WASHINGTON – It was the first time Dick Cheney broke publicly with George W. Bush over the issue of same-sex marriage. But it wouldn’t be the last.
Bush, the Republican nominee for president in 2000, held the traditional view that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Cheney, his running mate, stunned many Americans when he announced during a vice-presidential debate in Kentucky just a month before the election that he believed people should be able to enter into any kind of relationship they wanted.
“Freedom means freedom for everybody,” he said, adding that regulating personal behavior in that regard was no one’s business.
Four years later, Cheney would again distance himself from Bush over gay marriage in the middle of another election campaign. Referencing his daughter, Mary, who is a lesbian, Cheney said during a town hall meeting in Iowa that gay marriage is “an issue our family is very familiar with” and that a federal constitutional amendment that Bush supported to define marriage as between a man and a woman was unnecessary.
Yet despite his early support of same-sex couples, Cheney, who died on Nov. 3, leaves behind a complicated legacy on LGBTQ+ issues.
Though he opposed a federal marriage amendment, he never lobbied publicly against it. And not only did he remain on the ticket in 2004 despite their differences, but Bush and Cheney’s political campaign turned gay marriage into a wedge issue to drive conservative voters to the polls and help them win a second term.
“He could have either stood up or stood down, and he chose to stay on the ticket,” said Brian Bond, chief executive officer of PFLAG, a national nonprofit dedicated to LGBTQ+ people and their families. “I absolutely believe he loved his daughter. But he was a person of power and privilege. And at that moment, he was trying to split the baby. And I’m not sure that necessarily helped anyone.”
Stephen Herbits, a gay man who knew Cheney for five decades, said Cheney believed deeply that Republicans should win the election and probably feared that “if he became too strong on the (marriage) issue, it would have affected Bush’s chances.”
“I don’t think he wanted that responsibility,” Herbits said, “because he was a true conservative believer.”
Herbits worked as a consultant to Cheney years earlier during Cheney’s transition to becoming Defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush in 1989. Herbits took on similar duties under Donald Rumsfeld, who served as Defense secretary for six years under George W. Bush and Cheney.
Herbits said neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld – nor anyone else in the administration, for that matter – treated him any differently because of his sexual orientation. “I was fairly well known as an out gay person at that point,” he said. But, “it wasn’t an issue.”
Being gay did turn into an issue for Pete Williams, who served as the Pentagon’s chief spokesman when Cheney was Defense secretary.
Pentagon policy at the time barred gay men and women from serving in the military, and many gay service members were subject to investigations and then driven from the military because of their sexual orientation.
Williams, whose orientation wasn’t widely known, was outed in an article published in 1991 by The Advocate, an LGBTQ+ magazine. The article sought to call attention to the unfairness of a discriminatory policy that targeted service members but was not equally applied to civilian employees in positions of power.
Williams, like Cheney, was from Wyoming. He had worked for Cheney when he was in Congress and then followed him to the Pentagon. He’d never had a conversation with Cheney about his sexual orientation. But when The Advocate article was about to land, he went into Cheney’s office to give him a heads-up.
“I said, ‘I’m here to resign – I certainly 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, absolutely not – I don’t want you to resign,’ and said so in no uncertain terms like, ‘Get back down to your office and get to work,’” Williams said.
The phone on Williams’ desk included a button that, when pressed, would ring directly into Cheney’s office. For days after their conversation about the upcoming magazine article, “I would be sitting at my desk, and every once in a while, the ‘SECDEF’ button would light up,” Williams said. “I’d pick up the phone, and he’d say, ‘Doing OK? Everything all right?’ He was tremendously supportive of me, and I was grateful for that.”
Herbits said Cheney asked him to talk to Williams and persuade him not to quit. “Dick had mentioned to the president that he wanted him to stay,” Herbits said. “And the president said, basically, there ain’t no problem with it.”
Williams stayed on the job through the end of George H.W. Bush’s term as president in 1993 and later became a justice correspondent for NBC News.
On marriage equality, gay-rights activists applaud Cheney for standing up for same-sex unions at a time when federal law defined marriage as a legal union between 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 was the president, not him, and that Bush supported a federal constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage.
During the 2004 presidential campaign, the Log Cabin Republicans, which is made up of LGBTQ+ Republicans and their allies, used Cheney’s remarks in a 30-second television ad to help make the case against a federal marriage amendment. The ad showed footage of Cheney during the 2000 vice-presidential debate saying different states may come to different conclusions on gay marriage and that there shouldn’t necessarily be a federal policy on the issue.
The words “We agree” then appeared on the screen.
Cheney’s daughter, Mary, married her partner, Heather Poe, in 2012. The couple has two children.
In some ways, though, Cheney’s remarks that gay marriage should be a decision left to the states made it harder to gain federal recognition of same-sex unions, said Luce Remy of Family Equality, a nonprofit that works on behalf of LGBTQ+ families.
“I do genuinely believe that he loved his daughter and cared for his grandchildren,” said Remy, the organization’s vice president of public policy. “But I think Cheney’s stance allowed Republicans to be able to say I know and love gay people, but I am still conservative, and these things should be left to the states.”
Cheney’s belief that a federal marriage amendment wasn’t needed “was probably perceived by some or many as brave, but he was not actually out of lockstep with the administration because saying it isn’t necessary isn’t saying you shouldn’t do it,” Remy said.
Same-sex marriage would not be legalized in all 50 states until 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling that held that marriage is a fundamental right and that state marriage bans were unconstitutional. A decade after that decision, the high court refused on Nov. 10 to revisit the case, rejecting an appeal by Kim Davis, a former county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, citing her religious beliefs.
Cheney had an opportunity to influence the debate over federal support of marriage back in 2000 and 2004, Remy said, but he missed that moment.
“What his heart wanted him to do and what politics needed him to do were vastly different,” she said. “And I think he will be judged by what he did politically more than what his heart wanted.”
Michael Collins writes about the intersection of politics and culture. A veteran reporter, he has covered the White House and Congress. Follow him on X: @mcollinsNEWS