The whole "Kerry said Mary Cheney was gay! How dare he!" controversy -- find the stupidest thing said and link/post it here

(xpost)

http://instapundit.com/archives/018438.php

"One of the most refreshing things on the campaign trail last year was seeing stodgy old Dick Gephardt talk about how he loved his lesbian daughter Chrissy. He did it at almost every campaign stop. He did it so much it got boring, like everything Gephardt does. But it was from the heart.
Can you imagine Gephardt's reaction if he were a candidate and Bush had said something like Kerry said last night? Simple: Warmth and gratitude. Gephardt never implied there was anything unseemly about his daughter or her partner - they were both on his family's Christmas card! Bush wouldn't have had to mention her. Gephardt surely would have beaten him to it.
The only damn difference is that Bush & Cheney's base is anti-gay. That's why Mary Cheney's off-limits, not privacy or anything else. If their base were pro-gay, she would have had a prime-time convention speaking slot. But because they're homophobes, Kerry is supposed to shut up and act accordingly.
Andrew, I hope to God we're just 18 days away from having leadership that doesn't feel it has to whisper about a loved one's existence."

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110005755

James Taranto claims that Kerry was "gay-baiting." An excerpt:

"But this is not about Bush's base. It is about Kerry's base. Many Democrats oppose same-sex marriage, and some no doubt harbor antigay prejudice. By making an issue of Cheney's daughter's sexuality, [Kerry and Edwards] hope to discourage them from defecting to Bush."

x-post

Alan Keyes' duaghter!

I'd have to disagree with this - you seem essentially to be saying it would be okay for her to do this job if she was heterosexual, but because she's gay she should be doing something a little bit more worthy.
Hell, being gay isn't always such a politicising factor. Sure, a few of us get a look at the world from outside the mainstream, whether we like it or not, and decide that being outside that strand of opinion isn't, really, so bad. Others get shoved out of the mainstream and spend all their lives trying to climb back in. Watch the horrible Queer Eye For A Straight Guy sometime, and observe how consumer-obsessed so much of the gay community has become.

I have a feeling that if there had been various statements Bush-Cheneyward saying that the sky was blue and then Kerry said it, he would be accused of bad faith.

Yes, it would be, if I was doing that.

Do you really not understand?

Have you much experience of the gay community? My apologies if you have and if it happens to be very different from mine but judging from most of the people I've met the emu-farming idyll postulated above is very far from a reality.

I'm offering Queer Eye as an example of a strain of consumer-culture that exists in the Gay Community, not a totality, and would have thought this was clear from my post. I had already stated above that there are lots of people for whom the experience of being gay IS a radicalising (to the left-wing) factor. Equally, there are many, many people for whom it isn't. The suggestion that Mary Cheney should be off feeding her birds, rather than supporting her father's campaign, simply because she happens to be a lesbian is really rather offensive.

Okay, drop Queer Eye from the discussion (although from a subjective analysis most of the gay people I know DO watch this and consider me slightly peculiar and humourless for finding the whole pantomime rather disturbing. So I don't think your point about the audience not being gay is entirely valid - although it has some basis.). I'll happily stop talking about it here.

I'd like to hear the outrage from the left if the debate subject would have been obesity and the exchange would have gone something like this:
Sheiffer (?? on spelling) to skerry
Do you think obesity is a national problem and should be treated as a disease?

skerry
Of course I do. We need to get this problem under control by limiting the fats in foods............ (then continue for his two minutes)

Sheiffer - Mr. President, you have 1 1/2 minutes to respond.

President Bush
Yes we do have a problem with obesity. Just ask Mrs Edwards. She is really chubby.

And

Dick Cheney's daughter is a Lesbian. Dick Cheney's Lesbian daughter works for Coors. John Kerry would not drink a Coors beer he was offered on a flight last week. Hmmm.

I don't know what that one means.

The Kerry campaign is a lot like the terrorists in Cechnia. They were hurting the school children to get at the children's parents.

And finally, not really political,but certainly hilarious:

I think, in a lot of cases at least, sexual preference is "hard wired" into the person's brain. That's how it is in all other living things, why not humans. Could be genetic (at leas t in part); could be something that happens during fetal development. I'm not saying that homosexuality is "normal", rather that it is a congential illness like cerebreal palsy or club foot.

Obviously, none of this stuff is a surprise from the Free Republice, but when I want to find the supidest comments about things, it's where I go.

Absolutely. I just found the assumption that gay people shouldn't be right-wing rather a giant one.

I do agree with the point you were trying to make though - I just felt that was a poor way of illustrating it. Gays or not I can get defensive when I feel someone is painting an entire community with the same brush.

Hmm...but I wasn't trying to paint everyone with the same brush. That was the attitude I perceived in the original post that I was reacting against. That's why I made the point of saying that being gay could be an extremely politicising factor, and was for some people. Perhaps it wasn't good to mention QEFTSG here - it just seemed an example of the apotheosis of anything sincere.

... neither would I, Coors sucks.

And more's the damn pity.

BUSTED: Gary Bauer has long denied he's anti-gay, or catering to anti-gay prejudice. But this morning he came clean, in referring to Kerry's mentioning Mary Cheney's lesbianism:

"I think it is part of a strategy to suppress traditional-values voters, to knock 1 or 2 percent off in some rural areas by causing people to turn on the president."

Think about that for a minute. Bauer believes that his core supporters would be likely to "turn" on the president just because the vice-president's daughter is a lesbian. Notice that there's no indication of homosexual "acts", just a revulsion at Mary Cheney's simple identity as a lesbian. This is their base. This is why they're worried. Some of the subtler arguments I've heard overnight say the following: it's not that homosexuality is wrong; it's just that many people believe that and Kerry therefore exploited their homophobia to gain a point. I don't buy it, but let's assume the worst in Kerry's motives for the sake of argument. What these emailers are saying is that Kerry should hedge what he says in order to cater to the homophobia of Bush's base. Why on earth should he? The truth here is obvious: Bush and Cheney are closet tolerants. They have no problem with gay people personally; but they use hostility to gay people for political purposes, even if it means attacking members of their own families. What they are currently objecting to is the fact that their hypocrisy has been exposed. To which the only answer is: if you don't want to be exposed as a hypocrite, don't be one.

"As the former legislative director of the Christian Coalition, I find it hilarious, ironic and shameless that those who have long employed gay bashing as a political tool are feigning their outrage over Kerry's sensitive notation of Cheney's daughter's sexual orientation. This is truly a moment of desperation for the Bushies. On the one hand they are sending out gay bashing mail and on the other hand they are sounding like charter members of the Human Rights Campaign. You've got to laugh!" - from Marshall Wittmann.

I have to agree on the desperation point, as I've noted above.

Not at all. I have no more use for straight daughters working for the Bush campaign than lesbian daughters. I was responding way up above to a comment that you can't choose your family -- which I took to mean that it's not fair to tar Mary Cheney with the Bush-Cheney brush. My point was that she's tarred herself with their brush by actively campaigning on their behalf, so she's completely fair game.

And as for this -- whatever else Cheney is, I don't think he's been a hypocrite on this point -- oh yes he is. True, he has backed away from personally endorsing the constitutional amendment, but he sure hasn't publicly criticized it nor in any way tried to distance the Bush-Cheney campaign from the nasty bigots in their precious "base". He's more than willing to ride the issue for whatever votes it gets him so he can hang onto his power. And so, apparently, is his daughter.

I think Dan just said what I'm trying to, in way less words!

Kevin, I agree -- which is to say that I don't see anything particularly wrong with doing it, but there's no evident purpose to using Mary Cheney as a particular example of what "any gay person" would think, so you might as well -- just, you know, aesthetically -- justify chosing that particular example, in any one of the half-dozen available ways of doing it. You could blow up a whole conservative-mentality metaphor about rhetoric and expectations for others versus the liberal humanist expectations they invariably have to adopt in real life. Or you could just go, "see, anyone who actually knows and cares about an actual gay person sees your stance as offensive, right up to your own VP."

Mary Cheney is right in the thick of a campaign that wouldn't want her around at all if not for family ties. I don't think Kerry's observation was a planned one; at any rate it was a lot more honest than most of the criticism heading his way for what he said.

Created: Friday, October 15, 2004, at 13:22:42 EDT
Do you think sexual preference is a choice?

Yes 33% 16876 votes

No 67% 34744 votes

Total: 51620 votes

but

2. i do think it was a cynical ploy on the part of both edwards and kerry to mention cheney's daughters sexuality, not some salute to "strong families" bullshit.

if the shoe was on the other foot and edwards had a gay kid and bush mentioned it in the debate, everyone on ilx would (rightly) have accused him of back-handedly riling up the homophobe vote.

Here's an email that may help explain some of the mutual incomprehension now floating around:

While I'm sure some of the anger over Kerry's mention of Mary Cheney stems from the bigotry you've described, that being gay is something unmentionable, I think the other issue here is generational.
For many people of a certain age (take your pick - 45? 50? older?) they were taught that you weren't supposed to discuss politics or religion with strangers, much less yours or their sexuality. To mention a third party's sexuality, someone neither of you know, in a conversation when it would be unnecessary to do so, would be at best guache, and at worst obnoxious.
Like it or not, for the "old school'' among us, one's sexual identity is intensely private stuff, something only the individual and their loved ones have the right to bring up, even when "everyone'' knows about it. They recoiled from Kerry's casual mention in the same way they would recoil from a neighbor casually mentioning something intimate about another neighbor down the street in a conversational tangent.
I think this isn't the case with many people 40 or younger, who view sexuality as more mundane and matter of fact, akin to skin color. People can come to their own judgments about which way is better, but I've little doubt that this gulf in perceptions about social etiquette exists.

That's probably true. I've lived my entire adult life as openly gay. Maybe I'm out of touch with the way others - especially older then me - feel about the propriety of mentioning it in public. But that doesn't mean they're right and I'm wrong. It just means we come to the problem with vastly different experiences. And of course, I am right; and they're wrong. But we should probably close this discussion, don't you think?

It is the job of political operatives to recognize any and every tiny misstep by the opposition they can somehow use as a bludgeon to jar loose a few more undecided voters or to dismay or discourage their opponent's voters from voting. From here on out, in the absence of any big 'real' events, expect the political conversation to swing starkly to character assassination and sleaze floated by proxies.

The 'character' game is played by both sides, because the final slice of undecided voters don't vote on issues, but on their feelings about candidates. All the issue-motivated voters are allocated by now.

The Republicans are especially good at the 'sleaze' game, because the name of the game for Republicans has always been low voter turnout. Sleaze is not a tool for increasing your own votes, but for driving down the vote total overall. Really dirty politic works for them because it disgusts voters with the entire process and makes them want to disown it and dissociate themselves from it.

In this close of an election, even a few thousand votes are worth going after. Hence, the 'tempest in a teapot' issues are coming to the forefront.

This is so true. For instance, it was considered totally rude if, speaking of a male co-worker with another co-worker, you mentioned that he had a wife. Mentioning his heterosexuality -- that he, in all likelihood, enjoying putting his penis into his wife's vagina -- was deeply taboo.

You can be lesbian and not actually be interested in sex, even!

I think the record is pretty clear that fair-minded political leaders didn't talk publicly about Mary Cheney until her father did. All of a sudden it was clear to John Kerry and John Edwards that if the Bush campaign tried to attack them on the gay marriage issue, they should just respond by saying they had the same position on this issue as Dick Cheney. That is certainly the advice I gave them. How dare the president criticize Kerry, as he did again the other night, for taking the same position as Dick Cheney? And we know that anti-gay messages are being promoted in many districts around the country to get out the evangelical vote for President Bush on Election Day. The silent but admirable Mary Cheney has remained a loyal daughter and foot soldier in this homophobic campaign.

I know I've said this already, but will someone please explain to me what is admirable about Mary Cheney? She is actively working to re-elect this administration! How is that admirable? I'm sorry, if my dad was acquiescing to dickhead bigots in order to further his own career, I think I'd tell him, "Dad, I'm not gonna be a loyal foot soldier."

which doesn't mean that normal americans have to give a shit.