“No one doubts that the vice president’s apostasy on this issue is entirely personal. If Mary [Cheney] weren’t a lesbian, [Dick] Cheney would at this very minute be somewhere deep in the red states, warning voters in that scowling, brook-no-arguments way of his that gay marriage is exactly the sort of fuzzy-headed liberal nonsense that gives aid and comfort to Al Qaeda. (Lynne would be right there beside him, blaming the whole mess on those perverted, Mapplethorpe-loving bastards over at the National Endowment for the Arts.) But because one of his kids happens to bat for the other team, suddenly Dick’s a free-to-be-you-and-me, ‘freedom for everyone’ kind of guy.”

“Ever since powerful Ohio congressman Wayne Hayes’ downfall in the early ’70s for putting his mistress, Elizabeth Ray, on the congressional payroll as a ‘secretary’ (even though she couldn’t type), it’s been a cardinal rule of political survival that elected officials should never pay their paramour from the public coffers. But that’s what [newly out New Jersey Gov.] Jim McGreevey did – and his ringing declaration, ‘I am a gay American,’ was a carefully crafted piece of political prestidigitation designed to distract public attention from his feckless flouting of basic ethical principles.”

“The Employment Non-Discrimination Act is dead, a victim of Republican opposition, Democratic indifference, and now the foolishness of the country’s richest and most prominent gay civil rights organization. Abandoning common sense, the Human Rights Campaign announced in early August that it will no longer support federal legal protection for millions of gay workers unless the tiny number of transgendered workers get that protection, too. The decision is a slap in the face to gay Americans, who generously fund HRC, and who will now have to wait even longer for federal employment discrimination protection.”