Jimmy Akin

After his despicable attempt to turn Mary Cheney into an embarrassment and a political weapon to be used against her father and his boss, John Kerry defended himself by issuing a written statement in which he said this:

I love my daughters. They love their daughter. I was trying to say something positive about the way strong families deal with this issue.

Now commentator Bill Kristol has a question:

How stupid does John Kerry think the American people are?

Does he really think they will believe that he singled out Mary Cheney because he “was trying to say something positive about the way strong families deal with this issue?” Does he think they will accept his claim that he was saying something about the Cheneys’ “love of their daughter”? Of course, he wasn’t. In his answer, he never mentioned or came close to mentioning the Cheney family, or the Cheneys’ love. He merely brought up Mary Cheney as a lesbian, out of left field, in order to get her name and sexual orientation into an answer where no such citation was expected, called for, or remotely appropriate. His campaign manager let slip the truth when after the debate she told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that Mary Cheney was “fair game.”

Kerry’s desperate attempt at next-day spin was also revealing. It showed the way he had been supposed to bring up Mary Cheney–the way he and his staff had planned to pull off this maneuver. Kerry was supposed to do what his more skilled and cleverer debating partner, John Edwards, did. He was supposed to sugarcoat his use of Mary Cheney more effectively. Edwards prefaced his answer to Gwen Ifill’s same-sex marriage question in the vice-presidential debate with, “Let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can’t have anything but respect for the fact that they’re willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter; the fact that they embrace her is a wonderful thing.”

But Kerry forgot his lines. And while Cheney had to pretend to accept Edwards’s phony, condescending compliment, and everyone else allowed Edwards’s deftly exploitative comment go by, Kerry’s appropriation of Mary Cheney came in no such lawyerly and sugary packaging. The rawness of his ruthlessness was there for all to see. The Democrats are terrified of a debate on same-sex marriage, and used Mary Cheney to try to brush back the Bush-Cheney ticket from forcing a real policy debate.

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People often realize that something is wrong before they are able to quite put their finger on why.

An example was Sen. Kerry’s use in the debate Wednesday night of the fact that Vice Pres. Cheney’s daughter is homosexual.

When this began to be criticized in the commentary immediately after the debate, Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill applied the language of cynical political exploitation to this remark by declaring the subject to be “fair game.”

Many people were not persuaded, and Thursday the Cheneys expressed their own displeasure at the use of their daughter as a political football by Sen. Kerry (as, it is reported, they previously had expressed it after Sen. Edwards did the same thing during the vice presidential debate).

Watching some pundits on TV yesterday, I observed a number of Republican pundits displaying a strong intuition that Sen. Kerry was wrong to use Cheney’s daughter in this way, but they were unable to clearly articulate why it was wrong.

Asked by Democrat pundits what was wrong with it, they would say things like “It’s a violation of their privacy,” to which the Democrat pundits would point out that Cheney has himself publicly acknowledged his daughter’s homosexuality.

This is a fair point.

Since the matter is not only publicly known but publicly acknowledged by Cheney himself, Sen. Kerry’s use of the situation does not constitute a violation of privacy–at least not in the way privacy is conventionally understood.

But it’s still wrong.

Here’s why: The fact that the vice president’s daughter is homosexual is a very sensitive issue for him and his whole family, both personally and professionally. Personally, no parent (or virtually no parent) wants to find out that one of their children is a homosexual. Even if the parent has no moral problem with homosexuality, the discovery of the fact means that the child will face additional hardship in life that no parent wants for their child to experience.

Similarly infinitessimal numbers of parents want to acknowledge the fact of a homosexual child in public. It doesn’t matter whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing; it’s true. The matter is a source of agony for parents, no matter how brave a face they try to put on it in public–or in private for that matter.

It is even more sensitive a subject when you are a vice president who belongs to a party whose base is strongly opposed to homosexuality. It is further sensitive when there is a homosexual marriage crisis brewing and your boss (i.e., the president) has proposed a constitutional amendment to prevent courts from imposing homosexual marriage as the law of the land. Finally, it is especially sensitive at election time when the fact that your daughter is homosexual could be used against you as a political weapon to try to alienate the voters of your party and cause them to stay home on election day.

What Sen. Kerry did was not violate Dick Cheney’s privacy; it was to attempt to turn Cheney’s daughter into an embarrassment and a political liability to him and his boss.

It was the exploitation of an extraordinary sensitive family situation for his own political ends.

No child should be made to feel that she is an embarrassment and liability to her parents, and no parents should be placed in a situation where their child feels this way.

Kerry tried to turn the vice president’s child into a political weapon to be used against him.

Cheney may have acknowledged his daughter’s sexual orientation in public, but it is one thing for a parent to muster up the courage to admit such a sensitive fact and it is another thing entirely to have it thrown in your face in an attempt to harm you politically by using your child as a weapon.

What Sen. Kerry did was heartless.

It was cruel.

It was vile.

It was despicable.

It was wrong.

UPDATE: Welcome, HughHewitt.Com readers!

UPDATE: Now someone else is using a vile suggestion involving homosexuality to make political hay.

There seems to be no honor among thieves, or evil people, at least.

Evil authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail (a hack-journalism “investigation” purporing to show that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and gave rise to a prominent European royal bloodline that is at the center of a gigantic, centuries-long conspiracy) have now filed suit against evil author Dan Brown, claiming he committed plagiarism by ripping off their “non-fiction” work for his novel.

Quote:

Leigh told the Telegraph after issuing the writ: “It’s not that Dan Brown has lifted certain ideas because a number of people have done that before. It’s rather that he’s lifted the whole architecture – the whole jigsaw puzzle – and hung it on to the peg of a fictional thriller.”

More:

The authors argue that Brown lifted their all-important list of the Grand Masters, who supposedly guarded the secret documents pertaining to Christ’s bloodline, without acknowledgement.

The only mention of their book is when the villain of The Da Vinci Code, an eccentric English historian called Sir Leigh Teabing, lifts a copy off his bookshelf and says: “To my taste, the authors made some dubious leaps of faith in their analysis, but their fundamental premise is sound.”

The name Leigh Teabing is an anagram of Leigh and Baigent, the authors point out, while his physical description – he walks with the aid of crutches – is allegedly based on the third author, Henry Lincoln, who walks with a limp.

Lincoln has decided not to be part of the copyright action because of ill health, but is said to support it.

GET THE STORY.

NOTE TO FELLOW BLOGGERS: Feel free to link this one. It’s a point Catholics should be aware of.

A little liveblogging . . .

I’m watching the third presidential debate right now, and CBS moderator Bob Schieffer just raised the question of abortion. In answering the question, Sen. Kerry quoted the following from James 2:

What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? . . . faith without deeds is dead (Jas. 2:14, 20).

This was a dumb thing for several reaons. First, this passage was totally irrelevant to the question he was answering. Second, this is a flashpoint passage for Protestants, and quoted by a Catholic, it was guaranteed to send shivers up the spines of numerous Protestants in the audience (though many who would have the most strongly negative were not voting for Kerry already). Third, and most importantly, KERRY WAS OBLIVIOUS TO THE BITTER, HOWLING IRONY OF THIS PASSAGE AS APPLIED TO HIS OWN POSITION.

Kerry has professed–as a matter of his personal faith–a belief in the humanity of the unborn and his personal opposition to abortion, yet he has REFUSED TO UNDERTAKE ANY DEEDS TO PROTECT THE UNBORN.

Senator, faith without works IS dead. Your faith on this point INCLUDED.

It is not enough to say to the unborn “Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body” (Jas. 2:16).

One of the things that is “needful to the body” for the unborn is the legal protection NOT TO HAVE THEIR BODIES RIPPED APART BY AN ABORTIONIST.

Senator, YOUR faith, without YOUR deeds on this point, is DEAD.

What a shame, then, that it is left to a Texas Methodist (Sen. Kerry’s opponent in the debate) to repeatedly quote John Paul II’s phrase in saying that he supports “a culture of life.”