By JACK KENNY
The Supreme Court of the United States is engaged in nothing less than the overthrow of the republic and its Constitution, former diplomat and presidential candidate Alan Keyes declared at a September 20 forum on the Constitution in Portsmouth, N.H.
“They are in the business of overthrowing our government,” Keyes said of the High Court, making specific reference to this year’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision, requiring the granting of marriage licenses to homosexual couples.
The keynote speaker at the 17th annual Constitution Day banquet of the National Heritage Center for Constitutional Studies, Keyes, a former ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, delivered his address with the bluntness and fervor that once led the Long Island daily Newsday to liken some of his UN pronouncements to “the subtlety of the cannon burst in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.”
Though he has run for the U.S. Senate as a Republican in both Maryland and Illinois and three times competed for the GOP presidential nomination, Keyes said he no longer associates the Republican Party with conservatism, “because everyone knows how silly that is.”
“We don’t have two parties, we have two wings of the same faction,” he declared. “There is no way any reasonable person can deny the conclusion that we are dealing with one faction,” whose goal is “the overthrow of government of, by, and for the people,” he said.
A political commentator and radio talk show host, Keyes disavowed any interest in a conservatism aimed at preserving “the status quo.”
“The status quo is so depraved, so corrupt one would have to be insanely corrupt to want to preserve it,” said Keyes, who has long been a highly vocal critic of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion.
In the 5-4 Obergefell decision, he said, the court’s majority wrenched the theory of human rights from its historic context by imposing on the nation a legal equality between homosexual unions and a God-given right to marry and procreate that is essential to the perpetuation of the human race.
“What could be more authoritative than the right of family, as established by Almighty God?” Keyes asked, adding that the mandate on same-sex marriage has been promulgated “by the whim of justices who don’t even have the power to legislate.”
He invited the roughly 100 participants at the conference to imagine how such an order might have been received by the nation’s Founders.
“What if the British government had declared, as our Supreme Court did, that marriage and procreation is no more essential than what homosexuals are doing?” he asked. The colonists, he said, “would have gone to war with much fewer petitions and remonstrations.”
While the federal Constitution says nothing about marriage, Keyes cited the Ninth Amendment provision that the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution may not be construed to “deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Obergefell decision disparages the right of marriage and family, Keyes argued, while denying its meaning.
Calling on the conferees to “kick the party system to the curb,” the former ambassador said the answer lies not in partisan political activity but in education. He suggested reviving the American colonists’ Committees of Correspondence as a means of informing and rallying citizens against tyrannical government.
Modern communications technology, he noted, makes the work of the messengers faster and easier than it was in colonial times.
Keyes, a Catholic, shared the stage with Paul Jehle, an evangelical pastor and executive director of the Plymouth Rock Foundation. Jehle addressed the conference on Interposition, the theory that a state has the duty to stand between its people and a federal government exceeding the bounds of its constitutional authority.
“Since the Supreme Court has declared itself supreme over both federal and state government,” said Jehle, people in their towns and counties should “stand up for the rule of Interposition.”
Speaking on the increased number and growing power of administrative agencies in Washington, constitutional lawyer Edward Vieira agreed that the aggrandizement of power at the federal level during the past century has been nothing short of tyrannical.
“The characterization of the Administrative State as a form of tyranny is entirely accurate,” Vieira said.
“Neither the Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence can coexist with the Administrative State. Whether the people will recognize the antagonism and, more importantly, will steel themselves to take the necessary corrective steps remains to be seen.”
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