Say Anything Blog

You know, just five years or so ago the idea of the Vice President’s lesbian daughter having a child with her lover (and some anonymous sperm donor) would have been a major scandal.  Today?  Not so much it seems.

Mary Cheney, the vice president’s openly gay daughter, is pregnant. She and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, are “ecstatic” about the baby, due in late spring, said a source close to the couple.

Cheney, 37, was a key aide to her father during the 2004 reelection campaign and now is vice president for consumer advocacy at AOL. Poe, 45, a former park ranger, is renovating their Great Falls home.

News of the pregnancy will undoubtedly reignite the debate about gay marriage. During the campaign, Mary Cheney was criticized by gay activists for not being more publicly supportive of same-sex marriage. Her father said people “ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to” but deferred to the president’s policy supporting a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. Cheney herself called the proposed amendment “a gross affront to gays and lesbians everywhere” in her book, “Now It’s My Turn: A Daughter’s Chronicle of Political Life,” which was published in May.

Cheney has described her relationship with Poe—whom she took to last year’s White House dinner honoring Prince Charles and Camilla—as a marriage. The two met in 1988 while playing ice hockey and began dating four years later. They moved from Colorado to Virginia a year ago to be closer to Cheney’s family. In an interview with the Post six months ago, when asked if she and Poe wanted children, Cheney said that was a “conversation I think I should have with Heather first.”

This is an interesting story.

Obviously, the idea of the daughter of a conservative icon (and current second-in-command of this nation) being a lesbian and planning to raise her daughter with her lover has to be aggravating to many in the GOP base who find homosexuality and homosexual marriage reprehensible.  And yet Mary Cheney’s lifestyle doesn’t seem to be raising many eyebrows on the right.  Could it be that right-wing homophobia has been wildly exaggerated by the left?

That could be.  I know many on the right (though not myself) find homosexuality to be morally objectionable, but I know few of them who actually hate gays.  I wonder if the less-than-outraged reaction to Mary Cheney on the right is an example the GOP’s “big tent.”

Or maybe it just illustrates a declining interest among conservatives in opposing certain gay issues.