Selective anger, selective compassion

Conservatives are making a big to-do about John Kerry mentioning Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter.

The question asked of Kerry and President Bush was: "Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?"

Kerry's answer began: "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."

Conservatives' motives aside for a moment, Kerry probably had two intentions by bringing up Mary Cheney. Appealing to moderates and using Mary Cheney to demonstrate the Bush administration's hypocrisy.

He points out that it's not just immoral/amoral types who are gay. It's not just free love leftist hippies who are gay. Sometimes gays are, gasp, Republican. Sometimes they're children of conservatives. Sometimes they're children of people who've made their careers out of trumpeting "traditional values." If a "normal" family can "produce" a gay child, then perhaps homosexuality and normality shouldn't be seen opposites.

Kerry points out that gay bashing hurts these Republicans too. It hurts the daughter of no less than the conservative vice-president.

The effect of Kerry's comment is to humanize the debate. It's really easy to bash gays in general. It's a lot harder to bash them individually. The effect was to take the vitriol out of the realm of the abstract. To remind people that when you're bashing gays, you're bashing not just liberals and people of loose morals, but also the Republican vice-president's daughter.

The intent was to appeal to moderates.

I'm sure the other intent was to try to drive a wedge between the president (Mary Cheney's father's boss) and those supporters of his who are homophobic. These folks think that homosexuality is either genetic or the result of a choice. By bringing this up, Kerry's forcing the homophobes to confront their own prejudices. If they refuse to, which is likely, they're essentially admitting that either the vice-president and Mrs. Cheney gave their daughter defective genes or the Cheneys did a crappy job instilling their daughter with the "proper" morality.

It is unusual for a campaign to mention the family members of the opponents. Unless of course that family member happened to be named Hillary Clinton (and at least Kerry didn't savagely attack Mary Cheney). However, he did not invade her privacy. Her lesbianism has been a matter of public record for several years. In fact, she once served as Coors emissary to the gay community. Though I wish I could remember where, I've read that the Cheney parents even brought up her lesbianism during the 2000 campaign.

The Cheney parents were reportedly steamed at Kerry's comments. The vice-president called himself "an angry father" while his wife referred to it as "a cheap and tawdry political trick."

Yet when conservative firebrand Alan Keyes, a Republican US Senate candidate in Illinois, branded Mary Cheney as "a selfish hedonist" because of her lesbianism, Dick Cheney wasn't "an angry father" then. Lynne Cheney didn't call that "a cheap and tawdry political trick."

Perhaps their anger is as selective and Kerry's "compassion."

Essentially, the only way the reference to Mary Cheney can be considered an insult to her or her family is if you consider her homosexuality to be something awful. John Edwards' wife hit the nail on the head when she said that Mrs. Cheney "overreacted to this and treated it as if it's shameful to have this discussion" adding that "I think that it indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences,"