Tuesday, September 28, 2004
On second thought... Disregard my last post. I will explain why I find myself completely unable to support Alan Keyes for U.S. Senate. The worse this campaign gets, the harder it is for me to just shrug and say nothing.
As I said, I went into the Keyes office a couple of times to assist the campaign in building its database, and at the time I had every intention of continuing my service to Keyes' campaign. I even allowed a campaign staffer to sign my name to a letter that went out to former Jack Ryan volunteers urging them to support Alan Keyes and even volunteer for him.
I thought Keyes was committed to limiting the power and scope of our bloated federal government. I thought he'd be as vocal as Jack Ryan in explaining how liberal policies haven't helped lower classes over the last 70 years. (Ryan's strength was in articulating in a very compelling and intelligent way how the poor and minorities would benefit from implementing conservative policy.) Keyes supposedly is committed to fiscal responsibilty to the taxpayer (keeping government spending under control and keeping taxes as low as possible), but he hasn't been too vocal about it.
I thought Keyes would be vocal about reforming education. No dice there.
I thought Keyes would be resolute in his support of President Bush's policy against terrorism and his policy in the Middle East. Keyes has been relatively mum on this issue.
Unfortunately, all Keyes has talked about is abortion and gay marriage. I'm pro-life, and I felt it was important to have a pro-life nominee to oppose Obama once Ryan stepped aside. Keyes' position on abortion is completely correct, and simple. But his rhetoric is way too hot that it turns off pro-choice Republicans and independents, who might otherwise be inclined to vote for Keyes. (I'll elaborate later.)
Like Keyes, I oppose gay marriage and support a federal amendment stripping the power of granting same-sex marriages to the states. The reasons I have in opposing gay marriage are a bit more practical. I truly believe polygamy laws will be the next thing to be challenge, as will laws prohibiting inter-relational marriage and incest. Consenting adults, remember? Next will be the age of legal consent, and so on. The other problem that could arise from gay marriage is people entering into a marriage for the sake of passing significant assets without tax implications. For example, if I owned a business and died tomorrow, my wife would inherit it without any estate tax obligations. If I died and a child were to inherit it, the child would have estate tax obligations. At any rate, Keyes has used the issue of gay marriage as an opportunity to deride the gay lifestyle.
I'm not ready to opine whether homosexuality is learned behavior or natural, and a lot of that would dictate my opinion of the morality of it, I suppose. (Wouldn't Darwinists argue that homosexuality would have disappeared over the last 10,000 years as a result of natural selection?) But the gay lifestyle has little effect on my life. No one has tried to recruit me to the other team, and such efforts would be futile anyway.
At any rate, I shunned the Keyes campaign once he spoke out about Mary Cheney being a "selfish hedonist" during the Republican Convention. Keyes had no business consenting to an interview with Michelangelo Signorlie, a reporter for a gay publication who loves to paint conservatives as bigots. And while Keyes did not bring up Vice President Cheney's daughter, he could have said that he would prefer not to talk about the Vice President's family. (By the way, no one said a peep about the Kerry campaign suggesting that Mary Cheney was conceived expressly for the purpose of Dick Cheney avoiding the draft, but that's another story for another day.)
Anyway, that comment, a day after Keyes accused conservative columnist John Kass of being a Democratic operative, ended my stint as a Keyes volunteer. I thought I'd vote for him through gritted teeth, though.
But now comes this report out of Quincy, where Keyes campaigned over the weekend. Being in Wisconsin and Minnesota over the weekend, I just heard about it:
Keyes later led the crowd in a series of chants where they answered his questions with the refrain "Obama been lyin'."
I won't vote for Barack Obama. He and I are miles apart on almost every issue, so I want to do what I can for him to lose this race and for someone who represents my values and ideology to join the U.S. Senate.
Jerry Kohn, you have my vote!
Oh, and since gay sex has dominated this senate race, Mr. Keyes now has some more interesting questions to answer. His daughter (a campaign staffer, by the way) enjoys the company of women probably a little too much for her father's tastes. You can read more here.
At any rate, Keyes' campaign is a disaster, and it's a shame. I would have loved to see the seat stay Republican, whether the Senator was Ryan, McKenna, Oberweis, Wright, Rauschenberger, Borling, Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald, Edgar, Thompson, or (of course) Ditka.
