A Father and His Daughter

I never thought I would find myself agreeing with Vice President Cheney on anything. To many people he is the power behind the throne, the obsessed ideologue behind the invasion of Iraq, the Emperor to President Bush's Darth Vader.

But once in a while -- once in a long while -- he actually says something sensible.

On Tuesday, Cheney was the main attraction at a rally in Iowa. After hearing the standard stump speech about Iraq and the War on Terror, one attendee said that "we have a battle here on this land, as well" and asked Cheney about his stand on gay marriage.

Coming from a man who still believes Iraq was behind 9/11 and had nuclear weapons before last year's invasion, Cheney's response was eminently levelheaded. "With respect to the question of relationships," he said, "my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to." He went on to say that marriage is historically "a relationship that has been handled by the states. The states have made that basic fundamental decision in terms of defining what constitutes a marriage."

This put him into direct conflict with Bush and the Republican Party, both of whom adamantly support a constitutional amendment denying the same marriage rights enjoyed by everyone else to gays and lesbians, taking it entirely out of the hands of the states to begin with. "Attempts to redefine marriage in a single city or state could have serious consequences throughout the country," the draft GOP platform says, "and anything less than a constitutional amendment, passed by Congress and ratified by the states, is vulnerable to being overturned by activist judges."

What was behind Cheney's sudden burst of humanity? The answer is simple: one of his daughters is gay. Just for a moment, he stopped thinking like an ideologue and started thinking like a father. "We have enormous pride in both of them," Cheney said. "They're both fine young women. They do a superb job, frankly, of supporting us. And we are blessed with both our daughters."

You see, in a political environment which blames all our problems on the eternal Them, whether they be people of a different religion, skin color, sexual orientation, or anything else, it becomes a lot harder to go with the flow when one of "them" is family.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan ducked the issue at Wednesday's press gaggle, but the GOP's right-wing base promptly attacked Cheney with righteous fury. The Family Research Council, one of the loudest anti-gay-marriage groups, pounced on him for sending "mixed messages," frostily wondered why he was "allowed to depart from this position when the top of the ticket is unified on all other issues," and told him in no uncertain terms to get back in line.

Do the FRC and other religious-right groups actually expect Cheney publicly to relegate his own daughter to second-class citizenship for the sake of ideology? Apparently so, and their actions should make Cheney think long and hard about whether their backing is worth it.

Anyone who demands that someone must turn his or her back on a loved one as the price of their political support can, in the words of the Vice President himself, go f*ck themselves, and Cheney should say so loudly and publicly.