If you are of the Everything-Happens-for-a-Reason school, you might be saying “Oh, Mary Cheney’s pregnancy is designed to teach those frumpy Cheney parents and the Religious Right that it’s not immoral for gays to have kids.”

Could be. But actually, I think Bush and Cheney have always been more personally tolerant on gay issues than the Religious Right has let them be. What the Cheney pregnancy reveals is how hypocritical they’ve been as an administration, allowing the party to run on such an anti-gay platform all this time. So this is great! Time to smell the baby’s diaper! Who’s your Daddy!

Actually, I briefly worked with Lynne Cheney, Mary Cheney’s mom, the wife of the VP, at the Washingtonian magazine in the early 1980s. Lynne Cheney is a highly educated person. She’s a devoted mother. Buried beneath the official mask is a regular woman with a quirky sense of humor. Don’t you think the whole family discussed Mary’s desire to have children with her partner, agreeing it would be ideal, if possible,to wait to become pregnant and then announce after the mid-term elections? In this way, everything turns out well for almost everybody.

I do delight in the fact that life is stranger than fiction. Who could have believed years ago that something like this would ever happen?

And I think this pregnancy is an absolute healing miracle–not only for the Cheneys, but for all of society.