Former Vice President Dick Cheney dies
Dick Cheney, George Bush’s former vice president, was one of the most powerful and controversial figures in American history.
WASHINGTON – It was the first time Dick Cheney publicly broke with George W. Bush over the issue of same-sex marriage. But it won’t be the last.
Bush, the 2000 Republican presidential candidate, held the traditional view that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Vice presidential candidate Cheney surprised many Americans when she said at a vice presidential debate in Kentucky just a month before the election that she believed people should be able to form any kind of relationship they wanted.
“Freedom means freedom for everyone,” he said, adding that it is no one’s job to regulate individual behavior in that regard.
Four years later, during another campaign, Cheney distanced herself from Bush again over same-sex marriage. Speaking at a town hall rally in Iowa, Cheney, referring to his daughter Mary, who is a lesbian, said same-sex marriage was “an issue that our family knows very well” and that a proposed amendment to the federal constitution that President Bush supported that defines marriage as between a man and a woman is unnecessary.
But despite his early support for same-sex couples, Cheney, who died on November 3, left behind a mixed legacy on LGBTQ+ issues.
Although he opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment, he never publicly campaigned against it. And not only did Bush and Cheney stay in the race in 2004 despite their differences, but their political campaign turned same-sex marriage into a wedge issue in order to drive conservative voters to the polls and help them win a second term.
“He could have stood or stood, but he chose to continue with the ticket,” said Brian Bond, CEO of PFLAG, a national nonprofit that supports LGBTQ+ people and their families. “I’m sure he loved his daughter, but he was a man of power and privilege. And in that moment, he was going to tear the baby apart. And I don’t know if that necessarily helped anyone.”
Stephen Hurwitz, a gay man who has known Mr. Cheney for 50 years, said Mr. Cheney deeply believed that Republicans should win the election and perhaps feared that “getting too strong on the[marriage]issue would affect Mr. Bush’s chances.”
“I don’t think he wanted that kind of responsibility because he was a true conservative believer,” Hurwitz said.
Hurwitz worked as a consultant for Cheney several years before she became secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush in 1989. Hurwitz assumed a similar role under Donald Rumsfeld, who served as secretary of defense for six years under George W. Bush and Cheney.
Hurwitz said neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld, nor anyone else in the administration, gave him any special treatment because of his sexual orientation. “At that point, I was pretty well known for coming out as gay,” he said. But “it didn’t matter.”
“I don’t want you to quit.”
Being gay became an issue for Pete Williams, who served as the Pentagon’s chief press secretary when Cheney was secretary of defense.
Pentagon policy at the time prohibited gay men and women from serving in the military, and many gay service members were investigated and subsequently expelled from the military because of their sexual orientation.
Williams’ direction was little known until it was revealed in a 1991 article in the LGBTQ+ magazine The Advocate. This article seeks to draw attention to the inequity of discriminatory policies that target military personnel but do not equally apply to civilian civilians in positions of power.
Mr. Williams, like Mr. Cheney, was originally from Wyoming. He worked for Cheney when she was in Congress and then followed him to the Pentagon. He never discussed his sexual orientation with Cheney. But when the Advocate story was about to appear, he went to Cheney’s office and warned him.
“I said, ‘I’m here to resign. I definitely don’t want this to be a problem for you or the administration,'” Williams recalled in an interview with USA TODAY.
Cheney refused to accept his resignation. “He said, ‘No, I never want you to quit,’ and in no uncertain terms, ‘Go back to the office and do your job,'” Williams said.
The telephone on Williams’ desk had a button that, when pressed, called Cheney’s office directly. For days after our conversation about an upcoming magazine article, “I was sitting at my desk and every once in a while, the ‘SECDEF’ button would light up,” Williams said. “I picked up the phone and he said, ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’ He was a big supporter of me and I was grateful for that.”
Hurwitz said Cheney spoke with Williams and asked him to persuade him not to resign. “Dick has said he wants the president to stay in office,” Hurwitz said. “And the president basically said there’s no problem.”
Williams remained in that position until the end of President George H.W. Bush’s term in 1993, when he became NBC News’ justice correspondent.
On marriage equality, gay rights activists praise Cheney for standing up for same-sex unions at a time when federal law defined marriage as the legal union of a man and a woman. Cheney’s view was that the regulation of marriage should be left to the states, not the federal government. But he also noted that Bush is the president, not him, and that Bush supports a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
During the 2004 presidential campaign, the Log Cabin Republican Party, a group of LGBTQ+ Republicans and their allies, used Cheney’s remarks in a 30-second television ad to campaign against the federal marriage amendment. The ad showed footage of Cheney saying during the 2000 vice presidential debate that states could reach different conclusions on same-sex marriage and that there should not necessarily be a federal policy on the issue.
Then the words “I agree” appeared on the screen.
Cheney’s daughter Mary married her partner Heather Poe in 2012, and the couple have two children.
Was it a courageous decision or a missed opportunity?
But Ruth Remy of Family Equality, a nonprofit organization that works with LGBTQ+ families, said Cheney’s comments that same-sex marriage should be a decision left to individual states have in some ways made it harder to get same-sex marriage recognized by the federal government.
“I truly believe he loved his daughter and cared for his grandchildren,” said Remy, the group’s vice president for public policy. “But I think because of Cheney’s position, Republicans can now say, I know and love gay people, but I’m still a conservative and these things should be left to the states.”
Mr. Cheney’s belief that the federal marriage amendment was not needed was “probably taken by some, perhaps many, as brave, but I think he was actually out of sync with the administration because just because it’s not necessary doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done,” Remy said.
Same-sex marriage was not legal in all 50 states until 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling that found marriage a fundamental right and that state marriage bans were unconstitutional. Ten years after that decision, the high court on November 10 rejected the appeal of Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county official who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because of their religious beliefs, refusing to rehear the case.
Remy said Cheney had opportunities to influence the debate over federal marriage support in 2000 and 2004, but missed the moment.
“What his heart wanted from him and what politics wanted from him were very different,” she says. “And I think he’s going to be judged more by what he did politically than what his heart wanted.”
Michael Collins writes about the intersection of politics and culture. He is a veteran reporter who has covered the White House and Congress. Follow him on X: @mcollinsNEWS
