While many here have been busy Gannon-navel-gazing, another story broke this week, largely ignored on this site, that I think finally paints the GOP exactly as they are; the party of abandonment.
Maya Keyes went public this week, speaking at a gay-rights event in Annapolis, Maryland. She revealed that after she was publicly outed (which, like others, I didn't like) during her father's quixotic Illinois Senate campaign, she was:
-thrown out of her parent's house
-cut off financially, as the Keyes stopped paying her college tuition
-cut off emotionally, as her parents stopped speaking to her.
Mark Fisher in the Washington Post goes deeper into this story, and does make the point that, you know, Alan Keyes certainly is consistent about his hating:
During his failed campaign last fall against Barack Obama (D) for the Illinois Senate seat, Alan Keyes lashed out at Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Cheney. Keyes told a radio interviewer that Mary Cheney was a "selfish hedonist." Then, without having been asked anything about his own family, he volunteered that "if my daughter were a lesbian, I'd look at her and say, 'That is a relationship that is based on selfish hedonism.' I would also tell my daughter that it's a sin and she needs to pray to the Lord God to help her deal with that sin."
Maya heard the comments and recoiled. "It was kind of strange that he said it like a hypothetical," she says. "It was really kind of unpleasant."
He also gets to the bottom of the course of events...
Her parents have known that Maya is a lesbian since they found a copy of the Washington Blade, the gay weekly, in her room and confronted her at the end of high school (she went to Oakcrest School for Girls, a Catholic school in McLean run by the church's highly devout Opus Dei movement.) Ever since, Maya says, her parents have told her that her sexuality is wrong and sinful.
"As long as I was quiet about being gay or my politics, we got along," she says. "Then I went to the Counterinaugural," last month's protests in Washington against President Bush. "My father didn't like that."
Maya returned from the demonstration to find that she had been let go from her job at her father's political organization.
She says she was told to leave her father's apartment and not to expect any money toward attending Brown University, where she was admitted but deferred matriculation to spend a year teaching in southern India. "In my father's view, financing my college would be financing my politics, in a sense," Maya says, "because I plan to be an activist after college."
She wrote to her parents to tell them about tomorrow's speech, but says she got no response.
After I contacted Alan Keyes's office, press secretary Connie Hair called back with a prepared statement from him: "My daughter is an adult, and she is responsible for her own actions. What she chooses to do has nothing to do with my work or political activities." End of statement.
Despite all this, despite the differences in their politics, Maya explains in the article that she still loves her father, unconditionally. Would that the opposite were so.
And then I found a copy of her speech, which is honestly one of the most eloquent I've read in a long time. The speech is about a friend of hers, Shymmer, who like her was thrown out of his parents' house for being gay. Unlike her, he ended up dying on the street. You should go and read it all, but this passage hit me in the gut:
The thing that really got to me in this whole situation was the contrast between what's happened to both of us...
The first time something goes wrong in my life I get hundreds of people offering support, prayers, donations, people offering me spare bedrooms to crash in and telling me how they were going to make sure that I got through school alright; people writing to me to tell me that even if it feels like everything's going downhill there are people out there who care. And Shymmer ... he'd been out there for over two years now; been hungry and freezing and beaten up and raped and his situation was so incomparably worse than mine; and what support was offered him?
He got the support his handful of friends had to offer; but where is the community that offers to stand in solidarity behind him? Where are the hundreds of expressions of sympathy, support (and) outrage that this boy who had had such a bright future had spent two years starving in alleys?
The worst part is that he isn't the only one. This past summer I read in the International Herald Tribune something that anyone who has much to do with homeless kids has probably already noticed - approximately 40% of homeless youth were LGBTQ.
For 3-10% of the population to make up 40 per cent of street kids - think about that. I have known a lot of street kids; and I have known a whole lot of queer street kids, kids who were cut off by their parents solely because of who they are, kids who'd done absolutely nothing to deserve the treatment they were getting. I've seen these kids struggle out there and I've seen these kids die out there - kids like Shymmer, who passed away this Friday - and I have seen far too much silence about the reality of this problem.
I won't be silent any longer.
Here's the IHT story that Maya references, from June 2004.
This is the difference between Democrats and Republicans. The GOP is the party of abandonment. They've abandoned the poor, the working class, the farming community, the elderly, disabled veterans, at-risk youth, teen mothers, and countless others. And now, through this story, we learn that they abandon their own kids if it turns out they don't meet their expectations. And they do it with shocking regularity. It goes without saying that this abandonment stands in sharp contrast to the empty rhetoric of "family values."
We do not abandon anyone. We believe in the rights of man. We stand with Maya Keyes, a great American, to speak out against GOP abandonment and for progressive values.
We will not be silent any longer.
Update [2005-2-16 14:41:36 by dday]: This diary, while not about Keyes, makes an excellent companion piece. And this one, which is about Keyes, does as well.