I know I should drop it, but I really can't let go of this. The Republican Party's hypocrisy with respect to gay people just sickens me too much.

As we've discussed ad nauseam here, the Bush campaign has expressed its outrage that John Kerry would dare to mention the homosexuality of Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, invading her private life with such unwanted attention.

The debate which featured this impropriety took place on October 13. It was on October 12, six years ago, that another gay person from Wyoming suffered from some "unwanted attention" that invaded his private life. Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered, and he was targeted for brutal murder because he was gay. Matthew Shepard's murder was a hate crime.

Federal hate crimes law provides local law enforcement agencies with additional assistance in investigation and prosecution of hate crimes based on certain categories. Among those categories are race and religion. Not among the categories is sexual orientation. Whether you agree or disagree with the larger philosophy of prosecuting a hate crime differently from any other kind of crime, it is a curious thing that federal law acknowledges other types of hate crime victims as worthy of special protection while victims of anti-gay hate crimes are not.

Most Americans think this omission is a mistake. Local law enforcement groups overwhelmingly support adding real or perceived sexual orientation to the list of categories to which hate crimes law applies. The public at large also supports it.

Moving to correct this error, this summer the Senate voted 65-33 to add sexual orientation to the list of groups protected by federal hate crimes law. After President Bush announced that he would veto any such bill, the legislation was passed as an amendment to a defense authorization bill. Several delays later, the House passed the same legislation. For good measure they also passed a procedural resolution -- by a 213-186 vote -- instructing the House leadership not to remove the language in conference committee.

According to what I learned in civics class, that shouldn't be necessary, because the role of the conference committee is only to reconcile House and Senate versions of a bill; they can't actually remove language which House and Senate agree upon. Perhaps the House wanted to be extra certain in this case, knowing the President Bush is especially keen for this legislation not to come before him. If that were to happen, Bush would be faced with the unpleasant choice of breaking his promise to his socially conservative constituents or vetoing a law which the American public widely supports.

As I've argued in previous posts here in RMO, most of what we learned in school about how Congress operates no longer applies. Today's conference committees, hand-picked by the Republican leadership, now rewrite legislation at will. At the leadership's urging, the conference committee for this bill dutifully removed the amendment which would extend hate crimes protection to gay victims -- defying the traditional role of a conference committee, defying the explicit instructions of a majority of the House, and defying the wishes of the American public. All so that President Bush could avoid having to make a politically unpopular veto during an election year.

Now you may think this has nothing to do with Mary Cheney, other than the coincidence of a state and (almost) a date, but these are two incidents of the same political maneuver. The Bush campaign is relying on anti-gay actions and rhetoric in order to energize its base of voters who feel that homosexuality is a disease which its individual adherents and our nation as a whole need to be "cured" of. At the same time, Bush does not wish to alienate swing-vote Republicans who might be put off by such displays of hostility to gays.

What is Bush's real position on gay rights? I don't even know. I do know that he's trying to have it both ways. At some campaign events Mary Cheney and her life partner of 10 years appear with the vice-presidential family; at other events they are nowhere to be seen. The Bush campaign shows a different face depending on its audience.

If the President wants to straddle an issue, that's his prerogative, but someone is going to call him on it. That's what Kerry did by offering Mary Cheney as an example of why we know that homosexuality is not a "choice". Either Mr and Mrs Cheney accept that their daughter is being the person that God made her or they believe she has made a lifelong sinful choice. Calling the president on his straddling is also what the House did in passing legislation to extend hate crimes protections to gay victims. Either Bush is for it or he's against it, and with his veto pen he'll have to show us which it is. You can run from the issue, but you can't hide.

But Bush does hide. To the implied question about how the Cheneys really feel about a person's "choice" to be a homosexual, the Bush campaign kicked up so much dust about Kerry's supposed impropriety for even mentioning the contradiction, that the underlying question was lost in the confusion. To the challenge of whether he believes gays warrant protection under federal hate crimes law, Bush dodges the challenge by having his allies in Congress defy their own rules in order to quash the legislation.

Bush is hiding from this issue, as he has hidden from so many others. By acquiescing in the Bush campaign's post-debate spin about Kerry's lack of decorum, by ignoring the unprecedented abuse of power by the current Congressional leadership, we are allowing him to continue to get away with it.

mdl

(with apologies to my friends who feel it is impolite to mention the sexual orientation of a murder victim in order to make a political point)