Safire Redux

The New Republic Online: Bill Fold

Andrew Sullivan's fisking of yesterday's awful column by William Safire is almost perfect. He calls Safire to account for asserting his conjectures as facts and exposes the hypocrisy rife in both the column and in the attitude it represents. Here are a few choice passages:

The question raised was whether homosexual orientation is a choice. The most obvious argument that it isn't a choice is that many gay people would obviously be better off if they were straight. Why would they choose something that difficult if they didn't have to? This is particularly the case with people in the current Republican Party. If homosexuality is a choice, why would gay Republicans exist? Since the party is now institutionally anti-gay, it would make sense for all those who have "chosen" to be gay to "choose" to be straight. But they can't. Why? Because it isn't a choice.

And, whether she likes it or not, the most prominent gay Republican in the entire country is Mary Cheney. In fact, she's particularly poignant proof that homosexuality is not a choice. Her lesbianism is a source of acute embarrassment for the Republican Party. That's why she was pointedly absent from the family tableau at the Republican Convention. And yet she endures. And her family embraces her and her partner, Heather. What data could be more relevant in response to the question asked? Her very existence proves the Republican base wrong and bigoted. And Mary Cheney also disproves the notion that to be pro-gay is somehow to be anti-family. The opposite is the case. Being anti-gay is being anti-family. And, again, the Cheney family proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

And there's this pair of questions, which bear answering:

And if Lynne Cheney is not ashamed of her daughter's lesbianism, why did she object to the kind words about her from Kerry and Edwards? Perhaps the underlying truth is that Lynne Cheney is indeed ashamed--but not of her daughter's lesbianism. She is ashamed of the fact that she and her husband have now been exposed as hypocrites. That's a harsh word. But what other word comes to mind when the parents of a gay daughter seek to reelect a party and president intent on destroying their own daughter's civil rights?

This issue has clearly hurt John Kerry; I hope that the damage is repaired before election day. But I also hope that it opens a more realistic national conversation about the place of gays and lesbians in society. We should all feel sorry for Mary Cheney; she's in a difficult position, trying to support the father that she loves while being accused by her community of abandoning it because the man her father serves is our sworn enemy. But society should take this moment to reflect on its pity for Mary and extend it to every gay person in America whose dignity and self-worth have been damaged by the last year of vicious campaigning against us. America may deserve better than a campaign that suddenly revolves around the daughter of the vice president, whether she put herself in position for it to happen or not. Gays and lesbians certainly deserve better than to have our lives treated as a get-out-the-vote tool rather than with the same respect as anyone else's.