What’s Behind Bush’s Political Correctness on Mary Cheney?

By Peter LaBarbera

President Bush has been put in an awful spot, thanks to Mary Cheney’s “gay parenting” activism. Ms. Cheney, a proud lesbian, is pregnant through artificial insemination and will raise her child with lesbian partner Heather Poe. The media are reporting Bush’s comment to People magazine: “I think Mary is going to be a loving soul to her child. And I’m happy for her.”

Seeking to downplay the hubbub, White House spokesman Tony Snow actually made it worse when he was asked at a press briefing if the President still believes “that children who are raised by gay and lesbian parents are at a disadvantage.” Snow said:

“He does not make comments on that, and nor will I.” Snow added that the President still believes in the ideal of traditional marriage as the best environment for raising children, but “he believes that Mary Cheney’s child will, in fact, have loving parents.”

Note the perfectly PC, “nonjudgmental” tenor of Snow’s dodge. Shouldn’t pro-family Americans who helped re-elect Mr. Bush expect a bit more than this on a matter that strikes at the core of what a family is?

President Bush has been too timid about using his Bully Pulpit to promote pro-family values, but occasionally he stumbles and uses it to advance the opposite. In this case, he could have declined comment altogether or, better, used this situation as a teaching moment to reaffirm the natural superiority of the God-ordained family.

Maybe the latter is asking too much of Mr. Bush given his relationship with the Cheneys, but I do wonder why a president who talks so openly about his Christian faith was unprepared or unwilling to apply it logically to this touchy situation. Assuming that as an evangelical Christian, Mr. Bush believes homosexual practice is sinful, are we to believe that this man who faced down Islamic radicalism and launched the War on Terror is afraid to say what he really believes about lesbians having children to be raised in homes that are fatherless by design?

And isn’t it ironic that the daughter of Second Lady Lynne Cheney -– an ardent intellectual foe of Political Correctness -– is now being used to advance the PC idea of homosexual parenting?

Relational ‘Gay’ Activism

The whole Mary Cheney-baby episode typifies how the “gay” agenda advances in our emotionally-driven culture. The personal becomes political, and “open and proud gays” use their relationships with family members, friends and co-workers to persuade them to embrace behaviors with which they once disagreed — or at least go silent about them. This is the goal of homosexual activists’ “coming out” strategy, which is brilliant in its manipulation of human nature.

“I’m gay, so you can’t be anti-gay,” is the basic approach, and then parents are brought in through groups like PFLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) to expand the “gay”-positive network. Christians talk about “friendship evangelism,” but it’s the homosexuals and their families and friends who have proved themselves adept at changing society — and undermining Biblical morality and tradition — through personal relationships.

“Coming out” as a tactic is most cynical when encouraged among young people: homosexual school clubs called GSA’s (”Gay/Straight Alliances”) are merely the application of this approach to radically change a generation’s attitudes toward homosexuality and gender confusion (”transgenderism”). And it’s working: just ask the many Christian parents whose high school children have scolded them about being “homophobes.”

Bush Drops the Ball

By uttering platitudes rather than principles about Mary Cheney, the President of the United States missed a golden opportunity to instruct a nation about the gold standard of traditional marriage as the optimal environment for raising children. He blinked when put in the awkward position of either telling the truth or pretending that Ms. Cheney’s is not unlike any other (wonderful) pregnancy. It is different, by a long shot. Not that she won’t have maternal love for her child; of course she will. But the child is being brought into a household where the most important person in his or her world will be modeling lesbian behavior, which is changeable and always wrong, and an affront to a holy and loving Creator.

Finding some role-modeling man in her circle of friends will never substitute for the pre-designed absence of a dad in Mary Cheney’s child’s life. And ethically speaking, we must not treat her situation any differently just because she is a well-connected, Republican celebrity.

Of course, the radical feminists (a not insignifcant number of whom are lesbian) are loving this. In the old days, when women embraced lesbianism with its inherent rejection of men, it was understood that they would be denied the joys of motherhood. (Many radical lesbian activists relished the assault on “patriarchal” family structures.) There was a certain divine and natural justice to that.

But thanks to technology, those days are gone and anyone can have a child: “two moms,” “two dads,” two lesbians and two homosexual men sharing parental duties, single women who want a child but have no prospects for marriage, etc. This is bad enough, but must we pretend that these quirky arrangements will have no lasting effect on the innocent children involved? (The pro-”gay” crowd’s reflexive and self-centered response is to blame any problems the kids have on society’s “homophobia.”)

Already, I can hear homosexual activists comparing Cheney’s case to that of infertile married couples using artificial insemination to create a family, but that would be like justifying homosexual adoption by pointing to normal, mom-and-dad adoptions. Regardless of what you believe about artificial insemination, at least when heterosexuals are involved, the child will have a mom and dad — recreating the natural, as opposed to subjecting innocent children to the social experiment of same-sex parenting.

Media Need Biology Lessons

One last thing — note the media’s phraseology in its coverage of Mary Cheney’s pregnancy:

President Bush tells PEOPLE he is happy for Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary, who is expecting a child with her partner, Heather Poe.

Interesting. Mary Cheney is not “expecting a baby” WITH Heather Poe. She artificially conceived a child with the aid of some yet unidentified man. Heather Poe has no natural relationship to the child. When the media say that two homosexuals are “having a baby,” a biological impossibility, they trivialize the huge differences between natural, mom-and-dad families and artificial, homosexual-led households.

Political Correctness is all about denying or side-stepping the obvious in the service of some ideological crusade — usually one that’s too shaky to stand on its own among moral, free-thinking people. In that context, it’s pretty easy to see why President Bush and his spokesman, Tony Snow, gave the PC responses, and non-responses, that they gave about Mary Cheney’s pregnancy.

The following is excerpted from George Bush Says He’s ‘Happy’ for Mary Cheney, published Dec 15, 2006, by People Magazine:

President Bush tells PEOPLE he is happy for Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary, who is expecting a child with her partner, Heather Poe.

In an exclusive year-end interview, the President told PEOPLE magazine, “The Vice President took me aside and gave me the good news. He and his wife, Lynne, are very happy for Mary.”

In 2005, Bush said that ideally “a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman.”

Asked if he still felt that way knowing Mary and her partner, he said, “I think Mary is going to be a loving soul to her child. And I’m happy for her.”

Also — from the White House website, an excerpt from the transcript of the Dec 15, 2006, White House briefing with spokesman Tony Snow:

Q Tony, in an interview with People Magazine, the President was asked about Mary Cheney’s pregnancy, and said he’s confident — he believes she’ll be a loving soul to her child. In the past, he said that he believes the ideal is that a child be raised in a married family with a man and a woman. Does he still believe that’s the ideal?

MR. SNOW: Yes, he does, but he also believes that every human life is sacred and that every child that comes into the world deserves love. And he believes that Mary Cheney’s child will, in fact, have loving parents.

Q Does he believe that children who are raised by gay and lesbian parents are at a disadvantage?

MR. SNOW: He does not make comments on that, and nor will I.