Jimmy Akin

Okay, remember how I pointed out Kerry’s despicable attempt to make political hay by turning Mary Cheney against her will into a political weapon to be used against her father?

That was me criticizing someone on the Left for a vile attempt to exploit the issue of homosexuality.

Now let me criticize someone on the Right for a vile attempt to use homosexuality to make political hay.

There is a draft of a new ad out by a group called the Club for Growth. I don’t know anything about this group except that they produce Right-leaning political ads (of which I have previously seen one or two on TV).

Now they have an ad up (at the very top of this web page) that tries to poke fun at Kerry’s flip-flopping in a semi-humorous way. It involves showing people unable to commit to a decision in extreme and absurd situations.

One of these people, who is featured prominently in the ad, is a groom who is at the altar and suddenly finds himself unable to commit to his bride. He then begins romping about the church kissing every woman in sight. At the end of the ad (this is the “stinger” the ad ends on), he turns his gaze lustfully on . . . the priest, who then looks very alarmed and exits hastily while the bride sobs.

THIS TURNED MY STOMACH.

Since this is a “draft” of an ad that is not yet finalized, and the Club for Growth solicits feedback from those who visit its site, I immediately used the feedback form to send them this message:

I found the part where the groom looks lustfully at the worried priest to be HIGHLY OFFENSIVE. It will alienate Catholics who are already very sensitive about priestly sexual conduct.

This HAS TO COME OUT OF THE AD. Find a different stinger to end on. If not, expect tons of Catholic bloggers, including myself, to venomously denounce the ad in the strongest possible terms.

If you’re trying to persuade Catholics, do so in a way that doesn’t turn their stomachs. Kerry recently got himself into trouble with a vile attempt to exploit the homosexual issue. Don’t make the same mistake.

Watch the ad, and if you feel similarly, by all means let them know.

WATCH THE AD

LET THEM KNOW

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.

READ MORE.

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.