Gaysbian Politics

Katha Pollitt on Kerry's mention of Cheney's lesbian daughter (snippet):

....Thus are positions reversed: Kerry, the gay-friendly candidate, becomes the victimizer of innocent daughters, and Bush, who supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and who relies on homophobia to excite his fundamentalist base, becomes the generous protector. But if there's nothing immoral about being gay, and if Mary Cheney has herself made her sexual orientation public, what did Kerry do that was so monstrous? Here's what I find offensive: Kristol and William Safire comparing Kerry to Joseph McCarthy. Republicans, Safire writes, "have in mind a TV spot using an old film clip of a Boston lawyer named Welch at a Congressional hearing, saying 'Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?'" Who knew Safire, that old Nixonian, held McCarthy in such low esteem! Let's see: McCarthy destroyed lives with dubious accusations of secret Communist affiliations, something he regarded as evil. Kerry mentioned Mary Cheney's sexual orientation, which is a fact, is not a secret and is not a bad thing in Kerry's eyes. The analogy only makes sense if Kristol and Safire think homosexuality is as bad as communism--or communism is not as bad as they thought. The Mary Cheney gaffe is a bit like Paul Wellstone's memorial service, or for that matter the "Dean scream"--a blip, a nothing, a wisp that the Republican wind machine wants to whip into a tornado of hysterical outrage. And because so much of the media are frivolous and lazy, it can. The tactic doesn't work for long--don't you feel silly now, Minnesotans, for voting Republican because of a eulogy? and does anyone today think Howard Dean is crazy?--but it doesn't need to. It only needs to push the right buttons--propriety, prurience, politeness--for a few crucial days. Every minute people are focusing on what John Kerry said about Mary Cheney is a minute they're not talking about Iraq, or Guantánamo, that swamp of injustice and torture, or the plain basic fact that Bush, who lost the popular vote, has used his four years in the White House to turn the country over to lobbyists, ideologues and charlatans. It's a minute they're looking at Kerry's character and not at Bush's. It means they're not demanding action on the mushrooming scandal of pro-Bush vote suppression and fraud, and not just in Florida either--the intimidation of black voters, the trashing of Democratic registration forms by GOP-contracted firms and their rejection by state authorities on flimsy pretexts, those paperless electronic voting machines. (Penny Venetis and Frank Askin of the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic just filed a magnificent brief challenging the use of such machines in New Jersey.) Finally, as Richard Kim points out on www.thenation.com, defending Mary Cheney lets Republicans look concerned for a gay person while preserving their basic homophobic agenda....

I'm still at a loss trying to understand why any middle-class, non-fundagelical gay man or woman would even consider voting for Bush. If you are one, please explain...