Why I would vote for Alan Keyes

Recently, I saw a debate between Barack Obama and Alan Keyes who are vying to be the next US Senator from Illinois. Obama will win in a landslide, but I was extremely impressed by Mr. Keyes. I had not seen him before nor did I know much about him, but I liked what he had to say on a variety of issues.

1. He is unabashedly pro-life.

• I stand for the defense of innocent life.
  
• More than AIDS, more than violence, more than heart disease, more than any of those causes, including accidents and so forth combined, abortion has claimed the lives of black people--more than twice as many, amounting to twenty-five percent reduction in the black population.
• Abortion is intrinsically, objectively, wrong and sinful,
• There are certain issues that objectively violate the most fundamental canons of moral decency, and abortion, for instance, is one of them--the taking of innocent life.
• People looking at the babe in the womb take the view that that child is not developed enough to be treated as a human being, and therefore can be killed at will.
• I want to know where He stands with respect to the will of the Father, to Whom He looks. And on these questions, like abortion, He says the taking of innocent life is an abomination.
• Did you know that something like thirteen million black babies have been killed since Roe v. Wade, as a result of this holocaust of abortion? Did you know that the black population today is something like twenty-five percent less than it would otherwise be, because of abortion?
• the advocates of abortion, that they take the objective condition of poverty, and use it to justify a situation in which you then herd and push people toward the killing of their children.

2. He understands that sound morals are a critical foundation to a strong society, and that poverty, drug use, gangs, welfare, and education are issues that cannot be dealt with unless and until the traditional family is restored.

• I stand for the defense of traditional marriage.
• I think we must educate the heart and soul of people, so that they will control themselves.
• I think that if we care about our freedom, we have to care about the moral foundations of our liberty--moral foundations that are relevant, by the way, to every practical problem we face.
• In education, in health care, in our economic life, every study shows that if you allow, for instance, the breakdown of the family structure--the greatest contributing factor to poverty, to the gap in affordable housing, to the rising tide of crime and violence, to the inability, in fact, to deal with a lot of the problems that drive our young people into gangs, all are related to the breakdown of the family structure.
• the root of our problem lies in the decay of our moral culture. And government has assaulted this culture with stands on abortion, with, now, an assault on the traditional family, with regulations in the social welfare programs that drove fathers out of the home and broke down the family structure.
  
  He says, "This is not a concern of government." And yet government has, in fact, been deeply contributing to the damage that is being done to the moral culture of this country.
  
  I think we're gonna go bankrupt if we keep paying for the consequences of moral decay, and refuse to address its causes.
  

3. He understand that states' rights are waning and that it is critical to repeal the 17th amendment of the US Constitution.

• Senators were originally chosen, under our Constitution, by the state legislature--for the simple reason that the Senate was supposed to represent the state governments, not geographic entities, but the governments that are empowered to take care of the affairs of the states, as sovereign entities that, under our Constitution, retained the residual powers of government not delegated to the federal government.
  
  In point of fact, the notion that this somehow disenfranchises people--our laws, in the state of Illinois, are passed by the state legislature. In the passage of those laws, are the people of this state "disenfranchised"?
  
  Of course they're not. When the legislature makes a decision, puts a criminal law on the books, it is "The People v. So-and-So" when that law is violated, because the legislature is presumed to represent the people. That is the meaning of our Constitutional system.
  
  But what has happened under the federal aegis, since we adopted the Seventeenth Amendment, isn't that people are enfranchised.
  
  It's that more and more important issues--including, under certain education laws now, things vital to the community like education--are being more and more decided by distant bureaucrats, by people at a level of government not as responsive as the state and local level. That's why we should protect the prerogatives of the state governments that are closer to our people.

4. He champions the very fundamental values that were inherent in our founding fathers, such as faith in God, capitalism, and individual liberty.

• In point of fact, the most important principle of our nation's life--that we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator, not by human choice, with our unalienable rights
• I think that's the same position, in principle, and it violates the fundamental principle of our way of life--that we are not developed nor born, but created equal, and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.
• I do not say that homosexual relations is an abomination, the Bible says so. And many people in this state believe the Bible when it says so.
• For, the Lord said I must love Him with my whole heart, soul, mind, and strength. There's nothing left over. Without faith, there's just a faith-shaped void where the conscience ought to be.
• separation of church and state, something found nowhere in the Constitution, and certainly found nowhere in the Scripture as such.

5. He understand the threat of global terrorism and the threat that America is facing.

• [W]e have no choice now but to confront the terrorists where they live, to attack them before they attack us, to disrupt their lines of supply, their financial lines of supply, their training camps, and to make it clear to state sponsors of terrorism--such as Saddam Hussein was--that we are not going to tolerate their activities, and that none of them are going to be left alone.
• when dealing with domestic crime and with international relations, is that you must go after the people who cause the problem, and that you must get to those people before they do harm to your citizens or to your country.

6. The 2nd Amendment, he understands it's about individual liberty and personal protection.

• I will state boldly, though, that I am a supporter of the Second Amendment, and I believe strongly that law-abiding citizens should have their right to keep and bear arms left intact.
• The gun control mentality is ruthlessly absurd. It suggests that you pass a law which will bind law-abiding citizens. They won't have access to weapons. Now, we know that criminals, by definition, are people who don't obey laws.
• I don't believe in arming the criminals and protecting the criminal, while leaving the law-abiding citizens disarmed,
• I think one of the great problems is that the Assault Weapons Ban deals with a fictional distinction.

7. The Fair Tax plan (from his website)

• The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 85 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed. We need to return to the Constitution of economic liberty that our Founders intended to be a permanent bulwark of our political liberty.
• Replacing the income tax with a national sales tax would rejuvenate independence and responsibility in our citizens. True economic liberty and moral revival go hand in hand.
• A national sales tax would also put the American citizen back in control of fiscal policy. The best way to curtail government spending is to cut taxes, because they can't spend what they don't get.