mary cheney op-ed

Hello, same sex marriage: not federal. not even remotely. but anyway, here's an op-ed from Times Select, which is such a dopey name.


December 17, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

Mary Cheney's Bundle of Joy
By FRANK RICH

...

Senator Frist is now a lame duck, and his brand of pandering, typified
by his errant upbeat diagnosis of the brain-dead Terri Schiavo's
condition, is following him to political Valhalla. The 2006 midterms
left Karl Rove's supposedly foolproof playbook in tatters. It was hard
for the Republicans to deal the gay card one more time after the Mark
Foley and Ted Haggard scandals revealed that today's conservative
hierarchy is much like Roy Cohn's milieu in "Angels in America," minus
the wit and pathos.

...

This time around, ballot initiatives banning same-sex marriage drew
markedly less support than in 2004; the draconian one endorsed by Mr.
McCain in Arizona was voted down altogether. Two national politicians
who had kowtowed egregiously to their party's fringe, Rick Santorum
and George Allen, were defeated, joining their ideological fellow
travelers Tom DeLay and Ralph Reed in the political junkyard. To
further confirm the inexorable march of social history, the only
Christmas season miracle to lift the beleaguered Bush administration
this year has been the announcement that Mary Cheney, the vice
president's gay daughter, is pregnant. Her growing family is the
living rejoinder to those in her father's party who would relegate gay
American couples and their children to second-class legal or human
status.

...

Some of them are at last standing up to the extremists in
their own camp.

No one more dramatically so, perhaps, than Rick Warren, the Orange
County, Calif., megachurch leader and best-selling author of "The
Purpose Driven Life." He has adopted AIDS in Africa as a signature
crusade, and invited Barack Obama to join the usual suspects,
including Senator Brownback, to address his World AIDS Day conference
on the issue. This prompted predictable outrage from the right because
of Mr. Obama's liberal politics, especially on abortion. One radio
host, Kevin McCullough, demonized the Democrat for pursuing "inhumane,
sick and sinister evil" as a legislator. An open letter sponsored by
18 "pro-life" groups protested the invitation, also citing Mr. Obama's
"evil." But Mr. Warren didn't blink.

Among those defending the invitation was David Kuo, the former deputy
director of the Bush White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives. In a book, "Tempting Faith," as well as in interviews and
on his blog, the heretical Mr. Kuo has become a tough conservative
critic of the corruption of religion by politicians and
religious-right leaders who are guilty of "taking Jesus and reducing
him to some precinct captain, to some get-out-the-vote guy." Of those
"family" groups who criticized Mr. Obama's appearance at the AIDS
conference, Mr. Kuo wrote, "Are they so blind and possessed with such
a narrow definition of life that they can think of life only in
utero?" The answer, of course, is yes. The Christian Coalition parted
ways with its new president-elect, a Florida megachurch pastor, Joel
Hunter, after he announced that he would take on bigger issues like
poverty and global warming.

...
A liberal like Howard Dean is no more credible talking about the Bible (during the
2004 campaign he said his favorite book in the New Testament was Job)
than twice-married candidates like Mr. McCain are persuasive at
pledging allegiance to "the sanctity of marriage."

For all the skeptical theories about the Obama boomlet — or real boom,
we don't know yet — no one doubts that his language about faith is his
own, not a crib sheet provided by a conservative evangelical preacher
or a liberal political consultant on "values." That's why a Democrat
from Chicago whose voting record is to the left of Hillary Clinton's
received the same standing ovation from the thousands at Rick Warren's
Saddleback Church that he did from his own party's throngs in New
Hampshire. After a quarter-century of watching politicians from both
parties exploit religion for partisan and often mean-spirited
political gain, voters on all sides of this country's culture wars are
finally in the market for something new.