''Well, I think freedom means freedom for everyone. And as many of you know, my daughter is gay, and its something that we've lived with for a long time in our family. I think that people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union that they wish, any kind of arrangement that they wish. The question of whether or not their ought to be a federal statute that governs this, I don't support. I do believe that historically, the way that marriage has been regulated is at the state level -- it's a state issue. And that's the way it ought to be handled today. That is on a state-by-state basis. Different states will make different decisions but I don't have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that. And they do at present.''
Former Vice President Dick Cheney at the National Press Club in Washington, DC responding to the question: "Given recent developments in Iowa and elsewhere, is some form of legalized gay marriage inevitable in the United States?'' Note how Cheney's beliefs about the history of marriage recognition completely skips over the fact that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act continues to ban the legal recognition of gay and lesbian "freedoms" at the federal level, nor does he seem to recall Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court made the decision that effectively declared unconstitutional laws at the state level which banned mixed-race marriages. Cheney's wife, Lynne, uttered a similarly weak reply about "freedom" when asked about marriage rights applying to her lesbian daughter, Mary, last September. (C-Span via YouTube)
