Liberal Talk Radio

Last night, John Kerry outed Dick Cheney’s daughter. Now, it’s no secret that she’s gay. But it’s also no secret that Cheney, like Newt Gingrinch and the Reagans, have tried to shield their homosexual offspring from the slings and arrows of outrageous Republicans, aka, their political base. Clearly, homosexuality is a challenging thing for a lot of Republican voters … not every Republican likes to wear panties and pay a dom to whip him, but at least since J. Edgar Hoover we’ve known that people are complex, and often our most virulent leaders are the ones with the most to hide. But then of course it’s this complexity of human nature that the Bush/Cheney world view rejects outright, so it’s no wonder the RNC has its knickers in a wad over this one.

So what’s wrong with Kerry stating this fact during the debate last night? If we truly accept people for their differences, then it should make no difference what someone’s sexual orientation is. So if you believe that Kerry somehow did a disservice to the Veep’s daughter by stating her sexual preferences, then you must also believe on some deep level that the state of being gay is something harmful, shameful or otherwise necessary to hide from public scrutiny.

And what’s more: this campaign, the issue of extending domestic partnership rights to all partnerships is one of the few domestic issues getting any mileage. So it’s fair that potential Republican voters should know the full extent of Cheney’s involvement in the issue. If they choose to see Cheney as a man who is so devoid of compassion that he would legislate against his own daughter, then so be it. That’s the position Cheney has placed himself in — Cheney, and Cheney alone — must live with the consequences.

Last night Kerry (and, admittedly, this seems more like something he stumbled on rather than planned) offered yet another compelling vision for a future America - an America where we can talk about things like homosexuality and faith in respectful terms; an America where being called “gay” is not slander, just a simple statement of fact. JFK is still the right choice for America.

P.S. A note to Scott on sanctions. You state in a recent Desk Jockeys post that Iraqi sanctions weren’t working. This is simply not the case. We did have reason to believe that the sanction regime that was in place prior to the invasion in March ‘03 might not continue to work, and we also knew that Saddam was manuevering to work around the sanctions. However, the lack of WMDs in Iraq is ample evidence that the sanctions regime did, in fact, accomplish its purpose of keeping WMDs out of Saddam’s hands. The correct answer to the POSSIBLE future failure of sanctions is not necessarily to go to war now — what’s wrong with trying to fix the system first? Bush was impetuous, and a lot of people are dead now because it was easier for him to pull the trigger than to talk things out.