And we look back on that record, and I want you to consult with yourselves, because we're being told many things these days. These folks keep asking me, every time I turn around I have some journalist asking me, "Where are you going to get the twenty million dollars, the forty million dollars, the fifty million dollars, the eighty-five hundred million dollars that is required these days to run for President of the United States?" Does it bother you a little bit, that they have decided that the office of the Presidency is an office to be bargained and bought and sold on the auction block in a marketplace, as it were, not of ideas and values, but the simple bartered marketplace of dollars and cents?
Is that true? Is it really true that we have reached the point that the only thing we can hope for in this country is the best President money can buy? Because, I have a feeling that a lot of those candidates didn't have much money in the bank, who stood forthrightly for Republican principles, and the courage and the loyalty to the values of the American people that no money can buy. I have a feeling that that courage and that spirit and that loyalty hark back to many other Americans -- who fought on battlefields in Korea and the First World War and the Second World War - Americans who marched to their certain death during the Civil War and who understood that there are certain things that money cannot buy. There are certain things money cannot sell. There are certain things money cannot influence.
And that when you think about it, those are the things that make us one nation, one people under God. They are the values and the principles of justice and injustice -- of right and wrong -- that bind us together as a nation. And I think we've reached a time, when it has become seriously practical for us to look at how those principles have been applied and misapplied in our day.
And one great area where they have been misapplied, in my opinion, is the Supreme Court's decision on abortion. I think that it's quite clear that somewhere along the line, they succumbed to those liberal premises that said, "There really is no God. There is no morality. Everything is relative." At the end of the day, we only have one criterion for everything we do and that is the choice, the arbitrary whim of individual wills. And that arbitrary will -- and that choice -- that is our great god now, is it?
But I think that if we take that road, that we fail to appreciate what our founders set down at the beginning. A very simple logic it was. We have our rights and our freedoms as an endowment from God. Out of respect for the authority of God, no government, no power on earth, no individual, has the right to violate the individual rights and dignity of any human being.
Some people say -- the journalists are always out there and the pundits are out there saying, "oh, so what? You restate the principles of the Declaration. What does that matter to us? We've got practical problems to attend to." They don't understand what relationship this could possibly have to welfare reform, and crime in the streets, and education in our schools. They don't understand this.
But I think you and I do understand. We understand that when you corrupt the basic concepts of freedom -- when instead of freedom meaning that we live with respect for, and under the rule of law -- acknowledging the limits on choice which we must respect if we are to retain our freedom.
Alan Keyes
Austin Texas, 31 March 1995
Do you sleep with his photo under your pillow?
You took the chrome right off the bumper with that one!
DreamsofPolyCarp, Post #290:
I am not even registered Republican anymore. Here in NC, there is no registration for "libertarian" so I am independent. That said, I am fervently pro-life. THAT said, I am for the sovereignty of the states in deciding the issue, the way it was before ROE (legal issues which touch on personal morality, including porn, homosexuality, etc, are best decided locally). I believe in EVERY SINGLE PLANK of the Christian Right, I just don't believe in the usurpation of Federal power to do so. I believe that judges should have a "litmus test" regarding their views on federalism, not abortion. The Christian Right, which I grew up with, has whored itself out to the pursuit of political power on the federal level. It should repent and get back to the job of espousing the happy state of being cleansed by the grace of Jesus, and the personal responsibilities to repudiate the false god of more and more trinkets and toys, while hoping that they can get some guy in power who will stave off cultural collapse. This is worshiping a false god, or what the old faithful called "idolatry."
290 posted on 02/28/2007 1:14:39 PM CST by DreamsofPolycarp (Ron Paul in '08)
Has Alan Keyes ever won anything? And we're supposed to follow this guy?
You are clearly delusional.
Wow, two Keyes speaches in a row. I guess someone mentioning the name, "Keyes", on this forum has gotten stuck in your head like a bad song that won't quit playing in your brain.