Mary Cheney
Mary has been taking some heat in the wake of the publication of her new memoir and last week's "tell-all" interview with Diane Sawyer (now there's a reporter who knows how to grab an interviewee by the short hairs). Many LGBTs have taken this opportunity to cry, yet again, that Mary is a disappointment to LGBTs everywhere and should be ashamed of aiding and abetting the most openly anti-gay administration in U.S. history.
Personally, I disagree. Why? Because Mary Cheney is irrelevant. And the publication of "Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life" just makes her more so.
Mary Cheney owes nothing to the LGBT equality movement. Why? Because she's not a part of it. Just like her father and George W. Bush are out of touch with the majority of America, Mary is out of touch with the majority of LGBT folks. The Cheneys and the Bushes all live in another world where power is paramount, money is the universal language, war is a political game and politics always come before people (and often at the expense of people). Some might call these kinds of people sociopaths; others mistakenly use the term Republicans.
Affirmations Lesbian and Gay Community Center has a poster that reads, "Gay people are everyday people." So true. LGBT people have the same worries that the majority of Americans have: paying their mortgages, staying employed or finding work, rapidly rising health care costs, finding time to pick up the dry cleaning and get some groceries on the way to get the kids from the sitter's, rising gas prices.
When's the last time Mary Cheney had to worry about any of those things?
Mary doesn't feel your pain. She's not an "everyday person." So it shouldn't surprise anyone that she didn't leave her very comfortable and insular life in 2004 when her father's ticket started going napalm on the homos, just so she could go stand in the blazing sun in front of the Capitol elbow to elbow with the unwashed gay masses holding a pro-gay banner.
The proof is in her memoir. Take this little gem, where Mary addresses the fact that John Edwards' mentioned her sexuality in the 2004 V.P. debates.
"John Edwards took sleazy politics to a whole new level," she writes. "As Edwards went on to congratulate my family on the way they 'embraced' me, I got angrier and angrier. What in the world gave John Edwards any right to comment on my family? What gave him the right to use my sexual orientation to try to score political points?"
Has she no sense of irony?
Still, if I'm not mad at Mary for refusing to wrap herself in the rainbow flag and tell her dad to pound sand, then why name her this week's Creep? Because she's party to an administration that has made our democracy into a government for the rich, by the rich and of the rich. Money can't buy you love, but it can buy the kind of security that allows Mary Cheney to live her life as a lesbian and profit from the GOP's anti-gay campaign while the majority of Americans suffer because of it. After all, it keeps her daddy in power. And that's priority #1.
In her book she recalls what she told her daddy when he told her he wanted to be V.P. She writes, "I'd rather not be known as the vice president's lesbian daughter. But, if you're going to run, I think the country would be lucky to have you."
Oh yes, so lucky. And Ann Coulter says liberals hate America?
