Mary's Back

Kerry Didn't Gay-Bait - He used Mary Cheney to shame Bush for gay-baiting

Timothy Noah eloquently makes the point that needs to be passed around the media and turned into the consensus opinion on this whole gay Cheney row before it consumes the election. Here's the end of the article:

As it happens, the genetic nature of homosexuality was the very subject Kerry was discussing when he brought up Mary Cheney. Both candidates had been asked, "Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?" Bush had said he didn't know, and then, after some vague words about tolerance and dignity, affirmed his support for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Then Kerry spoke:

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.

And I've met wives who are supportive of their husbands or vice versa when they finally sort of broke out and allowed themselves to live who they were, who they felt God had made them.

I think we have to respect that.

I won't dispute that Kerry was using Mary Cheney to score a political point. But the political point was an entirely legitimate one, aimed, I believe, not at fundamentalists but at swing voters with libertarian leanings. Listen, Kerry was saying. This guy knows gay people, just like you and I do. So he must know that homosexuality isn't a "lifestyle choice." He must know that, and yet he pretends not to know it to score points with the religious right. How cynical can you get? And then he lends his support to a cockamamie Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage that even his right-wing-nut of a vice president can't stomach because his own daughter is gay. But even Cheney won't really speak out against this administration's exploitation of the gay-marriage issue to score cheap political points. Some father he is.

We can argue about whether Kerry's posture of moral superiority on this issue is entirely earned. After all, he, too, claims to oppose gay marriage (because "marriage is between a man and a woman," an argument whose essence is "because I say so"). But Kerry's record is more tolerant than his campaign rhetoric suggests, and even his campaign rhetoric is more tolerant than Bush's. Kerry wants to make that a reason for swing voters who deplore bigotry to vote for him. I think that's what made Lynne Cheney spitting mad--she resents the implication that the Bush-Cheney campaign sold out her own gay daughter. But you know what? It did. And you know what else? The evidence that Kerry would treat gays with greater tolerance than Bush is a pretty good reason to vote for Kerry.

The emphasis, as usual, is mine. And that's the point I've been trying to make all along, to anyone I know who might be wavering. Kerry is the better choice for dozens of reasons, but if you care at all about this one, I hope you'll give him your vote.