Mary Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter, whom he and Lynn love very much, recently made the media rounds plugging her new book, It's My Turn, or "John Kerry said 'Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter' in a painfully clumsy manner in a debate two years ago, so I wrote a book. Read it, I'm Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter."
I saw her on Letterman and listened to her on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the two ground-zeros of secular liberal culture - if you can believe it, two ground-zeroes we get - and David and Terry both harped on the contradiction between Mary being openly homosexual and yet obedient and loyal to the Bush 43 administration, which wants to amend the Constitution to deny gay couples equal rights with straight ones. Dave and Terry wasted most of their interviews on this dead-end enigma. Why is she loyal to a movement that owes its success in large part to people who would like nothing more than to outlaw her sexual identity?
Mary's answer is simply that Bush and her father were the right people to lead this country in its new war against the radical Muslim terrorists. So Terry and Dave might as well have asked her heterosexual father, Dick Cheney, "How can you be a U.S. citizen and yet be complicit in so many policies that make life worse for U.S. citizens?" or "How can you be a human being but be complicit in so many anti-human endeavors?" The answer would have been lexically a little different, but the substance would have been identical.
How could Mary Cheney not take a stand against the Hate Gay Couples amendment during the 2004 campaign? Why doesn't she speak out forcefully against it now, since she does admit she's against it? Why is she so much more interested in slamming everyone who dares criticize her father than those who would condemn her to eternal pain? The answer to these questions is that Mary Cheney, like her non-lesbian father, whom she loves very much, is a self-righteous liar and hypocrite with no respect for the intelligence of the citizens of the United States, no sense that there's a world of human and social needs beyond the sphere of desires and machinations propelling her father's self-serving enterprises, and no willingness to concede what the rest of the universe observes: that the invasion of Iraq is a horribly botched project, if not illegal and misbegotten from its very inception. In short, Mary Cheney is a neo-conservative.
Why weren't Mary and her partner present at the 2004 Republican National Convention? Mary says Heather is a privacy-loving person who doesn't like being in the spotlight, and Mary wanted to respect her wishes. You don't need unconstitutional NSA surveillance to figure out who's butch in that relationship. I wonder if Heather had instead wanted to make out on camera at the convention, Mary would have been so obliging. It sure is lucky that what Heather wanted happened to coincide exactly with the Republican party's need to pander to Christian religious extremists.
History is filled with examples of members of oppressed minorities willing to become spokespeople against their own, opportunistically siding with the nasty and powerful. Phyllis Schlafly remains a shining model of the anti-self activist. Just since the 1980s, when Joan Armatrading came out as a Tory, we've had Andrew Sullivan, Clarence Thomas, and Alan Keyes as prominent anti-selfists, to name just a handful. Nathan Lane trod close to that line, but decided his desire for other gay men not to hate him - that is, his desire for a career on Broadway - outweighed his desire to hate himself.
The pattern of the turncoat, or traitor-to-one's-own, may find no more seminal schematic than the case of Johannes Pfefferkorn. Pfefferkorn was a German Jew who, in the early 16th Century, converted to Christianity and became one of the leading anti-Semites of his time. He advocated forced conversion, confiscation of Jewish religious texts, and even what we might today call "ethnic cleansing" of the Jews from Europe. He allied himself with the Dominican Order of Cologne, a disgusting pack of powerful hate-mongers who railed against humanism, much as do the neo-cons of today. They also opposed the Reformation, of course. In fact it's astounding that the Pope, the self-traitors, and the anti-humanists find themselves, 500 years later, still on same side - the wrong side - of human progress. It's actually kind of depressing, when considered in that light. But cheer up. It could just be a coincidence. Let's check back in the year 2525, or maybe there's a prescient verse about it in the song.
Pfefferkorn was a great aid to the growth of anti-Semitism in late Medieval Europe. Here was a former Jew confirming the worst opinions about Jews - and who would know better than a Jew that Jews were rotten?
Who knows better than a black man that the black community is responsible for their own oppression, and that Affirmative Action just makes them lazier and more criminal? Who knows better than a woman that women don't deserve equal rights? Who knows better than a lesbian that gays too narrowly focus on the social acceptance of their love and ought to let that issue take a back seat to George W. Bush's dismantling of the economy, the social safety net, and the Constitution - oh, and the bodies of Iraqis and U.S. soldiers?
And who knows better than Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter, whom he and Lynn love very much, that her father isn't the Darth Vader the media portray him as, that he gets up every morning thinking about how he can make this country safer, not about how to set up his friends to make millions in war profits so he can land back in the private sector on a cushion of gold? Mary Cheney's non-lesbian father wakes up every morning thinking of ways to make this country safer, that's why he shot that guy in the face. That's why he went hunting with Scalia - because if you don't hunt with a homophobic judge the country's not safe. That's why he constantly tries to subvert the separation of powers - the Constitution puts our nation at risk. That's why he got so mad at Joe Wilson for exposing the Niger uranium lie: that lie was an important part of keeping our country secure. That's why he keeps so many secrets, why he wouldn't release details of who sat on his energy task force - because if the people of the USA knew that, they'd know too much, and might be tortured and killed by al Qaeda for having that knowledge. Maybe he's afraid we'll crack under torture, or even something not technically torture like waterboarding, and give away the list of task force participants. But mainly he's afraid for our own safety. Because if there's one thing al Qaeda doesn't want, it's Americans knowing the details of how Dick Cheney is ripping them off.
My father doesn't care about polls or his public image, Mary Cheney says proudly. He doesn't spend much time worrying about what other people think. Yeah, bitch, he doesn't care about other people AT ALL. Except his intimate circle of sociopathic friends, family members and partners in crime. Which wouldn't be quite so bad if he didn't feel the need to screw so much of the world to accomplish his selfish goals.
So the enigma is solved: lesbians can be just as selfish and evil as the rest of us. Yep, they're human, too, big news, I know. I'm very disappointed that, after Letterman wasted his interview picking at the pseudo-contradiction of a lesbian fascist, Terry Gross did the same damn thing. Why is she a lezzy supporting the Bush White House? Because her ideas about things are wrong. Her sense of the difference between right and wrong is wrong. How about asking the question, "How can you say the invasion of Iraq was exactly the right thing to do to keep this country safe when it clearly was not, you god damn selfish arrogant vile loaf of stinking fascism?" Or, "Why don't you and your father, if his motives are so pure, and if you love America so much, allow the people of the U.S. to rule themselves in democratic fashion rather than subverting public discussion about your policies at every possible opportunity?" (You god damn selfish arrogant vile loaf of stinking fascism.)
But those puzzles, too, cease to boggle the mind. Because Mary Cheney and her father share more than just a lot of DNA, including probably a Y chromosome. They share a temperament, a philosophy, and a lack of character. They're almost the same person. She's really just a little Dick.