Homosexuality put in spotlight

By Margaret Carlson of The Los Angeles Times

I have to admit I found it a little jarring when Sen. John Kerry used the word “lesbian” on Wednesday night. The evening of the last presidential debate was thick with statistics, and the president had just shouted that Kerry had voted to increase taxes 98 times for what seemed like the 98th time.

As far as we’ve come, the word “lesbian” still leaps out in the middle of a presidential debate.

The word came in an answer to moderator Bob Schieffer’s novel way of framing a question about gay rights: “Is homosexuality a choice?”

Bush sidestepped, as he did last year when asked if homosexuality was a sin. (That time, he answered, “We’re all sinners.”) This time he replied, “I just don’t know.” Although he surely has an opinion.

But to say so would risk alienating one wing or the other of his party. Kerry, talking honestly — and for once, it seemed, from the heart — said: “We’re all God’s children. 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 ... who she was born as. I think if you talk to anybody, it’s not a choice.”

On Thursday morning, I was even more jarred when I read Lynne Cheney’s reaction to Kerry’s comment. “This is not a good man,” she said. “Of course I am speaking as a mom, and a pretty indignant mom. This is not a good man. What a cheap and tawdry political trick.”

My first instinct was to admire Cheney as a fierce and righteous mother defending her daughter. But the more I thought about it, her daughter is an adult; she’s not Amy Carter or Chelsea Clinton thrust into the public eye in tender adolescence.

She now holds one of the most important jobs in her dad’s re-election effort. And her life partner joined the Cheneys on stage in St. Louis after the second debate.

She’d have to be in deep denial to think her sexual orientation wasn’t going to come up, given that Republicans have made gay marriage a defining issue of the campaign.

It was dear old Dad who first made Mary Cheney a talking point in the campaign earlier this year, discussing how there is some daylight between his position on the gay marriage amendment and that of the president. And in last week’s veep debate, he actually thanked John Edwards for making a kind reference to Mary.

During the campaign in 2000, neither Cheney would discuss Mary. Time magazine wrote a piece headlined “Where’s Mary?” about the constant references by the Cheneys to their daughter Elizabeth — the lawyer, wife and mother — and their simultaneous silence on Mary.

Now the vice president has gone public, showing how tolerant he is of his own daughter — but he is still not willing to move his president or his party in that direction. Kerry and Edwards see this and realize that discussing Mary Cheney is a no-lose proposition: It highlights the hypocrisy of the Bush-Cheney position while alerting evangelicals to the fact that the Cheneys have a gay person in the family whom they apparently aren’t trying to convert or cure.

Republicans know they have to be careful how they strike back for fear of alienating their moderates.

For the first time, Log Cabin Republicans are not supporting the GOP. The constitutional amendment on gay marriage was too far to go for a tax cut.

You couldn’t read Lynne Cheney’s outburst about a cheap and tawdry trick without thinking that she herself finds homosexuality cheap and tawdry.

Herein lies the irony of the flap. At the moment of Bush’s evasion, it was entirely appropriate for Kerry to drive home the point that, as the Cheneys and millions of other American families know, homosexuality is about identity, not about a lifestyle choice.

By standing up and saying so, it was John Kerry who was defending Mary Cheney. If anyone was doing her a disservice it was her mother, when in fact, Kerry was just doing what Mary’s own father hasn’t.