An Alan Keyes Sampler
* On strengthening the family: “Family life does not depend on material wealth. . . . [If it did,] the most stable families in the world would be in Hollywood.”
* Affirmative action: “Discrimination wasn’t wrong because it favored white people. It was wrong because it’s unjust. And if it’s unjust, it can’t be just if it’s used for me. So I say . . . let’s treat every human being . . . based on individual merit.”
* On parents having total control of schools: “Are we in a country where people ascribe to the government the power to brainwash children? Children do not belong to the government, they do not belong to the society. They are . . . the trust and responsibility of the parents. If we take any other view, we destroy the family. . . . [Certainly] any freedom can be abused. Does that mean we take it away? . . . Freedom has its rough edges that way.”
* Endangered species laws: “We seem to be trying to go nature one better . . . [by saying that] no species that exists in our time is ever going to perish. This would actually be unnatural. . . . The dinosaurs are not here right now. Nature is no respecter of species. It gives each an allotted portion of time in the great historical continuum and then it disappears.”
* Love: “Not the ‘Baywatch’ love that you see on TV, but the love that’s there year after year, on days when you no longer look good in a bathing suit. . . . On days when you don’t even like each other very much . . . days when you do out of love things no one could pay you to do otherwise. And you grow to realize that kind of love is what your family, and your life, has been about.”
* Abortion: “What’s the difference between [Susan Smith’s] decision [to drown her children in a car] . . . and the decision of any woman who walks into a clinic and gets her offspring scraped out of her womb? . . . The only question becomes: Is that [embryo] human life or not? And at the end of the day, I say I don’t know. [But] if we’re not certain, if we can’t agree on whether it’s life or it’s not life, in which direction do we err?”
* Gay rights: “If the government tells you homosexuality is right when the Bible that many of us read says it’s wrong, then that’s government-enforced morality. It’s a state religion.”
* On crime: “You open the newspapers now and the stray bullets passing through the walls are killing infants in the crib and old men reading their Bible verses in front of their home. . . . We live in a time that doesn’t seem to have respect for anything or anybody . . . not for the high, not for the low. Life is getting dirt cheap, because we have no respect for it.”
* Sources: Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Alan Keyes Network Home Page