Keyes: Gay Rights Will Undo Laws Against Rape, Incest and Pedophilia

When not warning that President Obama is pushing gun safety laws in order to have Americans “slaughtered by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands,” Alan Keyes usually sticks to issuing dire warnings about gay rights.

Today in his column for WorldNetDaily, Keyes claims that if the government repeals laws discriminating against gays and lesbians then it will have to remove laws against rape, incest and pedophilia as well.

Today the elitist faction promoters of so-called “homosexual rights” use and abuse the language of rights even though they reject the logic that, in light of America’s political heritage, invests that language with moral force. By that logic every claim of unalienable right (i.e., a right that trumps the provisions of merely human law) can be tested with a simple question: What is the provision of the “laws of nature and of nature’s God” that obliges and authorizes the action or activity the claim involves? The pursuit of pleasure, sexual or otherwise, does not in and of itself correspond to such an imperative (even though, thanks to the goodwill of the Creator, most bodily activities required for our survival, are in some degree pleasurable.) Loving human relations are of course an imperative of our nature. But loving human relations need not involve the particular physical pleasures connected with what we call “sexual relations.” If by natural necessity they must, then the prejudicial prohibitions against incest or pedophilia would be as much a violation of right as those that target homosexual relations.

Absent any God-endowed natural imperative to engage in homosexual relations, doing so is a matter of choice involving a preference for one form of sensual gratification over another. It’s absurd to suggest that government should by law, force others to approve of and accommodate such preferences, especially when doing so requires trampling on proven claims of unalienable right, like the right freely to exercise (put into practice) one’s religion. We may justly penalize the neglect of right that permits some to feast while others are denied the opportunity to glean bare subsistence from their leftovers. But it makes no sense to say that because some people want to eat pork others are forbidden to disapprove of doing so, and that the latter are required to prepare and serve it whenever pork eaters demand that they do so.

Moreover, unless we mean to repeal the laws against rape, no one can by law be forced to respect or cater to the sexual appetites of others. Even temple prostitutes could discriminate against those who desecrated the idols they served. Shall we then submit to laws that require that we violate our obligation to the Author of our nature, the very authority from which our whole people derives its right of self-government, and from which our Constitution and laws derive their claim to our allegiance and respect? As the famous American patriot said, on the eve of the war occasioned by a less egregious travesty of right, “Forbid it, Almighty God.”