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Guerriero attacks Bush and Cheney for "feigning outrage" over discussion of Mary Cheney

by Advocate (repost)
CNN reports that the head of the gay political group Log Cabin Republicans has come out angrily against the Bush-Cheney campaign for "feigning outrage" over Sen. John Kerry's comments in Wednesday night's presidential debate regarding Mary Cheney's homosexuality while asking that President Bush "stop attacking gay families on the campaign trail." Patrick Guerriero, interviewed on CNN's American Morning Friday, acknowledged that Kerry was "not wise" to bring up Mary Cheney in response to a question during the debate about homosexuality. But Guerriero also pointed out that Republicans "who are expressing outrage at the debate comments really have been outrageous themselves."
"The reality is the type of outrage that is being expressed by some Republicans should be expressed at themselves," said Guerriero. "They've decided to use gay families as wedge issues across America in swing states--that is truly outrageous." The Log Cabin Republicans withheld endorsing any candidate in the 2004 presidential election in response to a number of antigay planks in the Republican Party Platform, including opposition to gay and lesbian service members in the military and opposition to same-sex marriages or civil unions. According to Guerriero, members of Log Cabin are "insulted by a campaign that has attempted to amend the Constitution, and in too many states we've seen discriminatory amendments that would deny hospital visitation and domestic-partnership legislation."

"The big story in this election is that [Bush political strategist] Karl Rove has decided to strategically use gay and lesbian Americans in a number of swing states," said Guerriero. "The same people who are feigning outrage about what happened in the debate should speak out against that type of political gamesmanship."

At Wednesday night's debate, Kerry responded to a question about whether or not homosexuality is a choice by saying, "We're all God's children.... And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she was being who she was, she's being who she was born as." Despite the fact that Mary's lesbianism was mentioned in the vice presidential debate with no angry response from Republicans, both Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne responded angrily against Kerry's remark in subsequent days. Guerriero said he felt that Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, should "make their case for gay and lesbian fairness" without mentioning Mary Cheney and that "the president and Karl Rove should stop attacking gay families on the campaign trail."

http://www.advocate.com/new_news.asp?ID=14085&sd=10/16/04-10/18/04
§The L Word
by Nation
The last presidential debate highlighted clear and significant differences between John Kerry and George Bush on domestic issues like minimum wage, healthcare, education and even gay marriage. George Bush supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage while John Kerry, though he believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman, doesn't.

But if you caught only the postdebate banter, you might not know this. Instead, campaign surrogates and pundits have been obsessed with whether or not John Kerry (and earlier John Edwards) invaded Mary Cheney's privacy by noting that the Vice President's daughter is a lesbian.

Did they? I don't think so.

It's not like Mary Cheney's been quietly pursuing lesbianism by playing softball and raising cats in Northampton. She has devoted her entire career to providing cover for lesbian-hating organizations, corporations and political parties.

Before the 2000 campaign she worked as a liaison to the gay and lesbian community for Coors Brewing Company, a rather masochistic occupation, since Coors is just about as antigay as you can get. In the early 1970s Coors required prospective employees to submit to a lie-detector test in which the company asked if the respondent was a homosexual (prompting Harvey Milk to organize a boycott of Coors beer). Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the Coors family used generous donations from the Adolph Coors Foundation to launch right-wing groups like the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation--which coined the term "the homosexual agenda" in publications like Gays, AIDS and You. Meanwhile, the company busted unions (leading to an AFL-CIO boycott), and individual family members like William Coors made racist speeches to black audiences claiming "one of the best things that they [slave traders] did for you was to drag your ancestors over here in chains" (this statement led to a boycott by numerous minority groups).

Facing a nationwide protest, the Coors family, which controls both the brewery and the foundation, executed a savvy PR campaign. In 1993 they restricted the Adolph Coors Foundation's grants to Colorado organizations, while spinning off $36.5 million of unrestricted assets to endow the non-Coors named (though still Coors-controlled) Castle Rock Foundation, which continued to fund far-right groups. And while Coors Brewing extended domestic partnership benefits to gays and lesbians in 1995, its former CEO and favorite son, Peter Coors, is now running for Senate in Colorado on a platform that touts his support of a sweeping constitutional amendment that would not only ban gay marriage but could also eliminate domestic partnership benefits for unmarried couples.

At the very center of the Coors duck and cover operation was Mary Cheney, who was hired as "corporate relations manager for the gay and lesbian market" not because of her PR-savvy but because she was lesbian, a Republican and the daughter of Dick and Lynne Cheney. Not that she wasn't deeply committed to her job: As PR flack she toured the country with 1999 International Mr. Leather to promote Coors beer in gay bars. Cheney was not just a member of the lesbian community but a market analyst who researched, cultivated and delivered that community to a corporate dynasty seeking to paint over decades of active support for homophobic causes.

Read More
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20041101&s=kim
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