when i heard this this morning, i felt a kind of a smugness: ultra-moral alan keyes has a lesbian daughter. ha ha.

sorry, not funny. my older son is 19, and i can't think of anything that would make me disown him. he might piss me off terribly, but i love him way too much. he's done a lot of stupid things, but i can never forget his first 5 minutes of life; the idea that i would disown him or anything like that is repugnant.

shame on alan keyes. what a repellant, horrible person. i hope maya has friends and other family members to love and care for her. she must be hurting a lot right now. how awful for her.

Dateline 15 Feb 05. WorldNetDaily reports Alan Keyes’ daughter has announced she is a lesbian.

The immediate media reaction is to put Keyes himself on the spot because of his prominent public stances against homosexuality—almost as if Keyes has been caught in some kind of hypocrisy.

The expectation appears to be that Keyes should—indeed must—moderate his position on gays now that his family is affected. Keyes failed to do that though, maintaining his previously held position.

Rewind now to the recent presidential election and the same situation between Dick Cheney and his daughter—a situation where Cheney’s support for his daughter’s lifestyle was in prominent conflict with the direction of the Republican Party. Again, the expectation was that personal situations should determine public stances. In this case though, Cheney supported his daughter with language and postures that appeared almost pious.

The purpose of all this is not to set up Cheney or Keyes for attack, but to use them to illustrate the direction of social pressures on leaders who have conflicts between public and private life.

Our culture sees truth as something worked out in the midst of existential crises—crises where people are supposed to change their minds on issues when the problem hits home with them personally.

Part of this is philosophical. In the absence of absolute truth, people necessarily resort to private truths.

Part of it though is manipulative—both on the part of the conflicted individual and on the part of others. Public figures often use the “existential discovery of truth” ploy to change positions without being seen as a hypocrite.

At the same time, others can manipulate victims into furthering an ideological agenda by framing any failure to change as insensitivity or even inhumanity—that Matthew Sheppard’s mother would become a crusader for acceptance of gays was a foregone conclusion.

Culture demands that ethics be adjusted to fit morals. The biblical principle however, is radically different—”let God be true and every man a liar”—Romans 3:4.

Paul’s point is just the opposite of modern impulses. Hold up the ethic regardless of whether it exposes one’s moral failures.

Culture tries to frame that as hypocrisy. God sees it as integrity.
—Bill Brewer