Posted on 02/14/2005 9:46:45 AM PST by metalmanx2j
MARYLAND - Scheduled to speak at an Equality Maryland rally for gay rights today, Maya Keyes, 19, daughter of former Illinois Republican U.S. Senate candidate Alan Keyes, is speaking publicly for the first time about her sexuality and her soured relationship with her parents. Both Advocate.com and The Washington Post ran articles over the weekend wherein Maya Keyes discussed the situation.
Read Maya Keyes' interview with Advocate.com:
Maya Keyes ends speculation about her sexuality.
On Sunday, Marc Fisher of the Washington Post reported,
Maya Keyes loves her father and mother. She put off college and moved from the family home in Darnestown to Chicago to be with her dad on a grand adventure. Even though she disagrees with him on "almost everything" political, she worked hard for his quixotic and losing campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Now Maya Keyes -- liberal, lesbian and a little lost -- finds herself out on her own. She says her parents -- conservative commentator and perennial candidate Alan Keyes and his wife, Jocelyn -- threw her out of their house, refused to pay her college tuition and stopped speaking to her.
Maya, 19, says her parents cut her off because of who she is -- "a liberal queer." Tomorrow, she will take her private dispute with her dad into the open. She is scheduled to make her debut as a political animal, speaking at a rally in Annapolis sponsored by Equality Maryland, the state's gay rights lobby.
She plans to talk about "what it was like for me growing up as a liberal queer in a very conservative household. I've known so many other people in a position like mine, where their families really don't want much to do with them. Maybe I can help by talking about it."
The issue of Maya Keyes' sexuality came up during the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois when Capitol Fax publisher Rich Miller discovered a blog apparently populated by Maya that discussed her family and her sexuality and included pictures of her kissing another girl. The story remained underground during the Senate campaign thanks in large measure to the campaign's unwillingness to confirm or deny that the blog was indeed Maya's.
According to Fisher's piece in the Washington Post, despite the fact that Maya has been kicked out of her home, a San Francisco-based charity, the Point Foundation, has stepped in to provide the money needed for Maya to begin her studies at Brown University.
Interestingly, Maya Keyes seems to harbor little ill will towards her father. Again, from the Washington Post,
Maya still sounds more sad than angry about her situation. "I wouldn't want to do anything to hurt my father," she says. Like other gay relatives of prominent conservatives, she has struggled with how public to be about her sexuality...Maya is looking for work, planning to move in with friends in Washington or a brother in Boston. She hopes to get back in touch with her mom and dad..."It all seems kind of ridiculous," she says, "because I love him. He's my father."
© 2005 IllinoisLeader.com
And just how do they do this? Suggest that the judge might enjoy a little running around naked with other similarly middled men and women in the forest culminated by a blood sacrifice of a new born? Yeah I believe that when I see it.
I agree with your opinion on responsibility for one's actions.
I am one who does not think a parent "owes" their child a college education. Keyes has every right to withdraw financial support.
My issue is with throwing her out of the house and not speaking with her. If the facts are as presented regarding this, IMHO, this is an issue which is not worth totally severing your relationship with your child. There are other options, other ways.
Perhaps it is temporary and part of their coping process. Are they prepared to spend a lifetime not speaking with her or not allowing her in the house if she does not change her lifestyle?
It is easy to love someone when things are going well. It is hard when things get rough and you feel betrayed. But that is when they need your love the most.
Yeah. It's hard to say without all the facts, and I do not think you can underestimate the turmoil this has caused the other children whom the parents must also consider. Do they need to see this lesbian lifestyle displayed before them on a daily basis? Also, we do not know what other ways Maya has rebelled against the authority of her parents. She obviously feels that this respect travels only one way or she wouldn't be humiliating her father like this. I don't know, I've seen many a troubled teenager -- over this issue and many others. The rest of the family has needs too. That's all I am saying. Love doesn't mean the rest of the family must suffer indefinitely. Maya is 19 and has no right to control the lives of the rest of her family. I will be praying for them and respect however the parents choose to handle it. I'm not the one who has to live with her, nor do I have to worry about the other kids who have emotional ties of their own, to the parents and their sister. I just don't think the rest of us can really judge the situation fairly. I think Alan Keyes is a good man and other than say a prayer for them, I will respect his privacy on this.
The lesson in this is all families have issues to deal with. No one is immune.
Yeah. It's sad though.
Not mentally degenerate! Would be better defined as being bound by the sin of homosexuality. All of us are born with certain weaknesses and sinful tendencies. Homosexuals yield to the temptation and then become enslaved to it. Pedophilia, adultery, beastiality, and other sexual sins, drunkeness and drug addiction, are no different. The solution is to recognize the sin, repent and come to Christ for deliverance.
What would you expect her to say?
I'd bet that Daddy encouraged her to go Ivy League as he did, and was quite happy when she was accepted.
It also probably looked good when she deferred college for a year to do missionary work in her mother's home country of India, and when she deferred college for another semester to work on her father's Quixotic Senate campaign.
Agreed, except: Cheney seems to think that homosexuality is a-ok. So what would he have to "forgive" or "come to terms with"? All's okay. In that respect, Keyes is closer to doing what's right. Kids should know that parents expect them to renounce homosexuality. Lots of people have done it. You can too, Maya!
There are a couple of names missing from these threads. Have you noticed that?
Can you provide one shred of evidence for this?
Enough obviously.
Like compromising on their religious convictions? Or become RINO's?
Ours too. She made her choice, and it was in direct opposition to everything that their family values stood for.
She isn't content with just being out and on her own and able to do as she pleases. She needs to rubs her parents faces in it, too and continue to hurt them, and work against their values.
I guess that's what people with no moral values do best.
Its talk like this that keeps the democratic party alive. Its no wonder that they get so much traction when they call us all nuts.
Don't expect to every get a straight answer on this. Its all based on anecdotal experiences with those that have "turned away from the sinful lifestyle." Objective statistics just don't bear it out however.
Its ideas like this that make us look like backwoods idiots.
From this from other of her posts to her blog, she's just had to help bury a friend from high school who had been kicked out of his house at age 16 by his God-fearing, conservatively-correct parents and ended up living on the streets.God works in really screwed up ways sometimes - there are times in life when He doesn't just nudge you gently in the direction He wants you to go, he sorta - takes a 2x4 and whacks you over the head a few times - last month felt a lot like that for me.
These past few weeks two things happened and it became absolutely clear to me why I had to speak here today.
To begin with, I was having issues at home - issues that we'd been having for quite a while, but things just came to a head - liberal queer + conservative Republican just doesn't mesh too well. So that was making life a little turbulent - and on top of that, the second thing was that while I was out in Chicago I got news from my friends back here around DC that one of my really good friends was not doing too well.
This kid, Shymmer, he and I were a lot alike. Like me, he grew up queer in a very conservative household. Only, he came out to his parents back when we were juniors in high school - and they promptly just threw him out of their house. So, sixteen years old, not even through with high school, and he was out on the streets. He did manage to finish high school - somehow even with no roof over his head he kept his grades up, got into good colleges - but after a year out there things were just getting worse and worse for him - he was going home with any man who'd give him a roof over his head for the night, wound up with some people who just abused him awfully - by the time we caught up with him again it was just horrifying to see what too much time spent trying to survive out there had done to him.
The thing that really got to me in this whole situation was the contrast between what's happened to both of us -
For me, people got to hear that things were difficult for me, and I got flooded with emails of support, people telling me, don't worry, no matter how rough it gets, we're all sending you our best wishes - somehow you'll make it through everything okay. And that was great, I was really touched; but in the midst of it all I got this call about Shymmer back home, who had lost so much weight they were thinking of taking him to the hospital; I'd been saying lots of prayers for him and in the middle of praying once it just hit me how wrong it all was. The first time something goes wrong in my life I get hundreds of people offering support, prayers, donations, people offering me spare bedrooms to crash in and telling me how they were going to make sure that I got through school alright; people writing to me to tell me that even if it feels like everything's going downhill there are people out there who care. And Shymmer, he'd been out there for over two years now; been hungry and freezing and beaten up and raped and his situation was so incomparably worse than mine; and what support was offered him? He got the support his handful of friends had to offer; but where is the community that offers to stand in solidarity behind him? Where are the hundreds of expressions of sympathy, support, outrage that this boy who had had such a bright future had spent two years starving in alleys?The worst part is that he isn't the only one. This past summer I read in the International Herald Tribune something that anyone who has much to do with homeless kids has probably already noticed - approximately 40% of homeless youth were LGBTQ. For 3-10% of the population to make up 40% of street kids - think about that. I have known a lot of street kids; and I have known a whole lot of queer street kids, kids who were cut off by their parents solely because of who they are, kids who'd done absolutely nothing to deserve the treatment they were getting. I've seen these kids struggle out there and I've seen these kids die out there - kids like Shymmer, who passed away this Friday - and I have seen far too much silence about the reality of this problem. I won't be silent any longer.
So yes, this is a speech about how it's hard growing up queer in a conservative household - but it's not a speech about me. Sure, I did grow up in a really conservative household; and, okay, it was a slightly more high-profile household than most people's - but this isn't a speech about me. This is about the thousands of kids across the country growing up in houses where they're raised hearing constantly how they are somehow wrong, unnatural, immoral just because of who they are - kids who are rejected by those who should love them most - and we have to figure out what we can do to make sure that during those times when it feels like everything in the world is rejecting them, they know there are resources out there they can turn to; there are people out there who will say to them, I care.
Of course this is her side of the story, yadda yadda yadda. But if I had been lesbian and I grew up with a sanctimonious blowhard politician of a father, I could easily have embraced loony leftism at that age just as an emotional refuge.
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