A Cheney Family Portrait in Uncomfortable Focus

Over and out.

The Republican convention is over, and a daughter of the GOP’s number two guy is out.

It seems that Mary Cheney, daughter of vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney, is gay.

Why Ma and Pa Cheney aren’t trumpeting this from the rooftops, I do not know. (Although Lynn Cheney recently snapped “Mary has never declared such a thing,” it has been widely reported and not denied.) Because Mary Cheney could be the GOP’s kind of gay--if there is any such thing. Maybe there isn’t. We’ll soon find out.

Mary Cheney’s father runs on a party platform which declares homosexuals to be non grata in the military, the marriage license bureau and the courtroom seeking rights and protections.

Mary Cheney’s father was nominated at a convention at which an Arizona congressman named Jim Kolbe, the only declared gay Republican on Capitol Hill, made a speech. It was not a speech about condoms or AIDS or same-sex marriage (which Kolbe voted against) but about free trade.

As Kolbe spoke about the tedia of tariffs, a few good ol’ believers right down there in front of him, in the Texas delegation, ostentatiously doffed their Stetsons in prayer for the homo soul of poor Jim Kolbe which is surely speeding down that two-lane blacktop to hell.

And now--could it be?--there’s one of them right in the very hearth and bosom of the Second Family-to-Be?

From what is known of Mary Cheney, she might be an ideal Republican. She worked until recently as corporate liaison on gay and lesbian concerns. The Coors beer company has been mending fences in the gay community with domestic partner benefits to employees and donations to gay and lesbian events, including West Hollywood’s film festival.

There are fences to be mended. Many gays did, and still do, boycott the beer company because its profits bankroll the Coors family, whose foundation has put big dough into conservative and right-wing causes, among them the battle against “repugnant” same-sex marriage in Hawaii.

Yet when TV maven Cokie Roberts so much as began to ask Lynne Cheney about her daughter’s sexuality, Mere Cheney nearly snapped off Roberts’ talking head in one bite: “I would like to say I’m appalled at the media interest in one of my daughters.”

Yes, here, Cokie. Get interested in my other daughter instead--the one with a husband and three children. The one voters will accept.

“I have two wonderful daughters,” declared Mere Cheney. “They are bright. They are hard-working. They are decent. And I simply am not going to talk about their personal lives.”

Except when it suits me to do so.

*

*

Three of California’s last four governors have had no children. Not Gray Davis, not Pete Wilson (whose wife has two sons from her first marriage), not Jerry Brown.

Yet they campaigned on children’s matters like classroom size and prenatal programs and no one put up billboards accusing them of hypocrisy.

But nationally, we elect not just a president but a family. Politicians campaign en famille: Look at me, I don’t just talk about family, I have one--all these wonderful people love me, so you can trust me.

Family becomes both a prop and a photo op. Sometimes the press, yes even the press, is more considerate of young political offspring than politicians themselves. There should be a special child-abuse law for the way some pols trot out their children and grandchildren. Jacqueline Kennedy may have wanted privacy for hers, but every picture of John-John playing beneath his dad’s desk won votes that money, even Kennedy money, couldn’t buy.

Still, it doesn’t take much for a First Family character to become a family embarrassment. Brother Billy Carter was fine when he stuck to Billy Beer but that lobbying-for-Libya thing was too much. President Nixon wiretapped his own kid brother to keep tabs on him. And Speaker Gingrich’s lesbian half-sister was manna for comedians and misery for Newt.

And now Mary Cheney’s mother wants to throw a tarp over her, at least until November. Is that mother-love, or politics?

In 1995, journalist Bob Woodward related that Dick Cheney had told him that he wouldn’t be going after the presidency because he had a gay relative, who was not named. Afterward Woodward revealed that Cheney “chewed me out and said, ‘You have no right to do that. It is unfair.’ ”

Unfair to whom? To a 31-year-old woman who is “bright, hard-working, decent,” who has been quoted far and wide on gay issues in her job at Coors?

Or to the politics of family values at the expense of family?

Columnist Patt Morrison writes today for the vacationing Shawn Hubler, who is on assignment. Morrison’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com.