Focus on the Family Physician's
Conference
November 15, 1997
Dr Alan Keyes
Colorado Springs, CO
Part 2 (Conclusion)
From Focus on the Family
Friday, November 21, 1997
Dr. Keyes: He said, "let your light shine out before men." But I ask you today, how many Christian folks in America do you think are putting the lamp up there on the lamp post?
Mike Trout: Those compelling words were shared on the last edition of Focus on the Family. I'm Mike Trout; our host is psychologist and author Dr. James Dobson. And at the end of the broadcast we said we were going to continue with that message, and here we are. Doctor?
Dr. Dobson: Yesterday we aired the first half of a speech delivered by Dr. Alan Keyes at a physicians conference, here at Focus on the Family, last Saturday night. Dr. Keyes, of course, is a former Ambassador to the United Nations. And he delivered, here at Focus, one of the most important speeches I've ever heard, during which he described the moral degeneracy of a nation that would kill its unborn, and its elderly, and now its newborn babies.
Mike, this is a message that every Christian in the country should hear. And if our listeners weren't tuned in yesterday, I strongly recommend that they get the entire tape, and that's available from us here at Focus on the Family.
Seldom will you ever hear a more powerful description of what's happening to us as a nation, and as a people, than what Dr. Keyes had to say in the program we aired last time, and now we're going to hear the balance of it today.
When he was finished, I just sat there. A lot of people did. We just sat there. As we said yesterday, we were stunned. And all I could mutter was, "God help us."
Let's let our listeners hear the entire tape. It's long, Mike, we're going to have very little time for our own commentary. But it's not needed.
Mike Trout: You said "the entire tape." Actually we're going to pick up about halfway through; we'll replay a portion of what we featured at the end of yesterday's broadcast, and then roll on out through the end.
He was in the middle of a powerful illustration when we ended the program last time. And so we're going to play that for you again today, as we begin.
It turned out to be a piece in which we see the beginning of that ultimate stage of the doctrine of death that underlies abortion -- the de-humanization not just of the life in the womb, but the life out of the womb, not to be referred to now as "infants," but as "neonates." And when we kill them, we shall not call it "murder," we shall call it "neonaticide."
Somebody's going to have to explain to me, one of these days, why it is that we believe that it changes something when we apply a label to it from Latin or Greek. What is the Latin word for "infant"? "Fetus" Why does an infant cease to be a human being because you call it a "fetus"? Why does an infant just born, a newborn, cease to be a baby because you call it a "neonate"? And why is the act of taking its life no longer murder because you translate it into a dead language?
Dead language. Dead baby. Is this an equation? I don't think so.
But this is what this man was up to. And he didn't do it in jest; he didn't present it as, you know, a "modest proposal" that we are supposed to think is extreme. He even cited supposed evidence that killing newborns is a deep-seated instinct, and that practically the first idea any mother has is to do away with her young. Cited supposed examples from our "anthropological record" and "history" for this.
The reason I am dwelling on this article is because I don't think things like this should be taken lightly. The danger we are in, in our society now, is that some fellow like this writes a piece like this in a supposedly respectable journal of opinion, and that piece is read by some judge -- say the judge in the Amy Grossberg case. And, push comes to shove, that judge wants to find some way to justify whatever perverse sentiments may be grasping at his gut when he has to make some key decision in that case, and he grabs this rationale out of the New York Times in order to show us how "difficult" it is to justify legal sanctions against mothers who kill their newborns.
And in the context of the article, Mr. Pinker not only talks about mothers who kill their newborns. He talked about folks who had written, back in the seventies, about what a great boon it would be to humanity if parents had a little while to make up their minds about their children. Maybe a week or two -- make sure everything turned out all right. And during that "window," you would be able to snuff out the life of your "neonate" without any repercussions.
And now, it appears, we are going to have a debate about it! We are going to "discuss" whether parents have the right to kill their children, and at what stage it shall be tolerable. And this is not some other country, some other time. This is not some obscure unknown, writing in some journal in the backwaters of our minds. This is a serious argument, in a supposedly serious elite, establishment newspaper, presenting to us what I am afraid is going to be the next awful stage of our degeneracy.
We are already -- not only at, we are hurtling over -- the brink. The yawning abyss comes up at us, in arguments dressed up as "scientific." But you know one of the most significant things that was said in this piece, and the one that most arrested my attention, was that the other shoe finally dropped, in this piece, as to what the whole pro-death culture really means for America.
I'd gotten a hint of it some months back, when a lady had written a piece -- I think that was in the Washington Post -- in which she had acknowledged that, in point of fact, the pro-life forces -- she being a pro-abortion person -- had a point, that we had to take seriously that mystery of life within the womb; that pro-abortion people would have to begin to acknowledge that that was indeed a life that had some claim to respect. And they were going to have to seriously answer this argument being made by the pro-life forces.
And her answer was very simple. She said "what we'll have to make clear to them is that some life is worth more than other life." Very simple.
And now the other shoe has dropped. Because that's just an assertion, isn't it? Now along comes Mr. Pinker, and in the last couple of paragraphs of his piece he has an allusion to the rationale for taking the lives of these infants. He says: "The moral philosophers say. . . . " Now, this piece was not footnoted. I would have been really intrigued to see the footnotes here, to see what moral philosophers he was talking about. Because, given what he was about to say, it seemed to me that they must be the immoral philosophers, but he claimed that they were the moral philosophers. "The moral philosophers say that the right to life comes from certain morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess."
Ponder that. Ponder that. Is this where we are now? Have we become the people who believe that our claim to rights -- our claim, even, to the most fundamental right, to life itself -- is based on "certain morally significant traits that we humans HAPPEN to possess"?
Because if we now believe this, it means that we have abandoned all our greatness. We have abandoned all the truth that makes us what we are. We have abandoned all the premises that constitute the common ground of our national identity, and the just ground for our national hopes.
Because in the beginning of this nation's life, they didn't tell us that our rights come from "morally significant traits" that some humans "happen to possess." -- didn't say that at all.
I’m rather glad they didn't. As a matter of fact, I have to tell you that I am personally deeply indebted to them for not saying that. Since if they had, there could have been no cause to abolish slavery, there could have been no headway made to end racist discrimination. Why? Well, because in the 19th Century my color made me morally insignificant. I did not have the morally significant trait that was required for respect.
But you see where we are going, don't you? He makes the argument explicit that, of course, neonates do not possess these morally significant traits. You see, once we have come to the conclusion that our rights come from morally significant traits, there are two questions. What are the traits? And who decides who has them?
Now, I am sure that the person who wrote this article is pretty sure that he is going to be Al Gore's appointee on the commission that decides our morally significant traits. And I’m sure that it gives him great comfort to know that he'll be the one who makes it up. And probably, judging by the culture that he comes from, an appreciation for fine wines and a willingness to read the New York Times instead of go to church will probably be a morally significant trait. And I'm quite sure that those who are childish enough, still, to entertain a belief in Almighty God, and to fall down on their knees at the name of Jesus Christ -- that's probably going to be considered a sign of incipient insanity, if not senility. Will we still be morally significant?
And all such ideology aside, how gray does your hair have to be, before it becomes a sign that you have lost that morally significant trait which is youth -- the ability to truly enjoy the "quality of life"?
You see, when they come to us and they say we have the right to kill our children so that we can enjoy, without any degree of constraint, sexual license and indulgence, some people can pretend that that liberates. But I think finally, when they come to offer us the right to kill ourselves, and to kill our newborns, and to kill our grandparents, it's time we begin to wake up and understand: we are not being offered rights; we are being offered death and self-destruction in the guise of rights. And it's time that we understood that that will mean the destruction of our nation. There is no more important cause than to defeat these lies.
But how? How shall we defeat them? I could have a good time up here, I'm sure, going through the catalogue of all the things that you and I probably hold in common as dreadful shadows over our land. Some of the things that folks don't want to talk about, right now, including the tremendous assault on our moral decency that comes in the guise of "civil rights" for homosexuals. This is another one of those instances: first you say that our rights come from morally significant traits, and then you try to define as a right that which must be considered the object of moral judgment and consideration. Does this make any sense? Why do we accept it?
Someone comes forward and says "my sexual inclination -- you can't discriminate against me on those grounds. It's just like race." Why do we accept this drivel? I do not understand it. Have we lost our minds?
This morning I got up. I was, as you can see, a black person. When I go to bed this evening, I will still be a black person. In between, you can make strenuous efforts to dissuade me of this fact, but it will not do any good. In fact, they used to call us "people of the colored persuasion," but I've got to tell you, persuasion has nothing to do with it. I believe that it is, in fact, an injustice to treat as morally significant conditions over which human beings have no moral responsibility. That's bigotry; that's prejudice.
But what's going to happen to this society when we start to treat as if they are such conditions, behavior and conduct that has traditionally -- and that must, in civilized society -- be considered the subject of moral judgment.
I keep hearing these arguments as if it is a scientific thing that we're talking about. We're going to establish it as a scientific and genetically based fact that there are people who come into the world with some kind of gender confusion difficulties -- you know, females in male bodies, and doing all these other strange things that they were talking about at the Beijing Women's Conference. I myself have not seen anything that suggests that they are making their case very well, in scientific terms. But let's, for a moment, for the sake of argument, pretend that they were. What difference does that make?
I think it has been known for a long time -- as a matter of fact, for almost as long as human beings have had any kind of moral consciousness whatsoever -- it has been understood, to put it in the old, simple terms, that we have an animal nature; that this animal nature is kind of built in; it comes with the equipment. And that it tends to push us in directions. I mean, they say that sexual inclinations this way and that are some kind of genetically based and uncontrollable condition. Ask any red-blooded male what they generally feel like doing when a really good-looking woman walks past, and I think you get a little symptom of the animal nature.
Has it ever been the case that the existence of that animal nature -- what St. Paul called "the law in our members" -- served as an excuse for ignoring the law in our conscience, the law in our heart, the law writ there by the finger of God? It has never been the case that the existence of that nature exonerated us from moral responsibility.
This is the real revolution that is taking place. They are coming forward to tell us, not that we must accept homosexuality, but that we must accept the premise that sexual inclinations, sexual behavior, cannot be subject to moral judgment. And don't let anybody fool you: if you make that allowance for homosexuals, you have made it for all "sexuals," of any kind, whatsoever. What right does a homosexual have to come forward and say we must tolerate their sexual inclination, with an adulterer standing next to him, saying "tolerate my sexual inclination," and a pedophile, "you must tolerate my sexual inclination": all of them based on the same animal nature, the same genetically-determined, biologically-based inclinations?
Does that biology exempt us, then, from the law of God? If we accept the premise that it does, then we shall surely destroy any possibility of civilized life in this society. Think of the institutions that depend on the concept of moral responsibility: fidelity in marriage; the innocence of children.
And what is worse, think what happens if we take this view, which we are having of sexual passion, and start to think for a minute: why are we singling out sexual passion? Is sexual passion the only kind of passion that has a root in our animal nature, as it used to be called? I don't think so. I think at least since the fifties it has been pretty clear anger has such a root -- the aggressiveness, the urge to kill people, has such a root. So if we are going to exonerate the sexual inclination, why not the anger inclination? Why not the jealousy inclination? Why not the resentment inclination? Let's go through the whole range of human passions and exonerate each one, because it is rooted in a nature that they claim is beyond our control.
Once we have done so, you will realize that what is really going on here is not the liberation of some people to their sexual inclinations. It is the redefinition of our human condition in such a way that human freedom, and the human capacity for moral judgment and choice, is denied. And once we have denied our capacity for moral judgment, our capacity for moral responsibility, all talk of liberty and freedom and choice is nothing but a game played by those who have power, to dupe those they intend to keep without it.
Is this what we shall allow our country to become -- a shadow-play of freedom for the benefit of those who mean only to oppress? This is what we shall become, if we surrender to this slavery of lies, to this tyranny of passion.
There is a way out, though. Our Founders showed it to us, right there at the beginning. It's a way back. But if we take it seriously, then those of you in this room today, and many more like you in America, you are far more important, far more critical, to the future of this nation than perhaps you may believe.
There is only one thing that can get us back on the right track. We've got to go back to the beginning. We've got to put side-by-side with Mr. Pinker's lie that our rights come from certain morally significant traits that we happen to possess, we must put next to that lie the shining truth on which this nation was founded. We must hold it up, clearly, sincerely, unequivocally. We must, at every juncture, present it once again as the truth to the American people, who are being tempted to forget it.
Our rights are not happenstance. They are not the consequence of some fortuitous concatenation of events. They come not either from our will, from our judgment, from our decisions, from our laws, from our constitutions, from our presidents, from our judges, from our justices -- no human will, no human judgment whatsoever, is the source of those rights.
When this nation was founded, they pointed the way to truth, and we must find the way back again: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed -- not by their happenstance, and not by their laws, and not by their conditions, and not by their constitutions -- but by their Creator, God, with their rights, with their dignity, and with the grace to overcome those passions which stand in the way of the right exercise of those rights.
We are creatures of God! We are children [of] His hand. And because we are His creatures, and because we are the children of His hand, we can claim our liberty. We can recognize within ourselves that capacity for moral choice and moral responsibility which comes not from our strength, but by His grace.
And that is why we have to begin -- with boldness -- to declare to all the people of this land that truth which was so clearly seen by our Founders:
Without faith, there is no freedom; without God, there is no liberty.
This is the truth.
God bless you.
If you missed the beginning of his speech, I hope you will write to us and ask for a cassette copy.
Dr. Dobson: Mike, people stood and applauded for I don't know how long. I mean, Alan sat down, then he stood up, then he sat down, and people were still on their feet applauding. And there was so much going through my mind as I listened to what he had to say. And he was articulating so much of what I have felt, but have not put it into those particular words.
Let me end with a thought of my own that relates to that matter of the sanctity of life, which was kind of the centerpiece of what he was talking about in both halves of this message. In Washington, DC, right near the Lincoln Memorial, there is, of course, the Vietnam Memorial, with some 58,000 names inscribed on it -- the names of Americans who died in that horrible Asian war. And the monument is over 500 feet long; it's 10 feet high. And people come to that place to trace those names with their fingers, and to weep and to mourn and to express their respects to these fallen men.
But Mike, if we had such a monument with the names of each baby that we have murdered here in the United States alone -- and it goes around the world; every country, almost, is doing this -- but here in the United States alone, since the Supreme Court handed down that awful decision, January 22nd, 1973, that memorial would not be 500 feet long. It would be stretch nearly 50 miles long. It would extend outside the city limits of Washington, DC, and on into Baltimore. And now we're going to begin killing the elderly, and the sick, and the unproductive. And then, little babies, whom you can hold, and cuddle, and suckle.
And I feel like falling on my face before God and asking for forgiveness, apologizing to Him for our immorality. Because every one of those names is engraved on His great heart. It's not a memorial that you can see, but you can be certain that it's there. He saw every one of those babies. He knows them, by name. And He will not hold blameless those who spilt their blood.
Perhaps, Mike, perhaps, people can understand my utter revulsion, my regret, over the books that are being written and published now, and the articles that a well-known Christian columnist is publishing, that tell the brothers and sisters of the faith to withdraw from the public arena and confine their activities to their churches and their parishes, to let someone else decide the policies that are going to prevail in this great representative form of government, to imply that somehow we are second-class citizens, that the Constitution does not give us a right to lobby for what we believe or to express our point of view, or to try to defend the defenseless.
I want to tell you, I will speak for the innocent, the defenseless, the voiceless, as long as I have breath within my body. And Focus on the Family is going to fight to defend the principles of righteousness as long as I'm at its helm.
And I'm very grateful to Dr. Alan Keyes for helping to articulate those principles in such an unforgettable way on these two days. And I do trust that our listeners will take those words to heart.
Mike Trout: AND, share them with others. Get a cassette copy of this presentation from Alan Keyes, and review it again yourself, and pass it along to someone else. What a marvelous ingredient you then become in this whole process of getting the message out.
This is Focus on the Family. Our address is Colorado Springs, Colorado, 80995. Or our phone number is 1-800-232-6459.
The cassette title is "Rekindling the Torch of Liberty." Both days, of course, will be on that tape.
And then Alan Keyes is the Founder and President of an organization called the Declaration Foundation. He has woven his passion about the Declaration of the United States throughout his message today, whether you knew it or not. If you would like more information about the Declaration Foundation, we have an information sheet we'd be happy to send to you, as a gift from this ministry.
KEYES 2000!!!!!!
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