A Father's Choice: Dick Cheney's Dilemma

Mary Cheney is pregnant. How wonderful for her and her partner. And how complicated for her famous father, whose unwavering loyalty to the White House places him in the spotlight over this highly personal issue.

The fact that the Vice president's daughter shares her life with a female life partner was made public during the last presidential campaign. My own once favored candidate, John Kerry, blunderingly pointed the finger when he spoke of "the Vice President's gay daughter" and effectively buried himself politically. Prudence should have told him that a candidate's family is off limits.

I'm no fan of Mr. Cheney's. The sooner he leaves the White House, the happier I'll be. But, I can't blame him for snapping CNN's Wolf Blitzer's head off last week, when he brought up Mary Cheney's personal choices in an interview. A father should have the right to protect his daughter and to keep her private life out of the media circus.

Dick Cheney is in a difficult position. As a devoted father, he supports his daughter and her choices, yet as Vice President, it is his duty to stand behind the president and his official policies. While it is possible to keep one's personal life separate from one's professional life, this gets complicated when the issues contradict. And politically, it tends to threaten credibility.

By his own words, Mr. Cheney has no intentions of running for President, but if he did, there might well be some changes in policies, concerning gay/lesbian issues, unless he chose to continue to cater to religious rightwing conservatives. I wonder what his true convictions are on the issue and whether he would choose to follow them. And I wonder how he deals with the continued criticism of his private life and of his family.

Cheney represents an administration that has distinguished itself by showing intolerance and lack of candor. There have been lies and cover-ups and the Vice President has delivered his share of them. He is strong-willed and opinionated. He is a master manipulator. He is the big bass drum that accompanies President Bush's song-and-dance. He carries a large share of the guilt over the American economic crisis. And he has surely profited financially from this administration's self-serving policies. And yet, he is a father. And as a father, he deserves to be untouchable.

I have made choices in my life that were not in my best interest. And I have made choices that others thought inappropriate. Most of us have. We expect our families to support us and to stand behind us, regardless of what they may believe to be right. Some of us have that luxury. I do. Mary Cheney does. Many others do not.

My parents would shelter me from public attacks and they would keep me away from a political tug-of-war. It is what parents do. It is what the Cheney's do. We and the media should respect that choice and not intrude into the sanctity of a family's private affairs. Just as it was no one's business how Hillary Clinton dealt with her husband's extra-marital affair, Dick Cheney's family is none of our concern. There are plenty of reasons to confront the Vice President. All of them relate to his public statements and the current state of the Union. None of them involve his family. If we make political attacks on a public figure, let's make sure we are attacking him politically, not personally. Otherwise, we may undermine our own credibility. Or, as Dick Cheney told Wolf Blitzer, we may be "over the line."