Impossible and Absurd: Alan Keyes Meets Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

Another day and another laugh as Alan Keyes is arrested at Notre Dame University for trespassing during an anti-abortion "protest" that featured baby strollers, fake blood, and no small amount of political theater. Who would have thunk it? Alan Keyes indeed fashions himself as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. redux. We do indeed live in strange times...

Courtesy of Salon.com:

Alan Keyes' letter from Notre Dame jail

Over the last few years, Alan Keyes' life has become intertwined with Barack Obama's. In 2004, after the original Republican nominee dropped out of the race, Keyes ran against Obama, who was then seeking a Senate seat in Illinois. In 2008, Keyes ran against Obama again -- after he failed to secure either a presidential nomination from either the Republican Party or the Constitution Party, he founded his own party for the general election.

Even after Obama's victory, Keyes didn't give up. He's the plaintiff in one of the Birther lawsuits, and is challenging the results of the election, saying Obama hasn't proven that he was born in the U.S. and is eligible to be president. (He was, and he has.)

On Friday, a different battle against the president led to Keyes' arrest.

Keyes was arrested during a protest on Notre Dame's campus against the university's decision to invite Obama to speak at its commencement, and to award him an honorary degree. According to ChicagoBreakingNews.com, he and 25 others, "some of them pushing baby carriages with dolls covered in fake blood," entered campus Friday morning. They were met by university police, who handed them notices informing them that the school bans all protests not organized by members of the university community and given advance approval, and that they would be arrested if they remained. (The university is probably acutely sensitive to protests these days, as Catholics nationwide are organizing against Obama's appearance over his position on abortion.)

But the politician and former talk show host had come to Notre Dame specifically to be arrested, something he announced in a letter he'd written and released beforehand. So he and 21 of his fellow protesters were detained on misdemeanor trespassing charges. As of Friday afternoon, they were being held in jail in lieu of $250 bond, and will be appearing in court on Monday if they don't post the bond.

If that letter Keyes sent (which can be downloaded in PDF form here) is any indication, he's probably not going to post bond. In it, he announces, "I will go to South Bend. I will step foot on the Notre Dame campus to lift up the standard that protects the life of the innocent children of this and every generation. I will do it all day and every day from now until the Master comes if need be, though it mean I shall be housed every day in the prison house of lies and injustice that Obama, Jenkins and their minions now mean to construct for those who will never be still and silent in the face of their mockery of God and justice, their celebration of evil."

The letter reads as if Keyes meant it to be received as the successor to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Ultimately, though, he turns it into something far more reminiscent of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," full of pain and blood. An excerpt:

With the arrest of [Operation Rescue founder] Randall Terry, Father Jenkins and the University administration at Notre Dame take their advocacy of evil to a new level of spiritual atrocity.

In a little less than two weeks they will welcome to the university campus a man who represents the most abominable and extreme commitment ever known in US politics to destroying the God given right to life of innocent human offspring...

Every time abortionists rip a child limb from limb within the womb; every time they crush the fragile head; every time they scorch the life from its body with a death dealing solution; every time they scrape its nascent cells of life from the walls of a womb -- Jesus is savagely beaten again; his skull pressed down with thorns; his limbs pulled savagely in their sockets; his hands and feet pierced through with nails; his breath drawn with fiery pain; his life finally extinguished; every time.

And every time there stands vociferous in the crowd, the ambitious man of blood, Barack Obama. He is justifying the torture, forcing bystanders to aid in the atrocity, assuring that the nails are paid for and the henchmen of evil well fed and rewarded for their role in the daily crucifixion. Even the garments of the innocent children (their little organs or stem cells), like the vesture of Christ, he prepares for division among those who perpetrate the slaughter...

[T]hrough the years Randall Terry, and those who share his lion's heart for justice, have stood with the Mother of our Lord at the foot of the Cross. They have been sprayed with the blood and water that gushed from his wounded side. They have received from the pierced and bleeding hand of our Dying Lord, the Blessed Gift by which he made his Mother the mother of all the faithful ones who endure with Him to the end, receiving His crown of pain, which is also the crown of life.