The Media Love Affair Between John Kerry and Mary Cheney

It's 2004, and Sen. John Kerry is debating then President George W. Bush for the third and final time. A question about whether homosexuality is a choice comes up, and Sen. John Kerry mentions that Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter.

Mind you, Sen. Kerry wasn't outing Mary Cheney. Nor was he talking ill about MC. In fact, the reason Sen. Kerry brought up Mary Cheney in the first place was to show that people on all sides of the political aisle, from Republican to Democrat, support and love gay people.

"If you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as," Sen. Kerry said during the debate.

Given the absolute thunderstorm of criticism Sen. Kerry received from the Bush campaign for this comment, you might have thought that Sen. Kerry accused Mary Cheney of cheating on Sandra Bullock. At the time, Dick Cheney said that Sen. Kerry was exploiting his daughter (despite the fact that Dick Cheney even admitted Mary Cheney was gay during his own Vice Presidential debate with then Sen. John Edwards), and Lynne Cheney went so far as to call Sen. Kerry "not a good man."

True to form, two other members of the Bush campaign are harkening back to the episode this week, with new memoirs out about their experience in the Bush administration. Those folks? Laura Bush and Karl Rove. And both try to paint Sen. Kerry as some sort of monster for mentioning Mary Cheney's sexual orientation on national television. Talk about rewriting history.

Laura Bush is up first. In her new memoir (which we wrote about earlier this week, since she kinda-sorta-but-not-really came out for gay marriage), she recalls that her two daughters (Jenna and Barbara) were sitting in the crowd during the debate, and both of them thought Sen. Kerry stepped out of line.

"Beside me, Jenna and Barbara gasped," Laura Bush writes. "They were utterly stunned that a candidate would use an opponent’s child in a debate. John Kerry’s statement did not seem like some off-the-cuff remark."

Not to be outdone, Karl Rove weighed in on Sen. Kerry's remarks, too. And as you can imagine, he sides with Laura Bush.

"This was a jarring moment; the word lesbian had never been used before in a presidential debate,’’ wrote Rove. “I knew in an instant Kerry had made a bad misstep; he looked nasty and his comment dominated the coverage in the days that followed."

Perhaps the only response to the words from Laura Bush and Karl Rove is a big, thunderous, "Are you effin' kidding me?!"

The fact that the Bush campaign was able to garner multiple days of news coverage about this whole incident in 2004 showed that they were pretty adept at media messaging. But Laura Bush's charge that Sen. Kerry was using the daughter of a politician to score political points seems entirely ludicrous, when you look at the fact that Mary Cheney was openly gay. Literally, Dick and Lynne Cheney had both talked about how proud they were of Mary, regardless of her sexual orientation. During the campaign, and indeed, during his own Vice Presidential debate, Dick Cheney was cordial about discussion over his daughter's sexual orientation.

Beyond that, Mary Cheney herself helped recruit gay Republican voters during the 2002 midterm elections, and has served as an LGBT corporate relations manager for Coors Brewing Company.

In other words, discussing her sexual orientation on television was akin to disclosing that Ellen DeGeneres or Elton John were gay. Not to mention the fact that Sen. Kerry's original remarks were meant to showcase how loving Dick Cheney could be. (So much for trying to make Cheney seem sweet.)

It's ironic that years later, Sen. Kerry gets pinged for bringing up Mary Cheney's sexual orientation, when in the immediate days that followed the 2004 debate, it was the GOP who made her sexual orientation a campaign issue.

Talk about exploiting the daughter of a politician.

Photo credit: U.S. Sen. John Kerry's office