FRANKFORT, Kentucky – Dr. Alan Keyes, a man of numerous political distinctions, met with Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin at the governor’s mansion in Frankfort, Kentucky, where their shared pro-life agenda dominated the discussion.
Dr. Keyes, who holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard and wrote his dissertation on constitutional theory, ran for president in 1996, 2000 and 2008 and challenged Barack Obama for the open U.S. Senate seat from Illinois in 2004, according to RenewAmerica.
Serving as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations and as Ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council, Dr. Keyes was the highest-ranking black appointee in the Reagan Administration.
In fact, following their initial, very warm greeting, Dr. Keyes stayed to speak with Bevin and his brother, and the Governor called Dr. Keyes “Ambassador” as they sat at a table in a cozy den-type room in the lower level of the Kentucky Governor’s mansion.
Governor Bevin and his staff wear a quarter-sized red lapel pin with an open pair of scissors, representing the updating or elimination of 27 percent of Kentucky government’s regulations and reducing the boards and commissions that numbered 572 down to 375 over a period of two years.
Bevin, after losing to incumbent Mitch McConnell in the 2014 U.S. Senate Republican primary, went on to run for Governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky in 2015. With his running mate for Lieutenant Governor, Jenean Hampton, Bevin eked out a victory in the Republican primary by just 83 votes before going on to win the general with 52.5 percent of the vote.
After selecting a new running mate for Lieutenant Governor, physician and current State Senator Ralph Alvarado, Governor Bevin faces Kentucky’s current Democrat Attorney General Andy Beshear in the general election on November 5, 2019.
Beshear, who is the son of former Governor Steve Beshear who immediately preceded Bevin as Governor, have had their share of public disputes, including Beshear’s 2017 filing of a lawsuit over changes Bevin made by executive order to education boards. After a back and forth that included Governor Bevin modifying the executive order, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Bevin’s favor in June 2019, according to Ballotpedia. Beshear brought three other lawsuits against Bevin since 2016, with Beshear prevailing in one and the other two being dismissed.
Conversely, Beshear has refused to defend Kentucky laws relative to abortion bans after 20 weeks – when babies can feel pain – the requirement for an ultrasound before an abortion and protecting babies from dismemberment in the womb.
Governor Bevin told Dr. Keyes of Kentucky’s strong and bipartisan pro-life beliefs relative to a bill he signed into law that prohibits an abortion based on discrimination of the unborn child’s sex, race or disability. In Kentucky’s Senate, as many Democrats voted in favor of HB 5 as voted against it. The Governor said he believes that the non-eugenics bill, which took language from the Civil Rights Act and the ADA, will get to the Supreme Court.
Known for his eloquence and defense of the unborn, as he has spoken frequently on the evil of abortion, Dr. Keyes offered his perspective to Governor Bevin.
“The thing that to me is costing us the most, the turning away from our vocation for the future and hardening our hearts against our children and doing something that the Bible didn’t sort of envisage except perhaps in that moment when St. Paul writes ‘even the women turned against their nature,’ you get that sense that this was unheard of, this isn’t something that should be happening.”
“Yet, what is the main feature of our time? Hardening of the hearts of the women against their offspring.”
“The way the country was put together, and I guess is what sort of has me here today, is I think that our Constitution was written in such a way that the biggest lie you could tell about it is that any one of the branches is to be the final arbiter of the Constitution. That can’t be true, because the people would no longer be the voice,” reasoned Dr. Keyes.
“Everything was done to set it up so that wouldn’t happen, and yet it has been hijacked so that one of them has suddenly become the final law of the land.”
“It’s easily changed, but only if people who are entrusted with the power of the other branches wake up and realize that it’s not their role to simply accept what is against their conscience. The standard for judging the Constitution is not only its words, it’s the requirement that there should be a conscientious respect for those words, one that in good conscience strives to understand them as they were meant to be understood and apply them to the situation,” explained Dr. Keyes.
With regard to the Roe v. Wade decision, “That has been egregiously violated,” said Dr. Keyes
In agreement, Governor Bevin responded that it has been an abdication of responsibility by the other branches.
Referring to the opinion written by Justice Harry Blackmun, Dr. Keyes said the Justice made a huge error in Roe, that he tries to point out to people, because “it frees us from Roe.”
Dr. Keyes said the Roe v. Wade decision collapses of its own weight, based on Blackmun’s statement that if the suggestion of personhood be established then the complainant’s case fails. And, science, through DNA, has now confirmed the humanity of the child from the time of conception.
Then, referring to Article I, Section 2, paragraph 3 of the Constitution, Dr. Keyes explained a part of the apportionment of Representatives in the U.S. House known as the three-fifths clause, which, in addition to free persons, counted the whole number of all other persons and taking that whole number and reducing it by two-fifths for the purpose of preventing slave holders from getting a preponderance of representation.
Those other persons were enslaved blacks, who were people whose humanity was in question. Yet the Constitution, in its own use of the word said the controversy was irrelevant with the use of the word person being applied to enslaved blacks, said Dr. Keyes.
He then asked rhetorically who else is in that category, with their humanity questioned and a controversy over it. Responding that it’s the nascent children, Dr. Keyes said that means Justice Blackmun’s gyrations in the opinion were all irrelevant because the only thing that matters is the Constitution.
The constitutional usage and the meaning of the term person, as defined in Webster’s 1828 dictionary, contemporary at the time of the Constitution, come together. Therefore, the very thing that Blackmun said is needed has happened, explained Dr. Keyes. He added that the Supreme Court is not needed to tell us that, calling the logic “absolutely irrefutable.”
Going back to an earlier point, Dr. Keyes expounded that the three branches are equal, but that equality is not a matter of power, but a matter of responsibility with all three branches swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution with the Executive bearing the responsibility every moment and not waiting on anyone.
Dr. Keyes passionately argued that the Constitution is under attack by the Supreme Court, to which Governor Bevin said it was not unlike the Dred Scott case.
Through the error of the Supreme Court, the offspring of humanity and, therefore, humanity itself is being denied equal protection according under the law to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in accordance with the Fourteenth Amendment, added Dr. Keyes.
Abortion fits right in with the non-negotiable platform of the Democrats – who Dr. Keyes now refers to as the Deathocrats – the right to kill the elderly, the infirm and people beset with depression and mental illness, which Dr. Keyes called out as “madness.”
“I can think of nothing that is more important than returning this country to its God-fearing premises, because, without God, there is no liberty.”
Governor Bevin added that our founders understood that there were things that transcended government, and that those things were inalienable and endowed by our Creator.
He also talked about the liberal takeover of the education system and abdication of responsibility by parents, which has resulted in the inability for people to think and the resulting impact to our culture. Governor Bevin told Dr. Keyes of related points he made as part of a “stream of conscientiousness” at an American Enterprise Institute forum and captured on YouTube and watched by people who are seeking the truth.
Dr. Keyes has recently launched IAMtv – Independent American Media TV – where he “aims to engage viewers who are tired of dishonest, divisive news outlets and who share a common love for God and our country,” according to the website.
A featured video on the website, still pending its full launch, called Fight Abortion explains in greater detail Dr. Keyes’ case for the collapse of the Roe v. Wade decision and can be watched here.
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Laura Baigert is a senior reporter at The Tennessee Star.
