This time he has disowned his daughter.
It’s a fascinating story since it raises questions about families, acceptance and perceptions of betrayal on both sides. Marc Fisher writes in Washington Post:
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.
According to the Fisher, there was an apparent disconnect between reality and how Keyes presented it in his Saturday Night Live-style parody campaign for Senate in Illinois last fall:
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.”
Indeed, the paper says, Keyes knew about his daughter’s orientation for years — and her penchant for speaking out:
Maya is also an eloquent iconoclast, at once an adult and an adolescent, testing society’s limits even as she expects her parents to give her the love and support they always have provided.
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.
Ms. Keyes, meanwhile, has since then run peppery comments about her dad on the Internet. But Fisher includes various quotes that show she is torn and loves her dad. He ends it this way:
Maya Keyes is looking for answers to all those conservatives who e-mail her about how she’s going to burn in hell and to all those liberals who e-mail her about how she’s a traitor because she won’t disavow her father. And then there are the people who think she’s a whiny brat, “that I’m immature for thinking that I want my parents to talk to me.”
“It all seems kind of ridiculous,” she says, “because I love him. He’s my father.” A man who specializes in explaining the complexities of a trying world ought to be able to see something as simple as that.
So the bottom line is that Maya Keyes no longer lives with her dad.
Who’d want to live on Mars anyway?
This was originally posted on Dean’s World this weekend.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.