not in the closet, locked in the attic

With their gay daughter being mentioned in both the Edwards-Cheney debate and in tonight's final installment of the presidential face-off, the response of the Cheneys has been telling. Both times, both Dick and Lynne responded to non-critical, polite, and supportive references to their daughter with an air of "how dare you mention her" that makes it appear they deal with her absolutely acceptable personal sexual preference as though it were a handicap or a deformity, as though in simpler times she would have been imprisoned in the home as an article of shame and personal humiliation or perhaps maintained in a discreet private sanitarium somewhere out of town. How very sad.