{"id":2762,"date":"2004-10-14T09:50:30","date_gmt":"2004-10-14T14:50:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2762.html"},"modified":"2004-10-14T09:50:30","modified_gmt":"2004-10-14T14:50:30","slug":"kerrys-mary-cheney-remark-hardly-crossed-any-lines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/kerrys-mary-cheney-remark-hardly-crossed-any-lines\/","title":{"rendered":"Kerry’s Mary Cheney remark hardly crossed any lines"},"content":{"rendered":"

I suspect that the Bush campaign, desperate to find a way to distract attention away from some of Bush’s more egregious mistakes last night, have had to settle on trivia as their primary talking point from last night: Kerry’s reference to Dick Cheney’s gay daughter. It’s hardly been 12 hours and this has already received far more attention<\/a> than it deserves.<\/p>\n

Lynne V. Cheney, wife of Vice President Cheney, accused John F. Kerry on Wednesday night of “a cheap and tawdry political trick” and said he “is not a good man” after he brought up their daughter’s homosexuality at the final presidential debate. <\/p>\n

Mary Cheney, one of the vice president’s two daughters and an official of the Bush-Cheney campaign, has been open about her lesbian status. The candidates were asked if they believe homosexuality is a choice, and President Bush did not mention Mary Cheney. Then Kerry said, “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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First of all, Kerry was simply humanizing the question. He wasn’t “outing” anyone; Mary Cheney’s sexual orientation has never been a secret. What’s so tawdry about this? The question was about whether being gay is a choice. Bush wouldn’t answer either way and Kerry was putting a human face — whom Bush obviously knows — on an important societal question. There wasn’t anything “cheap” about it.<\/p>\n

Indeed, just last week in the VP debate, in a question about gay marriage, John Edwards brought up the fact that the Cheneys have a gay daughter. The vice president thanked him<\/i> for his comments and said he “appreciate[s] that very much.”<\/p>\n

Moreover, let’s go back and look at the transcript from Aug. 24, at a town-hall meeting the Cheneys attended in Davenport, Iowa.
\n<\/p>\n

Question: … I would like to know, sir, from your heart — I don’t want to know what your advisors say, or even what your top advisor thinks — but I need to know what do you think about homosexual marriages.<\/p>\n

Cheney: Well, the question has come up obviously in the past with respect to the question of gay marriage. Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it’s an issue that our family is very familiar with.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is Lynne Cheney prepared to say that this, too, was a “cheap and tawdry political trick”? The VP did the same thing Kerry did last night — he took a question that did not directly relate to Mary Cheney, but mentioned her as a way to put a human face on a controversial issue. It wasn’t underhanded when Dick Cheney said this in Iowa, just as it wasn’t underhanded for Kerry last night in Tempe.<\/p>\n

If this is the best the Republicans can come up with to try and downplay Kerry’s victory last night, they’ll have to do better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suspect that the Bush campaign, desperate to find a way to distract attention away from some of Bush’s more egregious mistakes last night, have had to settle on trivia as their primary talking point from last night: Kerry’s reference to Dick Cheney’s gay daughter. It’s hardly been 12 hours and this has already received […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2762\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}