Tonight I’m going to watch C-SPAN2. Why, you ask (and that’s a legitimate question.) Alan Keyes and Barak Obama are debating. As most of you probably know by now, Obama is the
Democratic party’s rising star, and soon to be senator from IL. Running opposite him is Alan Keyes, who is a religious far right winger. Because I heard eariler this week in the talk radio universe about Keyes’ comments regarding Cheney’s daughter, I figured it’d be good to find the actual audio of those comments. So, here it is, in MP3 format (you might want to right click, save as)
http://www.unspun.info/il/040831-signorile-keyes.mp3
What’s even funnier than the actual interview is the rambling commentary on the page that linked me to that file. It’s from a website called “Free Republic,” which bills itself as a “gathering place for independant, grass-roots conservatism on the web.” I imagine I shall have fun browsing this site in the future.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1213062/posts
So, I’ll report back from the debate later. I’m really hoping Keyes is his old self – it should be quite amusing.
For now.
This is what I’m getting from Mr. Keyes:
“Families are about procreation. The sole purpose of a family is to create new individuals. Any relationship that exists for any other reason is selfish hedonism.”
In other words, love = selfish hedonism.
Two people who give up careers for each other, or move to be with one another, or adopt kids and devote themselves to raising those kids, are selfish hedonists? Thrill-seekers acting purely along the lines of what gets their rocks off?
Here’s who I call selfish: people who enjoy the right to marriage and want to deny this right to others based on their archaic notions of why a family exists. I also think that the absolute last thing this planet needs is more kids, especially kids raised on the kind of thinking that Keyes is promoting, although that’s somewhat besides the point.
Honestly…these religious conservatives would be a lot more amusing if there weren’t so damned many of them.
– C