Marriage Quote by Alan Keyes

Keyes doesn’t argue; he indicts. The opening move - “It’s about time we all faced up to the truth” - is a classic political battering ram: declare moral clarity first, then treat dissent as denial. It’s not an invitation to debate policy details. It’s a demand for submission to a preloaded premise.

The phrase “radical homosexual agenda” does the heavy lifting. “Agenda” implies coordination, strategy, infiltration; “radical” frames even ordinary civil-rights claims as extremist. The subtext is that queer people aren’t citizens seeking equal treatment but an organized force bent on cultural sabotage. That framing lets him jump quickly from specific institutions (“the military,” “marriage”) to a sweeping existential threat: “utterly destroying the concept of family.” The absolutism is purposeful. If the stakes are total annihilation, then any compromise becomes complicity.

Context matters: this rhetoric flourished in the late-1990s and early-2000s culture wars, when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” same-sex marriage bans, and the Religious Right’s mobilization made “family values” a reliable campaign engine. Keyes’ sentence is built to activate that coalition. “Family” here isn’t a sociological description; it’s a boundary marker, shorthand for heterosexual marriage as civic bedrock and a proxy for authority, tradition, and religious legitimacy.

What makes it work, politically, is its emotional economy. It offers fear dressed as responsibility, and it recasts exclusion as protection. The real claim isn’t about families collapsing; it’s about who gets to count as one.