Mary Cheney's Bundle of Joy - New York Times
The New York Times

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December 17, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Mary Cheney's Bundle of Joy
By
FRANK RICH

IT'S not the least of John McCain's political talents that he comes across
as a paragon of straight talk even when he isn't talking straight. So it was
a surprise to see him reduced to near-stammering on ABC's "This Week" two
Sundays after the election. The subject that brought him low was the
elephant
in the elephants' room, or perhaps we should say in their closet:
homosexuality.

Senator McCain is no bigot, and his only goal was to change the subject as
quickly as possible. He kept repeating two safe talking points for dear
life:
he opposes same-sex marriage (as does every major presidential aspirant in
both parties) and he is opposed to discrimination. But because he had
endorsed
a broadly written Arizona ballot initiative that could have been used to
discriminate against unmarried domestic partners, George Stephanopoulos
wouldn't
let him off the hook.

"Are you against civil unions for gay couples?" he asked the senator, who
replied, "No, I'm not." When Mr. Stephanopoulos reiterated the question
seconds
later - "So you're for civil unions?" - Mr. McCain answered, "No." In other
words, he was not against civil unions before he was against them. His gaffe
was reminiscent of a similar appearance on Mr. Stephanopoulos's show in 2004
by Bill Frist, a Harvard-trained doctor who refused to criticize a federal
abstinence program that catered to the religious right by spreading the
canard that sweat and tears could transmit AIDS.

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.

Yet not even these political realities have entirely broken the knee-jerk
habit of some 2008 Republican presidential hopefuls to woo homophobes. Mitt
Romney,
the Republican Massachusetts governor, was caught in yet another
embarrassing example of his party's hypocrisy last week. In a
newly unearthed letter
courting the gay Log Cabin Republicans during his unsuccessful 1994 Senate
race, he promised to "do better" than even Ted Kennedy in making "equality
for
gays and lesbians a mainstream concern." Given that Mr. Romney has been
making
opposition to same-sex marriage his political calling card
this year, his ideological bisexuality looks as foolish in its G-rated way
as that of Mr. Haggard, the evangelical leader who was caught keeping time
with
a male prostitute.

There's no evidence that Mr. Romney's rightward move on gay civil rights and
abortion (
about which he acknowledges his flip-flop
) has helped him politically. Or that Mr. McCain has benefited from a
similar sea change that has taken him from accurately labeling Jerry Falwell
and Pat
Robertson "
agents of intolerance
" in 2000 to appearing at
Mr. Falwell's Liberty University
this year. A
Washington Post-ABC News poll
last week found that among Republican voters, Rudy Giuliani, an unabashed
liberal on gay civil rights and abortion, leads Mr. McCain 34 percent to 26
percent.
Mr. Romney brought up the rear, at 5 percent. That does, however, put him
nominally ahead of another presidential wannabe, the religious-right
favorite
Sam Brownback, who has
held up a federal judicial nomination
in the Senate because the nominee had attended a lesbian neighbor's
commitment ceremony.

For those who are cheered by seeing the Rovian politics of wedge issues
start to fade, the good news does not end with the growing evidence that
gay-baiting
may do candidates who traffic in it more harm than good. It's not only
centrist American voters of both parties who reject divisive demagoguery but
also
conservative evangelicals themselves. 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.

But it is leaders like Mr. Hunter and Mr. Warren who are in ascendance. Even
the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs at Mr.
Haggard's
former perch, the National Association of Evangelicals, has joined a number
of his peers in
taking up the cause of the environment
, putting him at odds with the Bush administration. Such religious leaders
may not have given up their opposition to abortion or gay marriage, but they
have more pressing priorities. They seem to have figured out, as Mr. Kuo has
said, that "
politicians use Christian voters for their money and for their votes
" and give them little in return except a reputation for bigotry and
heartless opposition to the lifesaving potential of stem-cell research.

The axis of family jihadis - Focus on the Family, the Family Research
Council, the American Family Association - is feeling the heat; its
positions get
more extreme by the day. A Concerned Women for America mouthpiece called
Mary Cheney's pregnancy "
unconscionable
," condemning her for having "injured her child" and "acted in a way that
denies everything that the Bush administration has worked for." (That last
statement,
thankfully, is true.) This overkill reeks of desperation. So does these
zealots' recent assault on the supposedly
feminizing "medical" properties of soy baby formula
(which deserves the "blame for today's rise in homosexuality," according to
the chairman of Megashift Ministries), and penguins.

Yes, penguins. These fine birds have now joined the Teletubbies and
SpongeBob SquarePants in the pantheon of cuddly secret agents for "the gay
agenda."
Schools are being
forced to defend
"And Tango Makes Three," an acclaimed children's picture book based on the
true story of two Central Park Zoo male penguins who adopted a chick from a
fertilized egg. The hit penguin movie "Happy Feet" has been outed for an
"anti-religious bias" and its "endorsement of gay identity" by
Michael Medved
, the commentator who sets the tone for the religious right's strictly
enforced code of cultural political correctness.

Such censoriousness is increasingly the stuff of comedy. So are politicians
of all stripes who advertise their faith. 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.

Copyright 2006
The New York Times Company

Posted by Miriam V.