So Mary Cheney is having her say—she’s got a book out, Now It’s My Turn.

The carpet-munching daughter of VP Dick Cheney is responsible for what was, for me, the most head-spinning moment of the 2004 election. Just reelected after a campaign that vilified gay people—gay couples in particular— George Bush gave his acceptance speech on a stage with both men’s families, and Mary Cheney and her long-term, bull-dykish partner, Heather, were up there on the stage with Bush. Like most gay Americans, I wanted to jump into the photo that ran on cover of the New York Times and slap Mary Cheney’s face.

Mary Cheney had nothing to say about the Federal Marriage Amendment during the campaign, and she worked hard to reelect her father. Now we learn in her new book that she contemplated quitting. Gee, a real profile in courage. She didn’t speak up when her words might have had an impact, but now two years after her father was reelected, she squeaks out a few pathetic words of dissent.

In finally speaking up, Mary has mostly demonstrated how pathetically misinformed she is—which Andrew Sullivan, who says he has no issues with M. Cheney (he’s got plenty with her father, though), pointed out after Mary Cheney was on Larry King. When King asked Mary Cheney if her relationship has any legal protection, Cheney replied: “My partner and I have living wills, regular wills, powers of attorney, everything that quite honestly any couple married or not should have.â€�

Yeah, any couple should have those documents, Mary—but no gay couple in Virginia can have them. Mary lives with her partner in Virginia, and that state has the most draconian anti-gay law in the country—a law that no homo living in Virginia could possibly be unaware of . The law bars gay or lesbian couples from using private contracts to “bestow the privileges and obligations of marriage.â€� Wills, powers of attorney, end-of-life directives—they are all “void and unenforceable in Virginia.” Mary’s will, her living will, and her powers of attorney are unenforceable, each having been shredded by Cheney’s fellow Republicans in the Virginia legislature.

Jonathan Rauch, author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, and also resident of Virginia, wrote this op-ed about Virginia’s anti-gay marriage law for the Washington Post in July of 2004—an op-ed that Mary Cheney obviously missed. Perhaps like her father, Mary Cheney watches nothing but Fox News and reads nothing but the Moonie-owned right-wing rag The Washington Times. Here’s a chunk of what Mary missed:

It is by entering into contracts that we bind ourselves to each other. Without the right of contract, participation in economic and social life is impossible; thus is that right enshrined in Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution. Slaves could not enter into contracts because they were the property of others rather than themselves; nor could children, who were wards of their parents. To be barred from contract, the founders understood, is to lose ownership of oneself.

To abridge the right of contract for same-sex partners, then, is to deny not just gay coupledom, in the law’s eyes, but gay personhood. It disenfranchises gay people as individuals. It makes us nonpersons, subcitizens. By stripping us of our bonds to each other, it strips us even of ownership of ourselves.

Americans have a name for the use of law in this fashion, and that name is Jim Crow.

Here’s another piece from the Washington Post: A lesbian couple who lived in Virginia—a couple that had been together for 40 years—had to sell their home and move to another state. Mary apparently missed this story too:

All that matters to them is being able to know, 100 percent for sure, that they will be together until the very end. They already know what it is like to be kept apart. Tibby still reflexively puts her right hand on her heart when she describes being barred from Barbara’s recovery room at Alexandria’s now-closed Circle Terrace Hospital, where Barbara had a hysterectomy in 1984. “Family only,” the nurses said, quoting hospital policy. Then, as now, the law did not entitle Tibby to be with Barbara.

“I could see her being wheeled in there, and it just pulled at my heart, to have her alone in there,” Tibby says. She stalked the waiting room until shifts changed and returned to the nurse’s station with a new identity—Barbara’s sister.

Now the Affirmation of Marriage Act had stripped away their confidence that their medical directives, which left each in charge of health care decisions for the other, would trump Virginia’s refusal to recognize their relationship.

Somehow Mary Cheney missed this story—and Rauch’s, and all the hundreds of other stories written about Virginia’s draconian anti-gay law. Poor Mary Cheney—born with a silver blinders on, it would appear.

Anyway, I bring all this up now because of a story on the cover of this morning’s New York Times: Conservative Christians Warn Republicans Against Inaction. The American Taliban is displeased with Republican leaders for not enacting their social agenda.

Some of President Bush’s most influential conservative Christian allies are becoming openly critical of the White House and Republicans in Congress, warning that they will withhold their support in the midterm elections unless Congress does more to oppose same-sex marriage, obscenity and abortion….

And at a meeting in Northern Virginia this weekend of the Council for National Policy, an alliance of the most prominent Christian conservatives, several participants said sentiment toward the White House and Republicans in Congress had deteriorated sharply since the 2004 elections.

When the group met in the summer of 2004, it resembled a pep rally for Mr. Bush and his allies on Capitol Hill, and one session focused on how to use state initiatives seeking to ban same-sex marriage to help turn out the vote. This year, some participants are complaining that as soon as Mr. Bush was re-elected he stopped expressing his support for a constitutional amendment banning such unions.

So, Mary—to appease the assholes that nullified your wills, living wills, and powers of attorney in Virginia, the Senate is going to vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) in June. If the FMA passes, it will destroy what little protection same-sex couples in the United States—all of them except Virginia—currently enjoy. So now that you’re speaking up—finally—now that it’s “your turn,â€� I hope we’ll see you out there actively campaigning against the FMA, or “fighting the forces of intolerance,” to borrow a phrase. (It’s not like McCain is using it anymore.)

But if you’re not going to lift a finger to fight the FMA, Mary, if you’re just going to sit there in Virginia with your thumb up your own ass and your tongue up your father’s, then have the decency to shut your fucking mouth.