Cheney on gay marriage: 'People free'

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Cheney on gay marriage: 'People free'

by Mark Silva

There's the national security side to Dick Cheney, noted hawk, and then there's the personal side, family man.

The former vice president, whose daughter Mary is gay, said today that people "ought to be free'' to enter into the union of their choice. He does not, however, support a federal law on marriage, but believes the question is best left to the states.

At the National Press Club today, where Cheney discussed the threat of terrorism after 9/11 and defended the Bush administration's interrogations and prosecution of the war against Iraq, the vice president also was asked about gay marriage, at a time when growing numbers of states, though still few, are legalizing same-sex marriages.

""I think that freedom means freedom for everyone," Cheney replied. "As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay, and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family.

"I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish -- any kind of arrangement they wish,'' Cheney said. "The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support. I do believe that, historically, the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue, and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis...

"But I don't have any problem with that,'' he said of the same-sex marriages that most of the states in New England, Iowa and the District of Columbia have authorized. "People ought to get a shot at that."

Although Mary Cheney, one of the former vice president's two daughters, who helped her father campaign for reelection, has been open about her life, her parents have been more protective of it.

During the 2004 campaign, in debate, the candidates for president were asked if they believe homosexuality is a choice. Then-President George W. Bush did not mention Mary Cheney, but Democratic rival John Kerry did.

The senator from Massachusetts, which since has legalized gay marriage, said: "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."

Bush, during his second term, continued to speak of marriage as "a union between a man and a woman,'' but failed to gain any support for a federal marriage amendment.

But Cheney's wife Lynne made it clear in a post-debate rebuke before a crowd near Pittsburgh what she thought of Kerry's debate tactic. "The only thing I can conclude is he is not a good man. I'm speaking as a mom," she said. "What a cheap and tawdry political trick."

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