The Beauty of Justice: Cheney's Daughter Becomes One of Two Moms

It was a favorite of the hysterical right back when they were conquering America--remember? Heather Has Two Mommies, the little book was called. It was meant to introduce the wide-eyed young to the possibility of different family arrangements. The book aimed at natural (and I mean that word in the Lockean sense) notions of equity and fairness that children bring to their naïve judgments of right and wrong.

But allies of Dick and Lynn Cheney were outraged.

Precisely because they understood its appeal to natural fairness, their roaring objections erupted all the more ferociously. They fed the maw of hate. These supposed defenders of the western tradition of natural law reacted like stereotypical savages confronted with violations of taboo. Their hate came down to a fear of arrangements they didn't recognize, a primitive and irrational response to a blurring of boundaries they took for granted.

That's why this little event in the second family matters. Dick and Lynn love their daughter. She's an actual real person to them. They will stand by her, as they should, and the hell with ideology.

But what Dick and Lynn don't get is that all human beings in the world are connected to the particular people they love in the same way. What the politics they represent ignores is the meaning of that particular, yet universal, love. That ignorance allows them to countenance the slaughter of innocents in the name of abstractions.

God forgive them. And may the beauty of this just event, this happy occasion of their daughter's pregnancy, lead them to the light...