Ever since John Kerry mentioned Vice President Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter, Mary Cheney, during the heavily watched third presidential debate on October 13, Republicans have been going ballistic about the supposed invasion of privacy. But a look at the record shows that Mary Cheney's name and sexual identity have, over the years, been frequently invoked within the Republican Party itself by individuals with a wide range of agendas.

Mary Cheney has provided Republicans like her father an opportunity to express a grudging tolerance of gays and to woo moderate voters, as Dick Cheney did when he spoke of his daughter in August, saying, “Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it's an issue our family is very familiar with,” and, when asked his stance on gay marriage, “People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.” But at the same time, Mary Cheney has been a focal point for anti-gay sentiment within the Republican Party and a frequent subject of intraparty criticism that the vice president and his wife have done little or nothing to publicly rebut.

Little over a month before Kerry said, “I think 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,” Illinois GOP Senate candidate Alan Keyes condemned homosexuality as “selfish hedonism” in a satellite-radio interview during the Republican national convention. Asked if Mary Cheney was also “a selfish hedonist,” Keyes replied, “Of course she is.”

Dick and Lynne Cheney, who have roundly criticized Kerry's pro-gay remarks, said nothing in the face of Keyes' highly derogatory comments. This should come as no surprise: There is a long history of suspicion in moral conservative circles that the vice president has not been adequately supportive of their agenda because of his gay daughter. And that has led the vice president and his family to be exceptionally tolerant of those who talk about his daughter's sexuality -- as long as they are anti-gay.

To the conservative moralists, Mary Cheney has been a kind of Trojan-horse conduit for the “homosexual agenda,” importing a foreign philosophy straight into the heart of Republicanism. According to this line of thinking, she has corrupted her father, who has failed to advocate for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage as vigorously as the president; her mother, who went so far as to once praise Elton John; and even Cheney aide Mary Matalin, who was involved with the Republican Unity Coalition, a gay-straight alliance looking to moderate the party's stance toward gays.

The Culture and Family Institute (CFI), an affiliate of the conservative group Concerned Women for America, was at the forefront of promoting this line of thinking after the last presidential election. In April 2002, CFI issued a press release condemning the vice president's daughter: “Mary Cheney Joins Homosexual Activist Group: Organization Wants to Make Homosexuality ‘Non-Issue' in the GOP.”

“This ‘unity' coalition will not unify the Republican Party but tear it apart,” then-CFI senior policy analyst Peter LaBarbera said in a statement. “It trivializes people's deeply held religious convictions by seeking to make homosexuality a ‘non-issue' in the GOP. And it insults advocates of healthy morality by comparing opposition to homosexuality -- the clear teaching of Christianity and other major religions -- to racism. Catering to a Republican brand of homosexual activism will hurt support for the GOP among the party's core base of religious -- and moral-minded voters.”

In 2001, CFI had expressed concerns about what it dubbed “the Cheney factor,” recapitulating the story of election 2000 as one in which religious conservatives were repelled by Cheney-instigated wavering on the question of gay rights on account of his “errant” daughter, as the conservative Reverend Jerry Falwell dubbed Mary Cheney in 2000.

“As the campaign proceeded, pro-family opponents of organized homosexuality grew increasingly apprehensive at Vice President Cheney's sympathy for the ‘gay' activist cause,” wrote three commentators at the CFI in 2001. “Homosexual activists used the Mary Cheney connection to lobby Republicans to abandon their opposition to their agenda. Second Lady Lynne Cheney -- after initially reacting angrily to a question posed by ABC newswoman Cokie Roberts about her daughter's sexuality -- has begun to use rhetoric favored by homosexual activists.”

That angry maternal response -- just like the one we are seeing today -- is the kind of thing moral conservatives want to see from parents of gays. “My daughter has never declared such a thing,” Lynne Cheney acidly told Roberts in 2000 of her gay daughter's sexual orientation, even though Mary Cheney had by that time been employed by the Coors Brewing Company in Colorado as a liaison to gay and lesbian groups, and newspapers were reporting that she'd been living as an out lesbian since college.

The role of angry, defensive parent affirms for Christian conservatives their perspective on homosexuality -- that it is, in the words of Keyes, “a sin,” and something to be kept hidden, like alcoholism or a history of shoplifting. “If my own daughter were a homosexual or lesbian, I would love my daughter, but I would tell her she was in sin,” Keyes said in September. That his own 19-year-old daughter, Maya Keyes, also appears to be gay, according to reports in the New York Daily News and elsewhere, only made this comment more poignant.

"There's a double standard," David Smith of the Human Rights Campaign told Salon in 2000. “Lynne Cheney has no problem talking about her daughter who's married and has children, and that's not private, but Mary's relationship is."

The same double standard has applied during campaign 2004. Liz Cheney and her photogenic young daughters were prominent presences at the Republican convention in New York, but Mary Cheney, who is active in the campaign as chief of operations for the vice president, stayed silent and, for the most part, offstage.

And when Keyes labeled Mary Cheney a “selfish hedonist,” the Cheneys didn't react with protective familial outrage but with a mix of silence and political calculation.

"I guess I'm surprised, frankly, that you would even repeat the quote, and I'm not going to dignify it with a comment," Liz Cheney told CNN's Bill Hemmer when queried about it. Her parents, meanwhile, said nothing condemnatory. Interviewed along with her straight daughter, Lynne Cheney told Hemmer evenhandedly “There are things that we all differ about … . But we sure, here in New York and Madison Square Garden, are perfectly united behind the idea that our president for the next four years should be George [W.] Bush and the vice president, of course, Dick Cheney.”

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, could only manage a tepid reply of "inappropriate" in response to Keyes' remark. Bush strategist Matthew Dowd, in contrast, condemned Kerry's debate remarks as “outrageous.”

Keyes' condemnation of the vice president's daughter has since gone on to be praised on fringe conservative Web sites read by the kind of far-right voter the Bush campaign is reaching out to. “Keyes' sex education lesson to a confused homosexual ought to be required reading in every sex education class in the country,” writes Mary Mostert at AmericanDaily.com. “It might begin scaling back the flood of misery, disease and early death that await those who chose to get involved in homosexual and lesbian life styles.”

While the Cheneys have refrained from speaking ill of their gay daughter, they seem to have a suspiciously high level of tolerance for Republicans who insult and disparage her. Perhaps it's because they know that in the closing weeks of an election year, being presented to the public, as per Kerry, as a model example of a family that loves and accepts a gay child -- and, even worse, believes in the “born gay” hypothesis Kerry laid out -- can only stir up old suspicions among Christian conservative voters about where the Cheney's true loyalties lie. The fear is that coming out as pro-gay -- or even just being known to have a gay child, which hard-right activists often see as an embarrassing symptom of familial failure -- will turn off exactly the kind of religious-right voters whose turnout Karl Rove has spent the last four years cultivating.

Conservative activist and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer said as much in The New York Times on October 15, calling Kerry's comments “part of a strategy to suppress traditional-values voters, to knock 1 [percent] or 2 percent off in some rural areas by causing people to turn on the president." The Wall Street Journal 's editorial board concurred, postulating that Kerry brought up Mary Cheney's sexual identity for purposes of "depressing voter turnout, specifically among Christian and other cultural conservatives."

And so the Cheneys and the Bush-Cheney campaign reacted like frightened junior-high students who have just been called “gay.” Bush-Cheney campaign communications director Nicolle Devenish condemned Kerry's comments as a “crass, below-the-belt political strategy.” Dick Cheney reiterated the campaign's months-old charge that Kerry is "a man who will say and do anything in order to get elected," using Kerry's comments about Mary Cheney daughter as new evidence and taking up the angry-parent role his wife adopted in 2000. “I am not speaking just as a father here, though I am a pretty angry father, but as a citizen,” he said. Lynne Cheney took the same tack in a postdebate rally in Pennsylvania, “speaking as a mom and a pretty indignant mom” and condemning Kerry's comments as “a cheap and tawdry political trick."

Kerry issued a statement saying that he'd been "trying to say something positive about the way strong families deal with this issue." Perhaps. I suspect that he also wanted to remind debate watchers that there's no difference between his stance on gay marriage and the Cheneys', and awkwardly reached for the familial comparison when a different question about gay people was asked.

Nonetheless, the Cheneys' tough talk about Kerry and silence on Keyes suggests that, when it comes to the subject of their gay daughter, they're nowhere near as strong a family as Kerry is making them out to be.

Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.