The Right Admits to Anti-gay Bias?

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for catching this article in the National Review Online, containing this quote:

Fox News contributor Mort Kondracke put it best when he said last night, "I think it was totally underhanded -- the outing of Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter.... And it struck me as a low blow designed to weaken the Bush-Cheney team with right-wingers who might not know that Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter."

While the Democrats have been hurling specious and unsubstantiated charges about Republicans suppressing the African-American vote, Kerry and Edwards are leading their party's effort -- on national television no less -- to discourage religious and social conservatives from going to the ballot box for President Bush.

Apparently they haven't bothered to follow this line of reasoning to its obvious conclusion. If this was really an effort to discourage "religious and social conservatives" from voting for Bush merely by pointing out that the Vice President's daughter is gay (which is an absurd premise to begin with, but that's what they're arguing), isn't that an admission that religious and social conservatives are so blinded by their anti-gay prejudices that they would vote against Bush merely because someone else on the ticket has a gay daughter? And if that mere mention of Mary Cheney's name was intended to appeal to the homophobes on the religious right, why isn't that criticism being leveled at Bush for his stridently anti-gay positions? Why isn't he trying to appeal to anti-gay bigotry with a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and his advocacy of harsh anti-sodomy laws? Sorry guys, you got caught big time on this one.

The other question is the same one I asked yesterday - where were these brave defenders of the oppressed when their fellow conservatives actually WERE doing what they are now falsely accusing Kerry of doing? Where were Cesar Conda and Mort Kondracke in 2000 when the Bush campaign was push polling in South Carolina to spread the rumor that John McCain had fathered an interracial child so they could beat him in the primary? Dead silence from the right on that one. All of this fake outrage is utter hypocrisy. And as usual, Sullivan nails it completely:

In fact, I'm deeply heartened by so many Republicans suddenly concerned about the smearing of homosexuals for political purposes. The reason for Taranto's assertion? He says that Kerry was pandering to the anti-gay parts of the Democratic base, by letting the last few souls on earth know, in an entirely positive way, that the vice-president's daughter is openly gay. And the way Kerry "gay-baited" was to say that homosexuality is not a choice, that he supports equal rights for gay couples, and that Mary Cheney helps prove that being gay isn't a choice. That'll rile 'em up in the trenches, won't it?...

You know what is based in gay-baiting? Implicitly, clearly, shamelessly: the Bush-Cheney campaign. The GOP has a nutty candidate in Illinois who called Mary Cheney a "selfish hedonist" - but Dick Cheney wasn't an "angry dad," then. Lynne Cheney didn't call that "tawdry." So Bush runs the most anti-gay national campaign ever and it's his opponent who gets tarred as a homophobe! Brilliant, even by Rove's standards. And when it comes to gay-baiting, there are few as practised as Rove. The sheer nerve of these hypocrites never ceases to amaze.

Hear, hear. This is just astonishing chutzpah on the part of the right. Absolutely breathtaking in its sheer stupidity.