Alan Keyes' Daughter

There was a bit of a stir about this last fall, when her website and blog suddenly disappeared from the internet. But it seems that Alan Keyes' daughter, Maya Marcel-Keyes, has come out of the closet publicly as a "liberal queer" (her words). Here's what the article at MSNBC has to say:

The daughter of conservative Republican Alan Keyes referred to herself Monday as a “liberal queer” and urged support for gay and lesbian young people who have been deserted by their families.

Maya Marcel-Keyes, 19, addressed a rally sponsored by the gay-rights group Equality Maryland, saying she was motivated to speak out because of her rocky relationship with her parents and the recent death of a friend who had fallen ill after being thrown out of the house by his family.

Marcel-Keyes told several hundred supporters that her sexuality had created a rift in her relationship with her parents.“Things just came to a head. Liberal queer plus conservative Republican just doesn’t mesh well,” she said. “That was making my life a little bit turbulent.”

Later, Marcel-Keyes told CNN her parents “were not too pleased” when they learned she was a lesbian, but she said she loves them “very much, and they love me. They can’t support my activities.”

Her father, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois last year, created a stir in August when he said during an interview that homosexuality was “selfish hedonism” and that Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter was a sinner.

In a statement issued Monday night, Keyes said: “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.”

Marcel-Keyes said she received an outpouring of support when disclosing her sexual orientation, but her friend did not.“Like me, he grew up queer in a conservative household,” she said. But where she got hundreds of e-mails, offers of a place to stay and a college scholarship, “he’d been out there two years and had gotten nothing.”

“And the worst part is, he isn’t the only one,” Marcel-Keyes said.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn't really all that important, although if I wanted to be psychoanalytic about it, I might suggest that it helps explain the vehemence of Keyes' reaction to Mary Cheney at last year's Republican Convention.

But you know, I've got to tell you, as the father of a daughter, I just don't get how a guy can stand up publicly and attack his daughter's sexuality, even if he doesn't approve of it. Keyes made a choice to focus (somewhat obsessively) on homosexuality as an issue. He didn't need to. There were plenty of other culture war issues he could have focused on. Yet he chose to place his emphasis precisely on that area where he would be garaunteed to cause the maximum pain to his daughter. This doesn't suggest fatherly love to me. It suggest's that the man is a bastard of the highest order.

And his statement about his daughter's coming out seems to confirm that: No expression of love. No expression of support. Just a self-serving distancing of himself from her. Well, I said it with my vote in November, and I'll say it again here: Fuck Alan Keyes.

UPDATE: Oy! It's even worse than I thought. From the Washington Post:

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."

Vile, vile man!