Turn For Mary Cheney To Speak | Women Lifestyle, Fashion, Health, Beauty and Personality

Turn For Mary Cheney To Speak
Category : Women Business, Women Personality

A Daughters Chronicle of Political Life Mary Cheney, lesbian daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, says she’s received nothing but support for her new book, “Now It’s My Turn: A Daughter’s Chronicle of Political Life.” The book hits bookstores Tuesday. Mary Cheney writes about the 2004 presidential campaign, her life as a lesbian in a Republican world, how she came out to her family, and what she thinks of George W. Bush.

Cheney, spoke to “Primetime” last week about standing by her father and a Republican Party that openly opposes gay marriage and is proposing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. After Thursday’s “Primetime,” viewers wrote in with their own questions, and Cheney answered some on “Good Morning America” today.

Wondering what’s she wrote on her book? She writes about the day she told her parents she was gay: She had just broken up with her first girlfriend and wrecked the family car. Her parents, Cheney says, were supportive, unlike the parents of other gay people she knows whose families abandoned them.
Mary Cheney spoke openly about her loving relationship with her longtime partner, Heather Poe, and how her conservative parents have always fully supported her since she first informed them at age 16 that she was a lesbian. Her father, she recounts, reacted with typical directness. “You’re my daughter and I love you and I just want you to be happy,” he said, to her great relief. But things haven’t always gone so smoothly in her political life.

That would be in that “10 percent of the book,” as Cheney’s own description, where she writes about coming out to her parents, how she felt about John Kerry and John Edwards bringing up her sexuality in campaign debates, and where she stands on the Federal Marriage Amendment Act, which would ban legal unions between same-sex partners. She opposes it and describes her own relationship as a marriage.
And that has earned early public focus, from Vanity Fair to People to Sawyer, which is why she’s moving through the hallways of the “GMA” studio on this particular morning, dressed in a tasteful gray suit with a splash of color — turquoise — added by the shirt underneath. She is the essence of understatement. Hasn’t she always been?

In her book, Cheney blasts the “lowlifes, pitiful lowlifes” who have tried to use her sexual orientation to advance their political causes. She has especially harsh words for the Democrat’s 2004 vice presidential nominee, John Edwards, who mentioned her during the 2004 vice presidential debate.
“What gave him the right to use my sexual orientation to try to score political points?” she writes. People on the far right have paraded around with signs calling me the Bride of Satan, and people on the far left have denounced me on the internet as a Nazi sellout,” she writes.
“In general, I try to ignore most of the insults hurled from the political fringes, although I do sometimes find humor in the more outrageous comments.”

Meanwhile Elizabeth Birch, former executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, has an editorial in Sunday’s Washington Post about Mary Cheney’s new book. Birch writes about her past disagreements with Mary Cheney’s silence on GLBT issues, as well as the fact Mary worked for the Bush/Cheney campaign. But Birch says the past isn’t as important as the future and she looks forward to the “Cheney family embracing this teachable moment, not just on the book tour but in election halls, state legislatures and Congress.”

In 2Â½ years, Dick Cheney’s term as vice president will be over, and Mary Cheney will enter a new phase of her life. While she does not like to speculate what she will be doing at that time, she believes the issue of gay rights will be moving faster than many people think.
“Today, same-sex couples can get married in Massachusetts and Canada and Great Britain,” Mary Cheney said. “Can anyone honestly say 10 years ago they thought we’d be having this debate today?”