This diary is a comment on and divergence from Booman’s story on conservative reaction to the announcement that VP Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter is pregnant. Booman concludes that the private lives of the Cheneys are their business and that we on the left should stay out of it. Commenters agreed and disagreed. I happen to agree, but there is a larger issue here. The issue is not family privacy, Gay rights, or the necessity of two parent families. The issue is the double standard, one for PLUs and another for everyone else.
PLU is a convient shorthand for “People Like Us.” PLUs are good people by definition. The Bush Family is the model of the PLU world view. If you are born a PLU, you don’t commit crimes, you make mistakes. You are helped out, not prosecuted. If you are born a Bush, you can avoid all wars, Viet Nam, as well as the War on Drugs. The law doesn’t apply to you. If you are born a Cheney, you and your lesbian partner can have a child and not have to worry that you might lose your job if anyone discovers your little secret. Bush PLU’s are anti-abortion, until one of their little darlings gets inconveniently knocked up and then a quick, quiet trip to a discreet, private clinic and all is fine.
If Bush had been born poor, not a PLU, he would have been in Viet Nam and walking through the jungle, dodging Viet Cong bullets, not playing junior jet pilot, when he felt like showing up. If Mary Cheney wasn’t a Cheney, she would risk the power of the state being used against her partner to deprive her of parental rights.
A while ago, we had a debate on the pages about what a progressive stands for. Several creeds and litmus tests were proposed. Here’s mine.
A Progressive wants everyone in this country to be treated decently, fairly, and with the same respect and opportunity as everyone else. We want our laws and our institutions to be aligned with our rhetoric. When we say, “All people are created equal,” we mean all people. When we say, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” we mean that everyone’s life is equally precious, everyone’s liberty is equally valued, and everyone’s pursuit of happiness has equal value. Progressive is to Privilege, as Liberal is to Conservative. A Progressive wants our country, our democracy, to continue to improve, to progress. We are liberal with freedom, liberal with opportunity. A conservative wants to retain privilege in the small group of families that make up Bush’s PLUs, to conserve power and privilege.
Yesterday, I talked with the mother of one of my students. The family lives a terrible project in Detroit. Two parents, four jobs, three kids, no way out. She is expecting another child in April. Will Mary Cheney’s daughter be sitting next to her in my inner city school classroom? Will she be diving under her bed when bullets come through the bedroom wall? Will her parents be so exhausted from working two lousy, dead end jobs, that they have little time or energy to read to her? Will she come to know the police as a barrier between her and her community and the “good” people in “good” communities?
Good job, Baby Cheney, you figured out the Bush system while still in the womb. This is a great country, if you choose your parents wisely. The privilege system is what Bush conservatives are conserving, and that system of privilege is what progressives should be tearing down.
Update [2006-12-7 17:7:17 by Teach313]: Minor editorial corrections made by author.