Everyone’s talking about Mary this week. Here are some of the more notable or amusing contributions:
- Pam of Pam’s House Blend is blunt: “With this development, Mary and her partner Heather Poe are going to make her father’s religious right friends go apesh*t again.” She then charts some of the rabid right’s first reactions.
- Many bloggers quoted Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America, who said, “They’re deliberately bringing a child into the world without a father, leaving a great gaping hole. Father absence is the biggest problem we’re facing in this country.” Andrew Sullivan goes further and shares an even more frightening right-wing response. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News asked one of his conservative guests “if a husband should be ‘mandatory’ for lesbian or single moms. The answer was yes,” Sullivan relates. “What does he mean by ‘mandatory’? I assume making it illegal for lesbians to have their own children. If that’s what they want, they should say so.”
- Robert A. George of Ragged Thots notes, in the same vein, “What’s interesting here is that social conservatives would undoubtedly admit that there is a biological urge among women to want to have a child. Yet, they want Mary Cheney to ignore that urge—for what would be ultimately a political decision rather than a personal one.”
- Sullivan also quotes a reader who cuts to the chase: “Britney Spears or Mary Cheney? Who would you want watching your child?” [My answer: Mary . . . unless she wanted to take Junior duck hunting with grandpa.]
- Susan G. at Daily Kos asks whether Janice Crouse, in her statement above, is referring to “A. Children of fathers on their fourth deployment to Iraq; B. Children of fathers who have died in Iraq; C. Mary Cheney’s pregnancy.”
- Amy Ephron of the Huffington Post looks to the future and asks, “The question is, are they [Cheney and partner Heather Poe] planning to get married?”
- Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post regrets that Cheney’s pregnancy didn’t happen sooner, “say, during the 2004 presidential race.” Regardless, she believes “whether [Cheney] intends it or not, her pregnancy will, I think, turn out to be a watershed in public understanding and acceptance of the phenomenon. This is the Ellen DeGeneres moment of national politics.”
- Shakespeare’s Sister takes issue with the LA Times’ characterization of “groups that oppose same-sex marriage and gay adoptions” as using “a delicate touch not always seen in the political wars over gay issues.”
- Liza Sabater of Culture Kitchen offers her thoughts on shower gifts to get for Mary and Heather.
- At Dorothy Surrenders, Dorothy Snarker looks at the fashion angle, asking, “Ladies, the hair. The hair. Is this really the kind of hair we want bringing a child into the world? Is this the kind of hair that represents happy, healthy gay parenting? . . . I think not. This is the kind of hair that barks orders to sweaty yet nubile basketball players from the sidelines at Virginia Tech.”
- Jennifer Chrisler, director of the Family Pride Coalition, gives some useful advice: “Hopefully, having this conversation will give us an opportunity to educate people about the unique challenges we face as LGBTQ parents and that even the Vice-President’s daughter won’t be immune from those challenges. In the meantime, I’ll give the Cheney-Poe family the same advice I give to all expectant LGBTQ parents. Get lots of sleep, go on lots of dates together, see a good movie, draw up your wills, powers of attorney, and health care proxies, drive the route to the hospital where you will deliver and, most of all, get ready for the biggest joy of your life.” Good points, except I imagine the Secret Service has the route-to-the-hospital part covered.
More tactically, Chrisler and team have dumped some money into Google AdWords so that if you search for “mary cheney pregnant,” links to the Family Pride Coalition appear in the Sponsored Links column. Nice move.
I’ll stop there, though there are plenty of other posts on the subject. We’re going to have several months of this; I have to pace myself.