From: nyikos@math.scarolina.edu (Peter Nyikos)
Subject: NBC News Blackout on Black Senatorial Candidate
Summary: US Senate candidate Alan L. Keyes disappears down NBC memory hole
Keywords: slavery, pro-life
Organization: USC  Department of Computer Science
Date:  2 Nov 92 14:00:56 GMT

Last night, NBC Nightly News carried information about women and minority
candidates.  It said that there were 11 women candidates for the US Senate,
and over a hundred (I forget the exact number) for the House.  When it
came the turn of Blacks, however, all we were told was that there were
approximately 60 candidates for the House.

But there is at least one Black candidate for the US Senate.  If there
is only one, it is easy to see why NBC news chose not to even hint
at his existence.

Alan L. Keyes, the Republican Party candidate for the U.S. Senate
seat from Maryland that is up for election, is pro-life.  To make
matters worse for him as far as media coverage is concerned, he
is running against an incumbent who is a woman and is radically
pro-choice.  

[A bit later in the same newscast, a Black woman was interviewed and asked
by Derek Utley what the effect of court nominees on the abortion issue
would be, and to compare the nominations Bill Clinton would make with the
ones Bush would make.  She totally ignored the first question and only said
that Clinton could be expected to make more women and minority nominations
than Bush.]

The state of Maryland also has the most radically pro-choice laws
on aboriton, outstripping Roe v. Wade and even FOCA, the so-called
Freedom of Choice Act.

And Alan Keyes is a committed pro-lifer, who has evidently given the
matter far more thought than George Bush has, because he has voiced his
opinions in long thoughtful articles on the subject.

A brief excerpt from his article, "Uncivil Liberties," which appeared
in the March 1990 issue of _Crisis_, follows, closing this post.  

	  The notion that slavery is wrong, that one human being
	cannot have property in the life of another, is today a 
	fundamental tenet of the moral creed from which we Americans
	derive our shared identity as a people.  It is therefore a
	basic tenet of our civic morality.  If we abandon it, we
	abandon ourselves.  If we assert our freedom in a way that
	violates it, we undermine the very doctrine that allows us
	to legitimate that assertion.  In short, we return to the 
	state of fundamental self-contradiction that made the 
	Civil War a tragic inevitability.

	  This is the danger that we face from the abortion issue.
	The pro-choice advocates contend that a woman's body belongs
	to her, is her property; that the fetus is part of her body,
	and therefore also her property.  But once a person is convinced
	that the life of the fetus is a human life, he cannot accept
	the pro-choice position without accepting the view that, in this
	case, one human being can have property in the life of another.
	This violates the anti-slavery principle.

	  Unless the anti-slavery principle holds true absolutely, other
	exceptions to it will also be possible.  If, for instance, we
	argue that the exception in this case is justified because the
	fetus cannot survive independently of the mother, then 
	independence (rather than simple humanity) becomes the criterion
	for deciding whether slavery is justified or not.  If someone
	comes along who can prove that there is another case in which
	one human being is dependent upon another as the fetus is upon
	the mother, that case, too, must be excluded from the anti-slavery
	principle.  Slavery then ceases to be a matter of fundamental
	human rights and becomes instead a subject for intellectual
	debate.  Someone could cleverly manipulate the concept of
	independence to prove that human beings may justly be deprived
	of their freedom if they use it irrationally, in a way that 
	violates the doctrine that establishes their right to be free.
	After all, ancient philosophers such as Aristotle held that
	irrational beings are, by nature, wholly dependent upon rational
	ones and can, therefore, be justly enslaved.
	
Peter Nyikos



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