Letter to Sullivan

Look, Andrew. I don't know what your story is with your family, but family gets REALLY complicated. And I'm sure it gets even more complicated when your conservative Christian Republican father starts going "off-reservation" in front of Republican donors about his opinions on your right to get married. You're a gay dude, you KNOW that Mary Cheney's been catching shit within our community for "disappearing" lately. And I'm pretty sure you DO know that this "disappearance" has had something to do with the damage that Cheney's relationship with his daughter was having on his career prospects. The Dems are trying to draw this out, and they're trying to draw it out because they know exactly how uncomfortable it makes Cheney. This article today articulates what I've been trying to tell people more elegantly than I've managed to say it myself, while identifying something going on in OUR community that's been bothering me for months (years in some cases):

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But then, at the Republican National Convention last month, Mary held her own National Going-Back-In Day. Whether by personal choice or out of family pressure, she did not appear on stage with the rest of the Cheneys after the vice-presidential acceptance speech, or with the Bushes during the closing moments of the convention. And my guess is that even if Mary "had" taken her rightful place onstage, it would have been without her partner.

For this, Mary Cheney has been pilloried, even though gay people are in comparable situations all the time across America. The big difference is that our fathers aren't vice president, and our family dramas aren't nationally televised. Consider, however, the times you've been asked by a family member to be "discreet" - say, when your father bemoaned your plans to march in the local gay-rights parade, because his boss might see you on the TV news; or when your mother asked you not to complain because your same-sex partner wasn't invited to a family wedding.

In a strange way, we have more in common with Mary Cheney than we would like to think. Maybe that's why we all love to hate her so much, because she "is" us

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I've very much appreciated your standing up against the bullies in DC who are trying to destroy the careers of gay Republicans. It shocks me to see you adopting such a double standard to the attempts of a gay person to BALANCE the consequences of their orientation with their efforts to accomplish their agenda.

This comment didn't fall out of the sky without a context. Cheney did openly acknowledge his gay daughter back in August, and he's caught a lot of shit for it. If Kerry's comment was sincerely motivated by a sense that it's just so perfectly normal in this world that one can mention such a thing completely off the cuff, that'd be one thing. But the comment is dropped in a context of Kerry trying to highlight an element of Cheney's private family life that he has been trying to downplay.

It's true that Cheney's love for his daughter and public embrace of her has exposed him to some potential consequences. But we're gay people. Just because Cheney can be damaged by bringing attention to his admirable treatment of his daughter doesn't mean he SHOULD. To argue that this is all just so much innocence on Kerry's part is the height of wilfull naivete.

Cheney hasn't just publicly embraced his daughter. He's also publicly tried to bring that aspect of his public life back under control. That is his right.