October 28, 2004 With countries such as Spain and many others making gay marriage legal, is it time that America takes the same step? That question has made gay marriage and civil unions the hot-button wedge issue of the 2004 election. Some analysts say Sen. John Kerry’s reference in the last debate to Mary Cheney—the vice president’s openly lesbian daughter—hurt him in the polls. Kerry’s exact words were: “If you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as. If you talk to anybody, it’s not choice. I’ve met people who struggled with this for years, people in a marriage and they struggled with it. I’ve met wives supportive of their husbands or vice versa when they finally broke out and allowed themselves to live who they were, who they felt God had made them. We have to respect that.” Kerry proponents, and many homosexuals, point out that the only way one can view his answer as bad or offensive is if the person finds homosexuality to be bad or offensive.
