Alan Keyes' Skeleton Closet

* Paid himself $100,000 per year out of campaign funds

* Those who know him best like him least (former campaign workers)

* All talk, no action

* Still owes money for his 1992 senate campaign, denies responsibility

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PERSON PROFILE

Alan Keyes

"I'm running for President because I think this country is in the midst of the greatest moral crisis that we have ever faced, and that if we don't address that crisis as our top priority, we're going to lose our institutions of liberty."

--Alan Keyes, 1999

(Former) Presidential candidate (March, 2000) Alan Keyes, a subsidized talk show host, is also the former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Social and Economic Council. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard and also served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations during the Reagan administration. Mr. Keyes has sought public office three times before, twice running for the US Senate from Maryland (failing both times -- in 1988 his campaign was managed by fellow conservative William Kristol), and four years ago in his first race for President.

Keyes' extreme views, such as equating the U.S. tax code to slavery, have placed him as a regular on Free Congress Foundation's National Empowerment Television and as a favorite on the Conservative lecture circuit. Like fellow moralists on the right such as Robert Bork, Keyes believes the United States is in a grave moral crisis (from the NewsHour on PBS):

"We have lost our moral way. We have forgotten the principle that our rights come from God and must be exercised with respect for the existence and authority of God.

We have gone down the road of abortion which denies the fundamental constitutional equality to our unborn children that is right there in the document where we are pledged to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, meaning generations yet unborn.

They are put in the Constitution on an equal plane with ourselves. And that fundamental constitutional principle we have forgotten, spat upon, turned our backs, in order to kill our children in the womb.

I think that fundamentally corrupts conscious and moral integrity, and the fruit of that corruption lies in the impeachment scandal, lies in the deaths in Columbine High School. It lies in the things that bespeak a loss of control. And self-control and self-discipline are the foundations of self-government. I think people are responding to that message."

January 1999

Keys calls Black Democratic leaders "Step-and-fetch-its" for the party

At the end of his talk, during the question and answer period, someone from the audience asked Keyes why 80-90% of Black Americans vote Democratic. Keyes answered, " I think part of it is that the Black leadership, the vocal ones that the media concentrates on, are all bought-and-sold, step-and-fetch-its of depravity for the Democratic party."

ON INTERNET FILTERING

"Don't use the First Amendment as some excuse to destroy our children's lives and souls...the libraries right now are egregiously ignoring their responsibility to our kids, trying to claim free speech rights."

ON AIDS AID FOR AFRICA

"After all, asking whether we should spend $300 million to cure an incurable disease is kind of an academic point, and you should realize that. Especially when the spread of that disease is rooted in what? Is rooted in a moral crisis. Is rooted in a pattern of behavior that spreads that death because of a kind of licentiousness, not only in Africa, but right here in our own country and around the world."

"We need to write into our policies and laws approaches that will work with folks who respect the marriage institution and oppose those who want to destroy institutions of marriage by encouraging the radical gay agenda and other things."

Keyes says Gays cause Nazism, communism

" 'Hitler and his supporters were Satanists and homosexuals. That's just a true statement.' He added, 'The notion that is involved in homosexuality, the unbridled sort of satisfaction of human passions' leads to 'totalitarianism,' 'Nazism,' and 'communism.'"
- People for the American Way,Hostile Climate," 1997, p.26

Keyes kicks gay daughter out of house

In her blog Maya Marcel Keyes disclosed that her father had kicked her out of the house...