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Yes, It’s a Cheney
—
Or Something
 If Rip Van Winkle were to awaken today, one would
hardly know where to start. Explaining rap music and “ultimate
fighting” would be the easy part.
This
week’s big
news  in
the Republican Party is that Mary
Cheney, usually described as “Vice President Dick Cheney’s
openly lesbian daughter,” is going to have a baby. Maybe we should
think of it as “ultimate motherhood.” Just when we were getting
used to surrogate motherhood. What will next week bring?
Everyone’s trying to be terribly open-minded about it, of
course, because this is, after all, the twenty-first century and nobody wants
to sound like some old twentieth-century fuddy-duddy. I think it was Charles
Peguy who observed, before World War I, that we will never know how many
acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of being insufficiently
“progressive.” So here goes.
I’m such
an old coot that I can still remember when unmarried women were sometimes
embarrassed when they found out they were pregnant. Yes, it could happen
in the best families, but, well, it really wasn’t supposed to. When it
did, it was an accident. You didn’t expect to find out about it if it
should happen to the daughter of the vice president of the United States.
Think Alben Barkley. Heck, think Dan Quayle, or even Al Gore.
That was then,
this is now. It wasn’t an accident. Mary Cheney and her, er, spouse
have chosen to have a child. Like, on purpose. It’s a deeply personal
decision, between a woman, her partner, and her turkey baster. You got a
problem with that?
Actually, I do.
Now I hate to sound like one of those stuffy old Druids of eld, and I’ll
be the first to agree that a “normal” person is probably
someone you just don’t know very well yet, but I still think we are all
better off when we make a reasonable effort to be, or at least appear, more
or less normal.
And darn it,
lesbians having babies just isn’t normal!!!
![[Breaker quote for
Yes, It's a Cheney -- or Something: Who's your daddy?]](2006breakers/061211.gif) One proof of this is
that even Democrats can’t help snickering about it. A liberal columnist
in the Washington Post, the ever-progressive Ruth Marcus,
wrote of it under the inspired headline “It’s a Cheney!”
She let on that it’s funny only because it shows up the reactionary
vice president and the rest of his “family values” party.
Yeah, sure.
That does make it funnier, but it would be funny anyway, because weird
things are funny. Let’s not try to pin this on the Republicans. Gay
marriage wasn’t their idea.
Before we
discuss what to name the baby, or whether Mary Cheney should exercise her
constitutional right to have it snuffed right up to the moment of birth,
let’s talk about the forgotten man in all this: the father, or as he
would now be called, the “biological” father.
What kind of
man supplies his own seed to help create a child who will never know him as
its father, and who is bound to be tormented by wondering about what other
children can take for granted? How will that child feel upon learning, or
figuring out, the bizarre origins of his or her existence? Does one send a
turkey baster a card on Father’s Day?
This is not like
begetting a child in a moment of passion and putting it up for adoption later
in the hope it will have the normal family life you couldn’t provide.
It’s the opposite: cold-bloodedly begetting a child, most unnaturally, in
the full knowledge that its family life will be abnormal. If it manages to be
happy anyway, that will be no fault of the biological father’s.
We’ve all known some deadbeat dads who have failed their children
through simple lack of character, but this guy, whoever he may be, takes the
cake.
Most men
— let’s call them normal men — couldn’t bear the
knowledge that they had a son or daughter somewhere out there who was
always secretly asking itself not just who the actual “biological”
father was, but what sort of emotional freak he was. Who wouldn’t
rather be an orphan than a child thus abandoned, as it were, by nature itself?
Well, it’s
a Cheney, I guess.
Joseph Sobran
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