Cheney disses the defense—and the defenders—of marriage

As usual, I’m out of step with the Republican cheerleading squad. While Frum, Morris, the bloggers, and the L-dotters are besides themselves with joy this morning over what they see as Cheney’s trouncing of Edwards on the Iraq issue in last night’s debate, I felt that Cheney on several occasions unaccountably failed to respond to Edwards’s false attacks, as Andrew McCarthy discusses at The Corner. Even more importantly,—and it led me to turn my tv off in disgust—Cheney declined to reply to Edwards’s vicious assertion that the Federal Marriage Amendment is being advanced solely to “divide” America for partisan purposes. Underscoring his total lack of support for the amendment and the fundamental principle it represents, Cheney, astonishingly, made a deliberate point of not using his available time—almost 90 seconds—to answer Edwards’s demagogic charge against the most important traditionalist initiative in America today.

Several hours after posting the above paragraph, I came upon this quote in the New York Sun by James Bundy, Dean of Yale School of Drama, which confirms my impression that Cheney handed a victory to the left:

In terms of political theater, the single most extraordinary event was the moment in which Cheney, by not responding, essentially conceded Senator Edwards’s point about how gay marriage was being used by the Bush administration as a tool for dividing the country. It was actually a moment of enormous personal courage and morality on the part of both the vice president and Senator Edwards.

Let no one diminish or forget the significance of what Cheney has done here. For years, the left has repeatedly charged that any attempt to prevent the institutionalization of homosexual “marriage” in this country was either an expression of animus, or a cynical political move. It has been central to the left’s purpose to deny that there could be any rational, good-faith disagreement with them on this issue: either you supported what amounted to the most radical social innovation in history, or you were a vicious and dishonest human being. And Cheney, by his pointed, stunning refusal to reply to Edwards’s attack on the FMA’s backers, gave to that leftist campaign of intimidation his seal of approval. The hell with him.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 06, 2004 09:41 AM | Send