But he is also clearly saying that his personal opinion is that he has no problem with SSM. You may argue with the process he favors, but the statement is pretty clear that if Wyoming (or whatever state he calls home these days), for example, wanted to enact SSM he would be in favor of it.
What? Cheney pretty plainly said he is in favour of recognising a gay couple’s right to marry. He didn’t say “in some states” or qualify the statement at all; he said he thinks everyone should be free to join in whatever union they want. That is clearly not the case in most states right now. Ergo, he is not happy with things as they are.
I can’t even see why this is a debate. It’s utterly perplexing. I think Cheney is one of the most loathsome individuals to have held high office in my lifetime, but there’s simply no interpretation of his words that would indicate he’s happy with the status quo with respect to gay rights. He’s happy with the status quo with respect to states making their own marriage laws, clearly, but as you yourself admit, states are perfectly able to legislate in favour of SSM. It should be utterly, utterly obvious that this is what he wants them to do.
This isn’t even a misreading of his words; it’s outright denial.
I mean, look at this in juxtaposition:
What you said is utterly contradictory to what Cheney said, and yet you claim they’re the same. It’s bizarre.
Hush, you. Dick Cheney is evil incarnate and can do nothing but evil. Thus it logically and inevitably follows that, because gay marriage is a good thing, that he must oppose it at every level. So stop trying to twist his words with a plain, untwisted read of them - you’ll cause ripples in our worldwiew!
Would you be so kind as to quote Mr. Cheney’s actual statement from which you have extracted this particularly odd interpretation?
It’s sort of funny how people who have an axe to grind are never willing to believe that someone legitimately supports states rights.
I believe in states rights, I think gay marriage, abortion, drugs, prostitution, speed limits and gambling should all be decided at the state level.
I think we should allow gay marriage, keep abortion legal even though it’s generally a morally abhorrent practice, legalize many drugs that are illegal, legalize prostitution and regulate it, have 85mph speed limits on all interstates, and legalize gambling everywhere.
In each of those cases how does supporting states rights change the legitimacy of my views?
He strikes me as one of those paradoxical almost libertarian conservatives. Not a big social conservative, but very fiscally conservative, big on privatization but staunchly supports the military. I know it’s hard to think of Dick Cheney as being in any way libertarian, but in the non-coastal western states that sort of thinking is quite common. Take the state out of most everything except for a big military.
I’m not saying it’s inherently wrong to believe in states’ rights as a general principle. But there are some things we’ve decided should apply to the whole country. One of them is civil rights.
So I refer you again to my hypothetical scenario. Mississippi, if left to decide the issue on its own in the 60’s, could very well have decided to continue legal segregation against blacks.
I think we could agree that that would have been… um… a BAD thing.
I am proposing that Cheney’s stance of apparently supporting SSM in principle, but leaving it up to the states would be “bad thing” too.
Putting it briefly: It’s a civil rights issue. It shouldn’t be left up to the states.
Missed the edit window…
On second review of your post, mswas, maybe I’m not clear on what you’re getting at. You said you want us to legalize a number of things, but you want the states to do it?
OK. But what if they don’t, and it’s a civil rights issue? Hence, my Mississippi example. I’m not sure how this addresses the legitimacy of one’s views on states’ rights, except to say that there should probably be some exceptions.
Please clarify if I’m still not interpreting you correctly.
Oh, are they letting him out in the day time now? Huh.
As much as I loathe Cheney and think him the anti-Christ, I think he’s in the right here. (As much as I think it SHOULD be decided at the federal level). I do give him props in this area – he didn’t disown Mary, or deny that she was gay, or try to hide her.
Which wouldn’t have been such a stretch -Alan Keyes’s daughter, Maya is also a lesbian. Keyes kicked her out when the public found out she was gay.
You’re right as far as I can tell. Bush put the friendly face on things for religious voters, but I don’t remember Cheney ever going for that stuff.
Cheney certainly never said this in public before, but he’d made clear earlier that he did not support an anti-same sex marriage amendment. It’s the only public difference of opinion I remember between him and Bush during their administration. So he did clearly lean this way.
I see your point.
That Mr. Cheney would like more, or all, states to legalize SSM is nice. However, it doesn’t represent a change from the current legal position of SSM - legal only on a state-by-state basis, with no guarantee of recognition between states. Without a repeal of DOMA and federal-level recognition of SSM, even if all 50 states legalized SSM tomorrow, there’s no reason to assume that every state would, or even could, honor same-sex marriages performed in every other state.
Not at all. As I and other posters have pointed out, this “leave it to the states” idea is exactly what we have right now.
To recap, here’s what Cheney said:
He explicitly does not support federal-level protection for the right of same-sex couples to marry.
I believe that the statements, “I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish” and, “The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don’t support” are inherently contradictory. If people should be free to enter into a same-sex union in (for instance) Maine, they should be free to enter into a same-sex union in (for instance) Oregon. Human beings in Oregon are not fundamentally different than human beings in Maine, nor are the laws/culture/folkways/mores of Oregon dramatically different from those of Maine. There’s no rational argument for leaving same-sex couples at the mercy of whichever state they happen to be in at the moment, when opposite-sex couples can rest easy in the assumption that their union will be recognized wherever they are.
Thank you. I finally understand how consistent the man is.
I agree that recognition on a Federal level is ultimately desirable, but this is just absurd.
How so? He says he thinks everyone should be able to do something, but isn’t interested in protecting their right to do it.
And regarding the OP - no, I don’t think he’ll tip the SSM scale. Thinking of people I know (personally or online), they’ve come to a conclusion based on personal experience, religious belief, ethics, etc. Dick Cheney’s opinion doesn’t figure heavily in their decision-making process.
That’s not what he’s saying at all. He thinks those rights should be protected, but at the state level, not at the federal level. There’s absolutely nothing contradictory about that, it’s simply a different idea about the best way to achieve the same goal.
This is a lot funnier if you change the punctuation:
Does anyone seriously believe the best way to achieve this goal is to have all 50 states vote on it independently? Wouldn’t it be accomplished faster and more completely at the federal level?
Meanwhile, opposite-sex marriages would continue to have many more federal-level protections and protections that same-sex marriages won’t have (warning: PDF), because this approach doesn’t require the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages at all. Thus, these are not simply two ways of achieving the same goal.