MaryGate

The only way to explain it is to begin at the beginning. During the vice-presidential debate, Senator Edwards felt a need to mention Vice-President Cheney's daughter in response to the Vice-President's statements on gay marriage:

Now, as to this question, let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy.

Then in the third presidential debate, President Kerry brought up the Vice-President's daughter again:

We're all God's children, Bob. And I think 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.

Serious commentary views this as an amazing blunder by Edwards and Kerry, either on grounds of the obvious creepiness of a below-the-belt debating tactic, or that Edwards and Kerry were trying to hurt Republicans with their conservative base by "outing" the Vice-President's daughter, or that it was a possible appeal to homphobia.

My view is that, at the very least, this is a serious mistake on simple decency grounds: how many parents would want their son or daughter being used as a political football on nationwide television? But the real key to understanding the real meaning of this controversy is to recognize it as another manifestation of political correctness. One of the most extreme tenets of political correctness is that only members of a "community" are entitled to voice an opinion about political issues that affect that community (i.e. men have no right to talk about banning abortion because they can never give birth). If we postulate that both Edwards and Kerry both share that fundamental belief, and if we further postulate that capitalizing on a visible disagreement between Cheney and President Bush was a goal for their debating peformances, then the reason for their statements about Mary Cheney emerges: anything Cheney says that in any way concerns homosexuality is, ipso facto, completely irrelevant until his vital connection with the homosexual community has been established.