SPECIAL UPDATE - THE CHENEYS’ DAUGHTER FLAP
Column no. 35A
By DR. Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – October 25, 2004
The flap created by the Republicans over the reference by Senator Kerry to the well-known (to most) matter of the sexuality of the Cheney’s daughter is indicative of a serious problem in the current Presidential election campaign: just how desperate the Republicans are becoming about their chances of winning.
Bush needed a win in the last debate, preferably a big one, but any kind of win would have done. Instead, the President did fair to poorly, and the Republicans, despite the brave face they put on, knew it instantly. So what do they do in such a situation? They create as big a distraction from the real issues as they possibly can. Their most common technique is to attack the messenger, not the message. That they seem to be able to do it instinctively, without thinking about what they are doing, I have always found quite remarkable. And so.
Bush really had had a tough time in the third debate. He not only had ducked a series of questions, on job-exportation (read exportation of capital), unemployment, the minimum wage, but he did each time with the same irrelevant answer: “do something abut education.”
And then he also ducked the question of whether homosexuality is a choice, not, thankfully, with his education shtick but with “I don’t know.” That is an answer that satisfies no one on his side, neither his socially-liberal but economically suicidal/Fuhrer Prinzip-type supporters nor his Far-Right, Alan “Cheney’s daughter is a selfish hedonist” Keyes/Gary Bauer-type supporters.
So when Sen. Kerry gives a straightforward answer that happens to use the Cheney’s daughter, a well-know Lesbian living openly with a partner with whom she campaigns (for selected audiences to be sure), as an example, the Republicans sense their opportunity. They take it, apparently unmindful of what hypocrites it shows them up to be, how insensitive to the daughter it reveals them as, what an idiotic contradiction it reveals their campaign position on homosexuality to be.
Bush actually said in that debate that every American must be treated equally and with respect at the same time, he strongly supports an amendment to the Constitution that would make second-class citizens out of gay people. Their position also shows up the Cheneys as being truly ashamed of their daughter, at least politically finding her a major inconvenience, and reveals that they had been engaged in something of a cover-up, hoping that at least some of their “gays will burn in hell forever” folk didn’t know.
The icing on the cake is this. Supposing that the Cheneys’ daughter were a world-class triathlete, and the question was, “Can anybody achieve that status, or is there a major genetic, inborn component behind it, that most people could not simply make the choice to become one and then get there simply by training hard?” As a 22-year triathlete who trains regularly but is really slow, I can tell you that it is not simply a matter of choice: for speed, genes do count.
If the question had been about genetics in the world-class triathlete context, and Sen. Kerry had used the Cheneys’ daughter as an example, everyone would have applauded. The only reason for the controversy in the real case is that most unfortunately our society does not treat homosexuality as simply another example of genetic determinism.
One very loud minority, the Christian Right, treats it as a chosen sin, a sin of the highest magnitude. This is a position that is scientifically wrong and socially highly destructive. Moreover, the Republican Party chooses to use it as one of their major political issues. Coming out of the last debate, on this issue that is what is wrong. Sen. Kerry forthrightly chose to applaud the Cheneys’ daughter for being who she is, just as biology determined her to be, should indeed be applauded.