Well ... Alan Keyes may be a total wingnut who terrifies his own party but you cannot say that he doesn't abide by his stated principles.
How unfortunate.
Maya Keyes loves her father and mother. She put off college and moved from the family home in Darnestown to Chicago to be with her dad on a grand adventure. Even though she disagrees with him on "almost everything" political, she worked hard for his quixotic and losing campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Now Maya Keyes -- liberal, lesbian and a little lost -- finds herself out on her own. She says her parents -- conservative commentator and perennial candidate Alan Keyes and his wife, Jocelyn -- threw her out of their house, refused to pay her college tuition and stopped speaking to her. Maya, 19, says her parents cut her off because of who she is -- "a liberal queer." Tomorrow, she will take her private dispute with her dad into the open. She is scheduled to make her debut as a political animal, speaking at a rally in Annapolis sponsored by Equality Maryland, the state's gay rights lobby.
She plans to talk about "what it was like for me growing up as a liberal queer in a very conservative household. I've known so many other people in a position like mine, where their families really don't want much to do with them. Maybe I can help by talking about it." [...] If she could talk to her parents now, she would tell them she does not intend to hurt them by going public. "I wish the fact that I was gay was not something that would hurt them either," she says. "It wasn't anything they did that made me this way. I really don't see why what I think should affect him in any way."
It does seem that the world is going out of its way to hurt her, somehow. Her parents, first and foremost. People on the right emailing her to tell her she's going to burn in hell. People on the left telling her that she's being "a whiny brat" because she'd like to have a relationship with her parents again.
I will admit, I do wonder about parents who can manage to do this. More often, you see parents who hang on to their children far too long, parents who excuse truly horrible things that their children do, parents who really should cut their children off and don't.
Posted by iain at February 14, 2005 12:39 AM
