For some reason, a lot of people are all upset that John Kerry mentioned Mary Cheney by name when discussing the subject of gay marriage and whether people choose to be gay or not. This boggles my mind, and Andrew Sullivan hits it just right, I think:
I keep getting emails asserting that Kerry's mentioning of Mary Cheney is somehow offensive or gratuitous or a "low blow". Huh? Mary Cheney is out of the closet and a member, with her partner, of the vice-president's family. That's a public fact. No one's privacy is being invaded by mentioning this. When Kerry cites Bush's wife or daughters, no one says it's a "low blow." The double standards are entirely a function of people's lingering prejudice against gay people. And by mentioning it, Kerry showed something important. This issue is not an abstract one. It's a concrete, human and real one. It affects many families, and Bush has decided to use this cynically as a divisive weapon in an election campaign. He deserves to be held to account for this - and how much more effective than showing a real person whose relationship and dignity he has attacked and minimized? Does this makes Bush's base uncomfortable? Well, good. It's about time they were made uncomfortable in their acquiescence to discrimination. Does it make Bush uncomfortable? Even better. His decision to bar gay couples from having any protections for their relationships in the constitution is not just a direct attack on the family member of the vice-president. It's an attack on all families with gay members - and on the family as an institution. That's a central issue in this campaign, a key indictment of Bush's record and more than relevant to any debate. For four years, this president has tried to make gay people invisible, to avoid any mention of us, to pretend we don't exist. Well, we do. Right in front of him.
Bingo, Mr. Sullivan.
Postscript: Gryphmon makes two good points about this as well:
As is rightly pointed out by one of his commenter's, conserviqueer, Alan Keyes says some extremely nasty things about Mary Cheney in public and theres nothing heard on the Right except silence or agreement. Jon Kerry casts Mary in a positive light and the Right complains that he insulted her?...If the Vice-President's daughter had cancer and President Bush had just vetoed all funding for cancer research and treatment, don't you think that the fact she has cancer would be newsworthy?
I do think the Cheneys are being disingenuous about this. They didn't come out and declare that Alan Keyes is not a good man when he told the press that Mary Cheney was a "selfish hedonist". But when John Kerry makes a statement about her that is not the least bit insulting and is in fact complimentary, they go ballistic. It looks to me like this isn't really about them being offended. They surely should have been far more offended at the insult from Keyes than by the compliment from Kerry, yet no reaction to the first and an overreaction to the second. Nor do I think it's because they want to keep Mary in the closet. I think they are reacting this way because it makes them uncomfortable, not because it was pointed out that they have a gay daughter - that has long been public knowledge and they have always accepted that and handled it gracefully - but because it puts the focus on the dissonance between their personal feelings about gay marriage and the President's policy on the subject, which they personally oppose.
Sullivan is right when he says that the President has cynically used this issue for political purposes. They pushed through 3 separate votes on the Federal Marriage Amendment. The house and senate both failed to pass it by wide margins, but they still brought it up again in the house for another vote that they knew they had no hope of winning. Why? So they could grandstand on the issue and tell their base, "See, my opponent voted against this twice! He's against marriage!" They knew it had no chance of passing in the first place. But the Republicans' political strategy has always been, to steal the old phrase, "God, guns and gays". Make your opponent out to be pro-gay and you fire up the religious right by appealing to their bigotry. This is how you motivate your base if you're a Republican politician, and everyone knows it.
So why on earth is Kerry getting all this heat for "trying to score political points" by bringing up her name when the real heat should be on Bush and his fellow anti-gay bigots for denying to her the right to at least some measure of equal rights and equal protection with her lifelong partner? At least the political point he is making is a valid one. The political point that Bush is trying to make is pure bigotry and demagoguery.
I understand why it's uncomfortable for the Cheneys to hear it, but it's still a valid and fair point to make, that the President's policies are damaging to Mary Cheney and to millions of Americans just like her. To the Cheneys and to those now hammering Kerry for bringing her up, I say: point your anger where it belongs, at the people who are advocating bigotry against Mary Cheney and everyone like her, not at those who are willing to stand up for her.
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This assessment is certainly true. However, Kerry's comment irked me because I find it hypocritical. He's willing to acknowledge that homosexuality is not a choice, but he won't acknowledge that homosexuals deserve equal rights? Just another example of how bloody spineless Kerry is. And it disgusts me. So in a way, I do think it was a low blow because it was just an attempt by Kerry to exploit Mary Cheney. If he gave a rats ass about homosexual rights, he would stand up for what is right here. This isn't a grey area. It is a clear issue.
So what is Kerry's position then? Homosexuality is natural, and not a choice. But homosexuals still don't deserve the same rights as heterosexuals? Why? To me that's like saying that being born black is clearly natural and not a choice, but black people still don't deserve the same rights as white people.
Bigotry is bigotry.
Bingo, Mr.Berez
Right on target Berez. And he only used her name to benifit himself. I too was a bit offended when spoke of her in the way he did. All he admitted to is the fact that a person has no choice in their sexual orentation. There was so much more he could have said about equal rights.
Ah, for the campaign's end, so no matter who wins, we'll see the actions that words only obscure.
I agree with the three of you on the question of being unsatisfied with Kerry's answer on the whole. Obviously, I support gay marriage and would like to see Kerry do the same. Politically, he can't do that even if he wanted to, but it's the right thing to do. Of course, I find Bush's answer 10 times worse. He talks about affording dignity and respect to gays, then sponsors a constitutional amendment that would take away even any state civil union legislation. At least Kerry supports partnership rights legislation, which would provide many of the same benefits and protections, just without calling it "marriage". That's a whole lot better than Bush's flat rejection of any rights or protections for gay couples.
But that doesn't really have anything to do with the question of whether mentioning Mary Cheney by name was tacky, or whatever term is being used for it. That is an entirely different question. And on that one, I agree with Sullivan. I think it is entirely appropriate to point out that Bush's policies make second class citizens out of people, even people within his own circle. It puts an identity on the issue and takes it out of the abstract, and that is important to do. Bush may view his policies as being about the "sanctity of marriage", but his policies and his rhetoric hurt real people like Mary Cheney. Bush's policy in this area is, as Sullivan noted, an attack on Mary Cheney's life and relationsihp, as well as the lives and relationships of millions of others. Pointing out that fact by name is, in my view, entirely appropriate.
I wasn't completely satisfied by Kerry's answer, but Bush out and out lied during his answer. In Bush's answer, he claimed to advocate tolerance for gay people. Yet not five years ago, while he was still governor of Texas, while the Lawrence and Garner sodomy cases were wending their way through the Texas court system, he said that he approved of Texas's homo-only sodomy statute as an expression of the state's morality, and that he would veto any attempt to repeal it. And he decried the ultimate decision of the case in the US Supreme Court, where it was eventually overturned. I am sorry, but I find it totally hypocritical of Bush to not claim that he advocates tolerance for gay people.
And that ignores his advocacy of the federal anti-marriage amendment last summer.
There are other examples I could cite to illustrate Bush's hypocrisy on the issue. Unless he had an epiphany in the last few months--which is highly unlikely--the man's answer last night was an out and out lie.
As far as I'm concerned, Kerry's citing of Mary Cheney was intended to highlight the hypocrisy of Bush/Cheney's fam'ly values silliness. And in that regard, it was totally appropriate.
raj, I completely agree with you on this one. When I read his answer and he had the audacity to claim that "in a free society people, consenting adults can live the way they want to live", while simultaneously supporting the Texas anti-sodomy law that allowed the police to arrest two men for having sex in the privacy of their own home, and then decried the overturning of that law as "activist judges" subverting the will of the people....well that just takes more chutzpah than I've got. How patently absurd. I don't wanna hear a guy throw around phrases like "tolerance and respect" for gays and the right of consenting adults to live as they please when he repeatedly endorsed a law that allowed the police to bust into people's homes and arrest them for having consensual sex with another adult. It's a lie, plain and simple. That's not tolerance and respect, it's advocacy of repression.
I think both candidates stance on gay rights is deplorable. I found Kerry's comments insulting, more for the fact that he sat there and said he and the president had the same viewpoint.
Bleh to both of them.
I think both candidates stance on gay rights is deplorable. I found Kerry's comments insulting, more for the fact that he sat there and said he and the president had the same viewpoint.
Well, they really don't have the same viewpoint at all. Both are opposed to gay marriage in the abstract, but Bush wants a constitutional amendment to ban them, and to ban even the states from enacting civil union legislation. Kerry is for civil unions and against that amendment. And as raj pointed out, Bush is also in favor of anti-sodomy laws, despite his bullshit rhetoric about consenting adults, while Kerry is opposed to them. Those are major differences of opinion. While I wish Kerry would go further, take his statements of principle to their logical conclusion, his position is still infinitely more sane and pro-gay than Bush's position. There's a big difference between "I wish candidate X would go a little further" and "Candidate Y is completely opposed to anything resembling a humane position".
There are indeed major differences of opinion on this issue between Bush (at least what he says) and Kerry, and, quite frankly I doubt very seriously that Kerry would actually vote in favor of a constitutional amendment here in MA that would ban equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. Whatever he says on the national campaign stump.
On the other hand, quite frankly, I don't believe that Bush has any actual beliefs on much of anything, but I do believe that he will say virtually anything to get himself elected. He's been in office for 4 years, and one might seriously wonder why he isn't out touting his record more.