Francoism Watch

"We shall deal with the challenge that is being mounted today to the family structure throughout our country: Gay marriage activists who are demanding that we should take marriage off the foundation of procreation, child rearing, responsibility to the future, that is the true heart of marriage and place it on a basis of selfishness, pleasure-seeking and self-fulfillment...

"The heterosexual relationship is haunted by the possibility of the child, which means you have to commit yourself somewhere to your head to the possibility of a lifelong commitment that involves not only selfish pleasure but sometimes sacrifice."---Alan Keyes, making sense, as always.

It's easy to laugh away a double-thinking buffoon like Keyes, but the evil kernel at the heart of his speechifying is common to the world's most historically significant mass-persecutions: an incorruptible, anti-empirical metaphysics that attempts to force all of time and space to fit within its artificial and narrow categories. From the Inquisition to the terrors of Stalinism, an ad hoc opportunistic dogma justifies the obliteration of difference and the subordination of the individual to a totalizing ideal. There is no autocratic state of which Keyes would not be an ideal citizen, nor indeed, in which he would not be, simultaneously, the unreflective court jester and witless court philosopher.

But (exhale) he's a national punchline. And that makes me proud to be an American.