If one didn’t know better, the headline above might receive a “ho-hum, so what” acknowledgement by the reader. This daughter, however, Mary, is a lesbian living with her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe. Her father is the second major player in the presidential administration that is singly responsible for the greatest setback in the lives of LGBT people in the contemporary history of our country.

Vice President Cheney — or Grandfather Cheney in this context — has been second-in-command. Vice President Cheney has been complicit in the largest full-scale attack on the LGBT community in modern history. He, his president, and his political party, have repeatedly targeted the LGBT community and LGBT families for scapegoating as part of their calculated political strategy and have attacked at all levels the rights and protections his own daughter will need to ensure a strong, healthy, legally protected family.

*1

Of course, the furor over Mary’s pregnancy has already died down. Never the less, The strangeness of this family’s response to a gay daughter’s life goes beyond the destruction of LGBT hopes for equality in the early Twenty-first Century. Their attitude, including Mary’s own of acceptance within the family, but non-acceptance of equality for LGBT people in the larger American society is unconscionable. It is as though they place themselves above all other people with lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, or transgendered children in our society. It is necessary for them to accept Mary's lesbianism within their wonderful upper-class family, but the rest of us are not good enough.

And yes, I’m playing the “class card.” The various strata within our culture are still there, and becoming more pronounced day by day as the middle class is slowly dissolved by this administration’s expensive war costs, high gas prices, out-sourcing of jobs, and purposeful ignorance of ecological concerns that play into an escalating cost of living. This Republican administration is engineering a two-class nation, a kind of super-power / third world nation in which there are only the extremely rich and the poor. It is a nation in which this administration scapegoats an entire group of citizens, LGBT people. Why? In the hope that no one will notice as it and the various evangelical Christian churches whittle away at one of the supporting pillars of our great nation, the separation of church and state.

I don’t understand a great deal about the Cheney family special privilege. I don’t understand why it wasn’t possible for Senator Kerry to compliment the Cheney family on their acceptance of a lesbian daughter during the 2004 election campaign. I don’t understand why even LGBT people sided with the Cheney family on that one. I don’t understand why this family doesn’t have to be like the rest of us, open to disclosure, a fact of life for everyone else in Twenty-first Century America. And, most of all, I don’t understand how the Cheney family is able to live with the fact that Mary Cheney’s child will never be allowed to have a legal relationship with her mother’s partner, Heather Poe.
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*1 “Gay Rights Group Slams Cheney After Announcement of Daughter’s Pregnancy, Family Pride: VP Has Done 'Irreparable Harm' to Gay Community. Statement by Jennifer Chissler of Family Values, on ABC News, http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2704853&page=1. December 6, 2005. Viewed on Monday, December 18, 2006, 10:00 AM EST.