No lesbians in THIS house

It was Cokie Roberts who first got chewed out by the hypocritical, academic freedom-bashing, anti-feminist activist, lesbian romance-writing Lynne Cheney. In 2000, when ABC's Roberts began a question to This Week guest Cheney about Mary, her daughter who "has declared she's openly gay," Cheney shot back that "Mary has never declared such a thing." She went on to chide Roberts for mentioning such a thing on the program.

Cheney was lying. For years, her daughter had declared her sexual preference in a really big way: She was the Coors liason to the gay community, and she spoke openly about her sexual preference on several occasions. Less than a year before the Cokie Roberts interview with her mother, Mary Cheney told the lesbian magazine Girlfriends, "The reason I came to work here [Coors] is because I knew several other lesbians who were very happy here."

Suddenly, Lynne Cheney is upset by John Kerry's remark about her daughter in the third debate. To be fair, Kerry's remark about Mary Cheney was groan-worthy and not very smart, and he struggled to get out the "L" word, blatantly revealing his own discomfort with it. It made me cringe, especially considering how hard Kerry has worked to make sure people know he is opposed to gay marriage.

Yes, it's true that Dick and Lynne Cheney shoved their daughter as far back in the closet as they could, and then dragged her out again to put her on public display. After the Town Hall debate, people suddenly enthusiastically popped up from the front row of the audience and began hugging Mary as though it were National Good Luck to Touch a Lesbian Day. But calling attention to Mary Cheney's sexual preference is not really a good idea in a society that is still very homophobic and would rather talk about "family values" than bigotry.

But Kerry's awkwardness (and hypocrisy) aside, the Cheney family must have nightmares about having Mary as a daughter. "Where did we go wrong?" they must ask themselves in the privacy of the underground bunker. "Should I have written those hot passages in the novel?"

Even worse than the Cheneys themselves are their thousands of right-wing supporters who are "outraged" by Kerry's remarks--people who are more likely to spit on gay citizens than defend them, but suddenly, very suddenly, Mary Cheney needs defending.