treason! And I would ask you again in the face of that kind of betrayal, why is it that we're still so calm about it? I don't understand.

We had senators come forward in the course of the Cox Report when it came out. They told us we had suffered the worst damage to our national security that we have seen since Pearl Harbor. Now, I understand that the Secretary of Defense, Cohen, during the course of the recent war in Yugoslavia, went before Congress to say it wasn't really a war because we were only bombing--and that's why Congress didn't have to declare war.

The mention of Pearl Harbor does bring to mind that other little episode of bombing, though.

If bombing doesn't constitute war, then I guess FDR overreacted to that Pearl Harbor thing. I don't think so. If we have suffered the worst damage to our national security since Pearl Harbor, and if we wake up to the situation we're in, it means that our national security must be hanging by a thread. It means that we have handed to a new enemy the wherewithal to overshadow this nation's life and our children with the self-same nuclear threat that we have just defeated in the Soviet Union--and that it was done purposefully and with malice aforethought.

If that's the case, my friends--we're all on this wonderful, lovely day in the midst of the wholesome and good-hearted people of Iowa. I would like to pretend that all is as it should be. This is not so in America now. If we didn't understand it from these other things--from the scandals in the White House, from the paralysis of the Congress, from the betrayal of our national security--then the blood of those crying out from the ground in cities all over this country, and finally even in high schools like Columbine High School in Colorado, that blood ought to tell us that there is something wrong in America. They want us to treat it as normal when we have young people in black trench coats, their hearts filled with violence and evil, stalking the halls to kill their fellow students. That's not normal! That's not America. And by the way, that's not the fault of the guns in their hands, that's the fault of the moral evil that is in their hearts.

And if we see that evil, if we see that corruption in high places and in low places, taking our security and taking the lives of our children, I think it's time we began to admit--the stock market may be going up, and for some (particularly those who aren't being destroyed by depressed farm prices) the economy may be great, but I've got news for you. If the moral heart of America is being destroyed, if the conscience of America is being undone, then it won't be long until all the rest tumbles from its pedestal.

What are we gonna do about it? That's the question I think faces the American people today. But to know what to do, we've got to know what's wrong. And on this July Fourth, I think we can especially see, if we're willing to look back at the heritage we celebrate, we can see what's wrong.

Today, in the Declaration of Independence, we celebrate the words with which our Founders stated the basic moral principles of our way of life. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," they wrote, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed." Many of us have heard those words time and again on July Fourth, and on other times in the course of our learning and our lives. But you know, one of the things that breaks my heart about this country today is that we mouth those words, but there are too many times when we don't seem to understand their true importance.

We are willing to stand up and join with others when we're whining about our rights, when we're going into court to make sure nobody tramples on them, when we're demanding that we must have equality in this, that, and the other thing. We can see all the ways in which those words justify us and our causes and crusades on behalf of those things that we demand for our selfish interests. How many times are we willing to step back--as I believe we must do now if we are to save our country--and look at the one fundamental truth that above all cries out in that language, that requires our attention, that requires our understanding, that requires our allegiance because it communicates the truth that is the only sure foundation of our strong character as a people?

Our Founders didn't just tell us that we have rights. They told us where those rights come from. And it was not from constitutions, and it was not from victories on the battlefield. It was not from stock markets and the strength of our economic life. It was not from any human power or any human judgments whatsoever. For, in that great language, in those great words, they invite us to bow our knee before that Source of our rights, which is the Source of all our strength and all our dignity: the power, the will, the authority of our Creator, God.

This is the truth. This is the truth that is the solid rock on which this nation stands. But, my friends, in so many ways in the course of the last several decades as a nation, we have turned our back on this truth. We have been willing to follow those who are trying to tell us that we can redefine our freedom--turning our backs on God, forgetting His will, forgetting His laws--and instead set up our own desires, our own passions in its place.

Chief among the lies that they perpetrate is the one that, in my opinion, epitomizes the depth of moral corruption that is today destroying our conscience, destroying our heart for citizenship and family life. It is the lie that the right to life of our children, our precious future in the womb, comes from their mother's choice. We can't have it both ways. Either that lie is to be our creed, or the Declaration is to be our creed. Either our rights come from human choice, or they come from the hand of God. You can't have it both ways. And if you mean to retain our allegiance to the great principles of the Declaration that we celebrate today, then the first step we must take as a people is to overturn the decisions, and the policies, and the judgments, and the laws that represent the rejection of the most fundamental principle of our moral life.

Abortion must be driven as policy and fact from this nation's life and from the precincts of all our laws and public places. Let that be the first step in what ought to be our efforts to reclaim our rightful place--not as the subjects and consumers of some vast utopian government service machine, but instead as what we're supposed to be: the citizens of a country in which our liberty gives us the right to participate, and the responsibility to help to shape the destiny of our country.

Do we want to reclaim that self-government? Because if we do, then we're gonna have to reclaim control of our schools, we're going to have to take them out of the hands of bureaucrats and educrats and put them back in the hands of parents who stand before God with the first responsibility for their children's lives. If we want to restore that self-government, then we are going to have to return control of our money and our economy to the hands of the people who work for it. We're going to have to look in the eye those who, for the last several decades, have told us, "Hey, give us a little more control of your dollars. We'll wipe out poverty. Give us a little more control of your dollars. We'll take care of all your needs. We'll take care of your aging parents. We'll take care of everything for you"--and we have watched as, time after time, they have raised the burden on our working life, taking more and more out of our income. And what have we gotten for it? Schools that aren't good enough to educate our children, and policies that are not good enough to provide for our future, in spite of all the earnings that we have placed in the Social Security system.

My friends, when are we gonna wake up? The key to this nation's strength has not been a government that does everything for us, but a people with the character, the strength, the willingness and responsibility to do what they have to for themselves. I think that we must, right now, begin to reclaim those things that will give us the strong position to be that people once again.

But that reclaiming of our rights as a people--that willingness to stand up and assert our rights over our money, our rights over our schools, our rights over our businesses against an ever-expanding state of government-domination and regulation--is going to require that we defeat one argument that's made across the board by the folks who are trying to justify the surrender of all our liberties. Because every time we say that it's time for us to take some of this power back into our own hands, what do they tell us? "We can't give you the control of the schools, you'll mess it up. You'll ruin the schools. They'll be destroyed if we let parents have the main say." We ask for control of our money, what do we hear? "We can't lower your taxes, we can't abolish the income tax. Let you get back to the Constitution and let you control all the money you earn? Can't do it. Why? Because you won't take care of the poor. You won't take care of the elderly. You won't provide for your aging parents."

Has it ever occurred to us to ask why it is that, after the hard work, the wisdom, the strength, the initiative of this great people to have built up the greatest country, the strongest economy, the most successful republic in the history of the world, we are being told now that we aren't even fit to take care of our own families and our own children? With what contempt do they speak of us now? But what is more important, why do we have such contempt for ourselves that we sit patiently and listen while they tell us all the things we are no longer fit to do?

It's gotten to the point that they're even telling us now we're not fit to have in our possession the instruments with which to defend our families and our lives and our liberties. They want to take the Second Amendment, flush it down the toilet. Some people think that's about guns. I've got news for you. There are some folks over in Kosovo right now who could tell you what Second Amendment rights are about. I think it's time we began to draw the lessons of that. When people come and tell you you're not fit to hold on to the instruments of your own defense, that means that they want to take away the means of that defense. And if you think thereafter they mean for you to be free, you haven't read the history of oppression through all the history of the world.

We have reached the point where the crisis of our character is becoming the crisis of all our institutions, and the crisis through which we will determine whether we will hold onto or surrender those rights and prerogatives which are essential if we are to retain our liberties. And all of this is possible because they play on the lack of moral self-confidence of so many people in this country who no longer believe in each other, who no longer believe in themselves, because they think that we have stepped back from the moral truths that alone can give us the sense that we are, in fact, a decent people, capable of doing the right thing with our rights and our freedoms.

That's why I say to you today what I'll say everywhere I go, for as long as anybody's willing to listen. Many people will come through--they'll talk to you about the money, or the budgets, the military this's and thats. But I'll tell you this. If you really care about America, if you really care to re-establish our strength based on the great principles we celebrate today, then join me in placing number one on the agenda of our concern the restoration of this nation's moral principles, of its moral conscience, of its moral character.

That is the first challenge we have. On that, everything else depends. And if you believe in the truth of that, then I'd ask you to join together with so many of the other people in Iowa and around the country who are fighting in a great army of moral renewal intended to restore this nation's allegiance--not only in lip service, but in heart and in fact to the great principles, including the first principles of God's authority, on which this nation rests. It is only if we are willing to stand up and meet that responsibility--and I don't mean tomorrow. I don't mean when next election comes. I don't mean in 2000, or 2004, or any time. Right now! If you're not willing to step forward and fight this battle, I'll tell you, I'll warn you, with everything that's in my heart, don't expect we'll have this battle to fight for much longer.

A people that is not able to understand the danger to its liberty, not willing to step forward and fight the battle for its liberty, will not have its liberty for much longer.

So I would plead with you in the name of those children who are yet to come, in the name of this world which has been inspired by the success of our God-fearing freedom that remains to be led and inspired by it in the 21st century--for the sake of all those things, think now on your duty as citizens. And turning where we must turn if we are, in fact, to find the strength to rebuild this nation's hope, turning to our Father, God, let us go down on our knees before Him and pray that the nation's heart will be stirred once again with respect for His name, with respect for His will and His law, that we will return to that strong sense of our own discipline of respect for the God-given value of our children's lives, on which alone we can build a right moral conscience as citizens.

Standing on the strength and confidence that comes from that rebuilt confidence, we will reclaim our control over family, over schools, over money, and finally over that government which is not to be our master, but our servant and our tool.

I think that if we can find it in ourselves to make this prayer and to act according to this plea, then we can enter, in spite of all the things they're trying to hype up to disturb us, we can enter the 21st century--not with confidence only in ourselves, but above all with that confidence that comes as it came to our Founders and so many in American history, from our faith in Almighty God. His special hand of providence has been on this country since it began, since Washington crossed the Delaware famously clutching in his heart this one thing: his belief that God's providence was on the side of his revolution. They did not have much in the way of equipment. They didn't have boots even, for the feet of all their soldiers. They didn't have all of the paraphernalia and training of their British adversaries. If you'd been taking bets you would have bet that they were gonna lose. But they didn't stand up and say, "We've gotta go with the winner." They said in their hearts, "We must go with what's right. We must fight so that this country will be based upon a sense of God's will and God's justice."

Those of us who are, by our own profession and faith, the people of God, who have been washed in the blood of His Son, who look for our hope and our salvation to His mercies and who look for guidance to His will--I think that, in the end, our willingness to bear witness to those truths in the public life of our country will make the difference between its survival and its fall.

I pray to the Lord God that, as He has encouraged us with His mercies to believe that in spite of all our sins and faults we shall someday be with Him in the joys of paradise, so I would pray that He encourage us now--in spite of all the things that seem to stand against right and decency--to believe that if together we put our hand in the hand of God and our faith in the truth of His promise and His word, we can, by following our hearts and simply doing what is right, return our country to the true path of conscience, of character, of true liberty.

On this Fourth of July, I can think of no better dedication than that we dedicate ourselves to this: the cause of restoring in truth what the Declaration we celebrate truly stands for. If we have this commitment, then I think we can be sure our God will be faithful and He will not withhold from us, as He has not in the past, so He will not in the future, His blessings of liberty.

God bless you.