Outing Mary Cheney
WSJ; October 15, 2004; Page A14
online.wsj.com
If Americans didn't know it before Wednesday night's debate, they know it now: Dick and Lynne Cheney have a gay daughter. How this piece of personal information about a low-profile member of the Vice President's family is relevant to the election is anyone's guess, but John Kerry and John Edwards somehow think it is.
Both brought it up out of the blue during their debates, though at least in Mr. Edwards's case Mr. Cheney was sitting next to him. The references -- Mr. Kerry's especially -- were gratuitous, and the fact that Mary Cheney came up twice suggests that it wasn't an accident but part of a deliberate political strategy. That impression was reinforced by Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill, who told Fox News in a post-debate interview that Ms. Cheney was "fair game."
It's hard to know precisely what's going on here, but we can think of two possibilities. One is gay identity politics. The distasteful practice of "outing" public figures has become popular in recent years as some gays seek personal and/or political affirmation by publicizing the private lives of politicians, business leaders, Hill staffers and so forth.
Mr. and Mrs. Cheney have not kept their daughter's lesbianism a secret but neither have they shouted it to the sky. (In the days before the GOP Convention the Vice President mentioned it briefly at a campaign rally in Davenport, Iowa.) By outing Mary Cheney before millions of viewers on prime-time television, Messrs. Kerry and Edwards may hope to score points with their base of gay activists. Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian political organization, was quick to praise Mr. Kerry's words Wednesday night.
The other possible motive is more subterranean: depressing voter turnout, specifically among Christian and other cultural conservatives. It's no secret that a large evangelical vote is key to a Bush victory, especially in swing states. Republicans are devoting considerable effort to getting more evangelicals to the polls this year. Many stayed home in 2000 for want of an inspiring issue, or perhaps because of the late reports of Mr. Bush's drunk-driving arrest as a young man.
But gay marriage might well be a potent motivating force this year, and in states where that's on the ballot -- such as Ohio -- the turnout of cultural conservatives is expected to be high. That has been the case everywhere the issue has appeared on state ballots so far, recently in Missouri. Our guess is that by throwing a spotlight on Ms. Cheney -- and on her father's opposition to a Constitutional amendment on gay marriage -- Messrs. Kerry and Edwards were trying to send a cultural message that there's really no difference between the two tickets, so you evangelicals might as well stay home.
If that's true, then the Kerry campaign may be making a profound miscalculation -- both about the religious right and the larger religious middle of "tolerant traditionalists," to quote former Clinton aide Bill Galston. Liberals often make the mistake of assuming that anyone who opposes gay marriage is a bigot. In truth, there's been a huge shift in attitudes toward homosexuality over the past 25 years. When Mr. Bush speaks of tolerance and acceptance, as he did on Wednesday night, he is reflecting the views of most Americans, including most of those on the religious right.
The gay marriage issue motivates these voters not out of hostility to gay Americans but because of what they believe is its challenge to a vital and venerable cultural institution. These voters didn't raise the marriage issue to its current prominence, after all, but responded after courts imposed gay marriage on voters in other states whose laws might one day be imposed on them too. (Like Mr. Cheney, we oppose a federal gay marriage amendment and think it should be left to the states.)
Amid an obvious public backlash, Mr. Kerry issued a statement yesterday explaining that he had merely been trying to "say something positive about the way strong families deal with the issue." Meanwhile, Elizabeth Edwards told a radio interviewer that Lynne Cheney might feel "a certain degree of shame" because her daughter is a lesbian. This pleasantry was in response to Mrs. Cheney's comment that Mr. Kerry's remarks were "a cheap and tawdry political trick." Sounds right to us.
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