fayfreethinkers.com

Mary Cheney and Partner Are About to Be Moms

Mary Cheney, the vice president's openly gay daughter, is pregnant. She and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, are "ecstatic" about the baby, due in late spring, said a source close to the couple.

It's a baby boom for grandparents Dick and Lynne Cheney: Their older daughter, Elizabeth, went on leave as deputy assistant secretary of state before having her fifth child in July. "The vice president and Mrs. Cheney are looking forward with eager anticipation to the arrival of their sixth grandchild," spokesman Lea Anne McBride said last night.


Cheney and Poe
Cheney, 37, was a key aide to her father during the 2004 reelection campaign and now is vice president for consumer advocacy at AOL. Poe, 45, a former park ranger, is renovating their Great Falls home.

News of the pregnancy will undoubtedly reignite the debate about gay marriage. During the campaign, Mary Cheney was criticized by gay activists for not being more publicly supportive of same-sex marriage. Her father said people "ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to" but deferred to the president's policy supporting a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. Cheney herself called the proposed amendment "a gross affront to gays and lesbians everywhere" in her book, "Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life," which was published in May.

Cheney has described her relationship with Poe -- whom she took to last year's White House dinner honoring Prince Charles and Camilla -- as a marriage. The two met in 1988 while playing ice hockey and began dating four years later. They moved from Colorado to Virginia a year ago to be closer to Cheney's family.

...In November, Virginia voters passed a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions; state law is unclear on whether Poe could have full legal rights as a parent of Cheney's child.
Read the rest here.
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DOUG
And the big question on the minds of many: are the religious conservatives going to keep silent about this out of respect for Cheney, or are they going to tear into the Cheneys as they typically would in the case of any other famous lesbian couple?

What gets even more fun - some states have laws (AR is contemplating one) that forbid gays to adopt children. Are they going to decide gay natural parents can't have (aren't "worthy" or whatever) children and take Mary's baby? (To be given to some deserving, christian, adoptive family, of course.) Better keep Dick away from the shotguns, if they try.

I find this so ironic, and so interesting that the right-wing republican freaks haven't said a THING about it. If a Democrat VP were in the same family situation, the religious wingnuts would be screaming their heads off.

You don't have to stretch your imagination very far to hear the wingnuts if it had been Chelsea Clinton!

While criticizing Mary Cheney's pregnancy in a December 10 Time magazine guest column titled "Two Mommies is One Too Many," Focus on the Family founder and chairman James Dobson baselessly claimed that "the majority of more than 30 years of social-science evidence indicates that children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father." Dobson asserted that "love alone is not enough to guarantee healthy growth and development" of a child and that "[t]he two most loving women in the world cannot provide a daddy for a little boy." Dobson also declared that "birth and adoption are the purview of married heterosexual couples" and "[t]hat's why public policy as it relates to families must be based not solely on the desires of adults but rather on the needs of children." In fact, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly noted..., studies have consistently found that children raised by gay or lesbian parents suffer no adverse effects in their psychosocial development.

Read the rest here, including links to the articles cited in elipses after "noted" above.