Somebody Tell Us -- What Are We Supposed to Think Here?

Earlier this year, a Sacramento satirist wrote a column proposing the ironic hypothesis that being conservative causes you to have gay kids. How else can you explain it? He starts with the Cheneys and goes on:

In addition to Mary Cheney, there’s ... oh wait. I’ve got a list. The public conservatives with gay children, grandchildren or siblings include: Phyllis Schlafly (queen of the anti-feminists), Randall Terry (of Operation Rescue fame), Newt Gingrich (Mr. Contract With America), Jesse Helms (who needs no description, except that he’s slightly to the right of Genghis Khan), the late Barry Goldwater (a libertarian who really didn’t care who loved who), and the late Sonny Bono (yes to gay daughter, no to gay rights).

Alan Keyes--former presidential candidate, family-values advocate and, most recently, a carpetbagger who sought to keep liberal Democrat Barack Obama from the Illinois Senate gig--put his college-student daughter, Maya, on the campaign trail while he bashed Dick Cheney for tolerating his lesbian daughter. Then Maya came out, and in a flurry of family values Keyes tossed her from the family home and cut off her tuition money. Don’t you just absolutely love those conservative family values?

But that’s not all. There’s the recently deceased Charles Socarides. He fathered both the discredited “reparative therapy” movement (which claimed that sexual orientation could be changed through psychiatry) and Richard Socarides, an openly gay official in the Clinton administration.

Regina Griggs, executive director of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), a group that advocates “tough love” and lots of scripture to turn your homo kid around to heterosexuality, has a gay son. Sadie Fields, a state chair of the Christian Coalition in Georgia, has a lesbian daughter, as does Bill Byrne, the Cobb County, Ga., commissioner who pushed through a resolution declaring “the homosexual lifestyle” unwelcome in suburban Atlanta. Apparently his daughter’s not invited to Thanksgiving. Not that she’d want to go.

And in our own state, we had the late state Senator Pete Knight, a traditional-values firebrand who led the so-called Knight Initiative, 2000’s Proposition 22, which amended the state constitution to refuse legal recognition of same-sex marriages. Knight’s plan to keep gay couples from marrying didn’t stop his gay son, David, from tying the knot with his long-term partner during San Francisco’s giddy wedding party in early 2004, before the courts overturned the marriages. It's a family tradition

The weird thing is, a lot of these aren't just "conservative" people, many of them are rabidly anti-gay "family values" hypocrites. You wonder how it is when they talk with their kids, do they just avoid the subject, or how does that work?

How do you spend your working day trying to undermine your own child? And why? Sometimes we are asked what motivates "those people." The only good answer is, "I don't know." (But ... we have our theories.)

This old article comes to mind today because of something in this morning's Post. I am just dying to know how this is going to play in the Family Blah-Blah side of the world.

Mary Cheney, the vice president's openly gay daughter, is pregnant. She and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, are "ecstatic" about the baby, due in late spring, said a source close to the couple.

It's a baby boom for grandparents Dick and Lynne Cheney: Their older daughter, Elizabeth, went on leave as deputy assistant secretary of state before having her fifth child in July. "The vice president and Mrs. Cheney are looking forward with eager anticipation to the arrival of their sixth grandchild," spokesman Lea Anne McBride said last night.
Cheney, 37, was a key aide to her father during the 2004 reelection campaign and now is vice president for consumer advocacy at AOL. Poe, 45, a former park ranger, is renovating their Great Falls home.

News of the pregnancy will undoubtedly reignite the debate about gay marriage. During the campaign, Mary Cheney was criticized by gay activists for not being more publicly supportive of same-sex marriage. Her father said people "ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to" but deferred to the president's policy supporting a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. Cheney herself called the proposed amendment "a gross affront to gays and lesbians everywhere" in her book, "Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life," which was published in May.

Cheney has described her relationship with Poe -- whom she took to last year's White House dinner honoring Prince Charles and Camilla -- as a marriage. The two met in 1988 while playing ice hockey and began dating four years later. They moved from Colorado to Virginia a year ago to be closer to Cheney's family. In an interview with the Post six months ago, when asked if she and Poe wanted children, Cheney said that was a "conversation I think I should have with Heather first."

In November, Virginia voters passed a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions; state law is unclear on whether Poe could have full legal rights as a parent of Cheney's child. The circumstances of the pregnancy will remain private, said the source close to the couple. This is the first child for both. Mary Cheney and Partner Are About to Be Moms

To his credit, Satan -- uh, I mean, Dick Cheney -- has been quiet about his daughter's sexual orientation. Never mind that he sits over there in the White House ... keeping quiet ... while The Party campaigns as hard as they can to make sure gay people are prevented from adopting family values. His fake-outrage over John Kerry's mention of something everybody knew was an overly-facile exploitation of her situation, it seemed to me, but I suppose a professional politician like Cheney knows if he's gone too far.

That's, I say, that's a joke, son, a joke.

One thing I'm not seeing in this Post article is anything about how Ms. Cheney got pregnant "... the circumstances will remain private..." I don't know much about this stuff, having taken, y'know, the old sex-ed curriculum, but it seems to me two women would need something else -- has David Crosby been in the area lately?

And the idea that they consider this a marriage, while living in Virginia. John at AmericaBlog explains what that means:

... Virginia had already set up new Jim Crow laws targeting gays two years ago. Those laws may vitiate any legal agreement between the two, period, about anything. The law ensures that Mary's partner has no legal rights whatsoever in their child, or in what happens to Mary (or vice versa), such as if one partner has to go the hospital, the other can't visit. The law may even nullify any wills that Mary and Heather write regarding each other, and it may make it impossible for gay people to go to court to resolve any difference about anything - the courts can't recognize gay unions, so they can't make any decisions that would imply recognition (custody, hospital visitation, wills, etc.) It's beyond ironic that Virginia's new law, one of the most hateful, bigoted laws on the books, is now targeting the vice president's own daughter and soon-to-be new grandchild.

Read more here, it's chilling the extent to which Virginia has slipped back into its racist, hateful path. BREAKING: Cheney's lesbian daughter Mary is pregnant!

We have seen it over and over again, the ability of the anti-gay nuts to compartmentalize. If they know a gay person, that person is either the perfect limp-wristed interior-designing stereotype, or they are a completely unique mystery -- they can't just be a person whose partner happens to have the same plumbing as them.

So here they're going to have to figure out what to do. Not only are these two women acting like they're married, but one got pregnant! What if we learn that she had ... oh, it's too much to think! ... what if she had sex outside of marriage?!?! No, put that out of your mind: it's possible that it was an implanted embryo, but even then -- that would mean that somebody masturbated, wouldn't it?

It will just be too fun, watching the hypocrites dance around this one.