NEWSFLASH! (About "pursuit of happiness" and other liberal heresies....)

According to Alan Keyes, Dick Cheney's daughter is a "selfish hedonist" -- and the reason is simple:

Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter Mary is a "selfish hedonist" because she is a lesbian.

I suspect he hasn't seen too many lovers die in the throes of AIDS.

I have. You can call such an experience many things, but it didn't feel hedonistic to me.

UPDATE: Stephen Green thinks that Alan Keyes is a Republican stalking horse:

Single-handedly, (and perhaps unknowingly) Keyes might just have taken the heat off of Bush for his Idiotic Pander Maneuver -- er, I mean support for the ill-fated constitutional amendment against gay marriage rights. As of tomorrow, the President can say, "Look, I don't support gay marriage, but Keyes is talking about my Veep's daughter, and that's just going too far."

Best part? Bush doesn't even have to actually say it. People will assume it, because, rightly or wrongly, most people tend to think of Bush as a pretty decent guy.

And certainly, that may be the way things will work out in practice. However, I think I'm as Machiavellian as anyone, but when I researched the history of the Keyes selection, it appeared to be the handiwork of disgruntled local Republicans.

MORE: A longtime favorite blogger, Objectivist Don Watkins, shares his thoughts in a post called "UNSELFISH SEX," ("the idea that sex should be anything but a selfish pursuit of pleasure is so obviously evil, that I can't bring myself to discuss it further"), and refers readers to his earlier post on contempt for joy:

Sex isn't an end in itself -- it isn't a right. Sex, in Kurtz's view, is a permission granted to (some) individuals by the state for the purpose of procreation.

What utter contempt for joy must a person have to promulgate such a view? I can't fathom it, but the scary thing is, he's not the only person who believes it. A lot of conservatives do.

This results in an error all too common among conservatives: viewing the family, not the individual, as the fundamental unit of civilization. This leads to the unforgivable sin of demanding the individual be sacrificed to "the family" as if the family were a soverign end in itself, apart form the rights of its members.

That's hogwash, and anyone who believes it is NOT a friend of freedom.

"As an ultimate symbol of sexuality for the sake of pleasure (rather than reproduction) homosexuality has traditionally been taboo. That taboo was embodied and expressed in sodomy laws. Rigorous enforcement of these laws was secondary — and in any case, next to impossible. The important thing was the statement of collective values made by the laws against sodomy. By making homosexuality taboo, the law reinforced the idea that the highest and proper purpose of sexuality itself was to bind and energize families."

Yeah, that's the idea, but it's also a lie. A lie built on the foundation of pure, unadulterated, Kantian altruism. As sick as it is that Kurtz thinks this is the purpose of sex, what's sicker as that he's willing to impose his view on everyone else -- he's willing to sacrifice individuals for engaging in sex for pleasure rather than procreation. And for homosexuals, and presumably, straight couples who don't want or can't have children, he's willing to demand that the state BAN them from having sex altogether.

I'll tell you, friends, I hardly have words to describe the kind of dispicable nonesense this is. I've already had to erase a couple of explicatives. But what worries me is that THIS is the voice of conservatism. Conservatives, who pose as friends of freedom, are trying to justify banning sex for pleasure. They are demanding the government have the right to put you and me in jail for engaging in consentual acts in the...err...privacy of our own homes.