I hadn't thought of this, it's an interesting angle:
The New Republic vis CBS:
As near as I can figure, Cheney's approach to public policy seems to be that he believes in a basic set of rules that everyone should live by -- except in those cases where doing so would prove inconvenient for him or his family. Gay marriage isn't the only area in which he's invoked this personal exemption. There was also Cheney's behavior toward Iraq during his tenure as Chairman and CEO of Halliburton. Despite being a hardliner about America's not doing business with Saddam, Chief Executive Cheney conveniently looked the other way while his firm's foreign subsidiaries made millions selling oil-drilling equipment to Baghdad.
I understand that all politics are personal. But are we really supposed to applaud a man who strays from his pinched ideological worldview only when it serves to benefit himself or someone in his circle of intimates? That's not compassionate conservativism; that's political cronyism (or, in Mary's case, nepotism).
Of course, if having personal ties to an issue is what it takes to get the Vice President in touch with his softer side, we should probably all be rooting for Cheney to discover that, in addition to having a gay daughter, he also has a couple of black grandkids, an illegal immigrant cousin, an aunt with a drug habit, a transsexual brother, a sister who just got laid off from a textile mill in North Carolina, and a long-lost son who's been getting his butt shot at in Najaf.
With enough rabble-rousers, poor folk, and minorities in the family, the Vice President might actually be forced to become a tolerant, compassionate kind of guy. Barring that, we can only hope that enough swing-voters see through Dick's freedom-for-everyone b.s. to send the dark-hearted, autocratic jerk back to Wyoming come November.
