Chutzpah

Can we agree that anyone who supports the Federal Marriage Amendment and feins shock at John Kerry "gay-baiting" Mary Cheney is a cynical poseur? Can we further agree that ostensible supporters of gay rights who are nevertheless backing the BC-FMA-04 ticket and who think that calling an openly lesbian lesbian a lesbian is tantamount to "dissing" her are meta-cynical hacks?

MORE: Responding to Andrew Sullivan taking him to task for claiming that Kerry had "dissed" Mary Cheney, Glenn Reynolds writes:

It's not even an insult to call a straight person gay. But it is disrespectful to drag people into debates on sexuality on national TV. And it's disrespectful to do so as an effort to -- as Mickey Kaus suggested -- swing the votes of homophobes. I'm surprised that Andrew is so untroubled by this.

I think this illustrates that those who are expecting some special degree of sensitivity toward gay issues -- or privacy in general -- from a President Kerry are likely to be disappointed. Apparently, it's all just stuff to be manipulated for advantage.

Hmm. Special degree of sensitivity towards gay issues and privacy in general? I guess there's just no meaningful difference between a candidate who supported his state's gays-only anti-sodomy law, and one who thinks anti-sodomy laws are a bad idea. Nor is there a difference between a candidate who thinks that a special exception to the Equal Protection clauses of the Constitution should be built into the Constitution itself in order to make gays permanent second-class citizens, and a candidate who (you guessed it) thinks that's a bad idea. Nor between a candidate who thinks that the nation's founding document should prohibit any of the "legal incidents" of marriage from being conferred to gay couples, and a candidate who thinks that gay couples should be able to attain all the legal incidents of marriage. If Andrew Sullivan is right that Mr. Bush is really a "closet tolerant" (how tolerant can a fundamentalist Protestant really be?), then his decision to premise an entire campaign on gay-baiting---have we already forgotten Karl Rove's pronouncement about "God, guns, and gays---is even more poisonous than it would be coming from a genuine bigot.

Now if Kerry's intent was to "out" Mary Cheney (a difficult thing to do considering that she was head of gay and lesbian outreach for Coors Brewing, and that her parents have talked about her sexuality in public speeches) so that culturally conservative but economically populist voters in the midwest would turn on the Bush campaign, then I would agree that his move was classless. But I don't think that was the whole story. Timothy Noah's explanation of the Mary Cheney reference is at least as plausible as Mickey Kaus's:

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.

I suspect that some combination of the two motives was at work (I don't believe for a second that it was an off-the-cuff remark). Noah's theory raises the really salient point that Glenn Reynolds would have been talking about all summer if he were genuinely interested in the rights of gay people and not just a self-righteous shill. But I'll leave that point in Noah's words, since he puts it better than I could:

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 real outrage isn't Kerry's reference to Mary Cheney. It's that no one will ask Dick Cheney how he feels supporting a party whose members and candidates regard his daughter a degenerate, or why he would run on a platform of denying his daughter the right to marry the woman that she loves. In short, to paraphrase John Kerry, Kerry made a mistake in talking about how Dick Cheney sold out his own daughter; Cheney made worse than a mistake in mortgaging his daughter's civil rights for short-term gain of the Republican party. Which is worse?