So, there’s this artificial tempest going on because Kerry referred to Mary Cheney as a lesbian during the third presidential debate.
If you haven’t been following, some people (particularly Lynne and Dick Cheney) claim that it was unconscionable for Kerry to bring up Mary Cheney’s homosexuality during the debate, after moderator Bob Schieffer asked if the candidates believe homosexuality is a choice.
KERRY: We’re all God’s children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.
I think if you talk to anybody, it’s not choice. I’ve met people who struggled with this for years, people who were in a marriage because they were living a sort of convention, and they struggled with it…
Lynne Cheney called Kerry “not a good man” and said mentioning Mary was a “cheap and tawdry political trick.” Dick Cheney described himself as “a pretty angry father.” The New York Post (big surprise) has it as today’s cover story under the headline “NO SHAME.”
Oh, I see. So it’s okay for you to mention your own gay daughter, but nobody else can?
Cheney’s remarks came in response to a question from a member of the audience at an Aug. 24 town hall meeting in Davenport, Iowa.
The audience member asked, “I would like to know, sir, from your heart — I don’t want to know what your advisers say, or even what your top adviser thinks — but I need to know what do you think about homosexual marriages?”
With his wife Lynne Cheney sitting next to him, Cheney said, “Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it’s an issue that our family is very familiar with.”
No, it can’t be that it’s okay only if it’s your own daughter, because the Cheneys didn’t express public outrage when Republican Senate candidate Alan Keyes referred to Mary recently as a “selfish hedonist.”
This is utter bullshit. Karl Rove must be thrilled at this distraction from Bush’s awful presidency.
As for the merits themselves of this trumped-up issue, Dave Cullen in Salon.com gets it right:
Let’s get one thing straight. It is not an insult to call a proudly public lesbian a lesbian. It’s an insult to gasp when someone calls her a lesbian. That’s how all the gays I have spoken to the past 24 hours perceived the press response. You’re embarrassed for us. And it’s infuriating.
So does Andrew Sullivan:
[I]t’s no different than, say, if a candidate were to mention another candidate’s son in the Marines. Or if, in a debate on immigration, a pro-immigrant candidate mentioned Kerry’s immigrant wife. You have to regard homosexuality as immoral or wrong or shameful to even get to the beginning of the case against Kerry. That’s why it’s a Rorschach test. Secondly, Mary Cheney isn’t private. She ran gay outreach for Coors, for pete’s sake. She appears in public with her partner. Her family acknowledges this. She’s running her dad’s campaign! Whatever else this has to do with – and essentially, it has to do whether you approve of homosexuality or not – privacy is irrelevant.
Mike has some comments as well.
Let’s see: more than 1,000 American soldiers have died in an unnecessary and horribly-executed war. Osama bin Laden is still at large. Bush has blown the deficit through the roof, gutted environmental protections, underfunded his own education program, and lied about the cost of his prescription drug program. No wonder the Republicans want to distract us.
Now can we please get back to how Bush is ruining the country?
What I keep coming back to is the “not a good man” thing. Wow. That’s really harsh. I can’t think of any other cases of a representative of one candidate (even an unofficial one) calling another candidate a bad person — it goes beyond the normal level of partisan name-calling between people who know they’ll have to work together in the future.
This is a campaign in tatters — Barbara Bush calling Gerry Ferraro a bitch was just a taunt from someone in an unassailable position, but a bridge-burning comment along these lines carries the subtext “and I’m afraid he might win.”
you know its just so typical of that evil bastard Cheney. you saw him in the debate with edwards and he’s obviously such a smug, evil, meanspirited motherf****er. It’s a rare occasion that I agree with Andrew Sullivan, but I do in this case. Mary Cheney is no longer private and being gay is not shameful. I think what Kerry said was not only fair but important. He drove home the fact that political policies have an impact on real people – something that Cheney and the rest of the GOP want to ignore. And he rubbed Cheney’s nose in his own hypocrisy, which was gratifying. I wish the Dems played hardball like that all the time – maybe we’d finally start taking back this country. But then they’d have to listen to Nader, too, which’ll never happen.
Gee, from the sounds eminating from Karl Rove’s evil flying monkeys one would think future President Kerry had accused the Cheneys of locking up their daughter in some reparative therapy camp in the Black Hills.
Her noticeable, and poli-campaign appropriate, silence might lend credence to this.
The American public sees through the “Not a good man” phrase. When Kerry spoke i, honest injun, thought it was a kind set of words, and was profoundly morally inspired — and that Dick Cheney would later offer Kerry thanks in the press so as to negate Kerry’s wise comments. No joke, that’s what i thought.
So, when MotherSuperior Cheney declared Kerry the anti-tsadik thought, “Geesh. She almost sounds as bad as me.” I believe Americans who saw Kerry’s original comment, and heard Mrs. Richard Cheney’s moral tirade, see through the political hacking.
This is the Bush campaign’s last good old boy hoorah before Election Day and any possible (probable) alQaeda hijinks, upon which our democracy shall pivot. (Buy bottled water.)
rob@egoz.org
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pivot