Ruben Navarrette Jr. / Syndicated columnist
Homosexual lobby shouldn't let Kerry get away with this

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DALLAS — With friends like these, who needs Republicans?

That's the lesson for gay and lesbian liberals now that John Kerry and his Democratic defenders have shown they'll say anything to win a close election, even if it means losing the moral high ground.

During the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, a Republican senator from Oklahoma declared that he was outraged that people were outraged.

Well, it's been a week since Kerry reprehensibly made a debate prop out of Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, and I'm shocked that more Democrats — and more of the liberal media — aren't shocked.

You know what happened. In response to a question in the final debate about whether he thought homosexuality was a choice, Kerry helped himself to the example of Mary Cheney. He 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."

I doubt that it was some elaborate plan to try to weaken the support that Republicans get from religious conservatives, as some pundits have suggested. Nor do I think the senator was making some grand political point.

I think Kerry was just being a jerk and trying to tweak the other side. Years ago, to cut someone down to size, the zinger was: "Your mother wears combat boots." Today, it is: "You have a gay daughter." Or, in this case, your running mate has a gay daughter.

John Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, stuck the knife in deeper when she said during a radio interview that the fact Lynne Cheney reacted angrily to Kerry's comment "indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences."

As someone who has gay family members, I can't stomach what the Kerry-Edwards campaign did to this young woman and her family.

I had hoped that Democratic-leaning gay advocacy groups would say as much. Instead, they're defending Kerry and attacking his critics. They claim that anyone who raises a fuss over Kerry's comments must think that homosexuality should be hidden. But they're also saying that it was Dick Cheney who — in what they would have to admit was a poor job of hiding — first brought up the fact that his daughter is gay.

Look, folks, just because your candidate stakes out both sides of an issue doesn't mean you have to.

And what does this say about Kerry? After all the attempts to market the senator as a tough guy who went to Vietnam and rides motorcycles, this is how he demonstrates his strength: manhandling the daughter of one of his opponents. From alpha male to insensitive brute.

Kerry now insists that he meant the remark "constructively." If so, I'd hate to be around when he is trying to be destructive.

The only good news is that the comment seems to have backfired. According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, nearly two in three likely voters — 64 percent — called it "inappropriate."

I hope that includes the well-meaning but terribly condescending gay reader in San Francisco who recently criticized me for not being a vocal enough champion of gay marriage.

The reader dubbed me a Hispanic Republican (he's half right) and dared me to come out as a "proud bigot" like President Bush, who has voiced support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Sorry, I can't go there. What the president proposes is a boneheaded and deeply offensive idea that would write discrimination into the Constitution. It is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Now, in light of Kerry's remarks about Mary Cheney, the Bush critics have to put up or shut up. Is this what passes for compassion and empathy in the Kerry-Edwards campaign? Is this the extent of what Democrats have to offer those who believe that gays and lesbians should have the same dignity as everyone else?

If the homosexual lobby lets Kerry get away with this, then it'll have about as much credibility as the feminist supporters of Bill Clinton who held theirtongues during the Monica Lewinsky scandal or black activists when they let Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd get away with using the N-word, or Latino activists who remained in silencio when Teresa Heinz Kerry went around identifying herself as an immigrant.

Gays and lesbians have a choice. They can demand a public apology from Kerry. Or admit that, when it comes to political correctness, there's one set of rules for Democrats and one set for everyone else.

Ruben Navarrette's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is rnavarrette@dallasnews.com