Mary Cheney is screwed

[Updated December 13, 2006, 10:42am] There's something seriously messed up here, but I'm not sure how to say it.

Let's recap, shall we?

1. Mary Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, is pregnant. No problems with that, congrats and best wishes, I say.

2. Mary Cheney is, for those who didn't know, is a lesbian. She and her 15-year-long partner Heather Poe will be raising the child. Again, no problems with that, contrats and best wishes to them both, I say.

3. As mentioned earlier, Mary Cheney is the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, half of the Bush/Cheney ticket.

4. One of the planks of said Bush/Cheney ticket in the 2004 re-election was an opposition to gay marriage, to the point where Bush was endorsing a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriages.
   

   (To be fair to Mr. Cheney, he never endorsed such views himself, and has said he supported leaving the issue for the states to decide)

5. In a twist of odd, Mary Cheney worked for the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign as the director of vice presidential operations.

6. In a twist of odder, the Cheneys publicly condemned the gay-marriage-friendly Kerry/Edwards ticket for mentioning Mary's sexual orientation -- as if it was some sort of secret (which it wasn't), or if they needed her permission to do so (which they didn't).
   

   (And in a twist of odd beyond belief, Mary Cheney later called Kerry a "son of a bitch" and Edwards "slime," while simultaneously admitting that she was so distraught over Bush's proposed anti-gay-marriage Constitutional amendment that she almost left the Republican party as a result. Almost, mind you, but not enough to call Bush a "son of a bitch," or to denounce her father as "slime" for offering merely token opposition. Apparently being a lesbian is no innoculation against hypocrisy...)

7. Anyway, with Mary Cheney's work on the campaign -- and a strong election-day turnout by anti-gay-marriage Christian fundamentalists -- the Bush/Cheney ticket won re-election in 2004.

8. So now Mary Cheney and her partner are expecting, which (as I've said earlier) is all nice and dandy, congrats and best wishes, yadda yadda yadda.

   Except...

9. The Christian fundamentalists -- the same anti-gay-marriage folks who helped put the Bush/Cheney ticket back in the White House -- are now condemning Mary Cheney's non-traditional family-building.

10. Worse, Mary Cheney and Heather Poe are currently living in Virgina, a state that's already banned gay marriage and whose courts have already established precedent that gay and lesbian parents don't have the same rights as heterosexual ones -- which means Ms. Poe will not have any legal rights to the child beyond that of an interested spectator.

So we have Mary Cheney, who worked on behalf of her father's anti-gay-marriage political campaign, and who aided and abetted the anti-gay-marriage Christian Fundamentalists, helping her father get re-elect back into office -- now she's trying to raise a family of her own, only to get caught in the crosshairs of the afformentioned anti-gay-marriage Christian Fundamentalists, while living in a state with anti-gay-marriage laws, fueled by the same anti-gay-marriage sentiments she helped endorse during the campaign...

*pant* *pant*

...I suppose what I really need here is a word that means "reap what you sow." It's not exactly "schadenfreude," but it's pretty close.

And I really have to wonder if Mary Cheney is finally kicking herself (figuratively) for supporting an Administration, a political party, and a social trend that actively opposes her and everything she wants out of life. I thought the Log Cabin Republicans were messed in the head, but Mary Cheney takes the cake.

[Updated December 13, 2006, 10:42am] Evangelical nutjob James "spank-a-matic" Dobson weighs in on Mary Cheney's condition:

That is not to say Cheney and Poe will not love their child. But love alone is not enough to guarantee healthy growth and development... Moms give a child a sense of hopefulness; dads provide a sense of right and wrong and its consequences. Other researchers have determined that boys are not born with an understanding of "maleness." They have to learn it, ideally from their fathers.

Which is a fancy-schmancy way of Dobson repeating his earlier views, that Mary Cheney's kid needs a dad to teach him how to be macho:

[T]he boy's father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

Uh, wait...