Near the start of her memoir, which is being published this week, Mary Cheney tells the story of her first political assignment. It was 1978, Dick Cheney's first run for Congress, and 9-year-old Mary was detailed to stand outside campaign headquarters wearing a sandwich board that read, "Honk for Cheney."

Mary Cheney didn't wear a sandwich board when her father ran for vice president, but she might as well have: She was - instantaneously and indelibly - Dick Cheney's Lesbian Daughter. From Alan Keyes' crazed assessment ("selfish hedonist") to John Kerry's gratuitous invocation of the L-word, she served as a silent prop for advocates on both sides of the battle over gay rights. Honk for Mary. Honk against her.

Gay activists were so enraged by what they saw as her traitorous silence that they put her picture on milk cartons: "Have you seen me?" The intolerant right squirmed at a "lesbian activist" helping run the vice president's campaign; they squirmed even more when her partner, Heather Poe, turned up in the family box at the Republican National Convention.

The title of Ms. Cheney's book is doubly fitting: Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life. Being a politician's child means constantly having to bite your tongue, and Ms. Cheney has had more occasion for biting than most.

She is ready to talk, but there's a lot she's not ready to talk about. Asked by People magazine whether she planned to have children, she replied, "That's one Heather and I are going to have to talk about before I can tell you." This is a couple that's been together for 14 years. They haven't gotten around to discussing kids?

This reticence, in her book and accompanying publicity, isn't surprising. Political memoirs, especially from figures still immersed in politics, tend more toward score settling than rigorous self-assessment. And neither introspection nor self-revelation comes easily to Cheneys - the "most buttoned-down of families," Ms. Cheney writes.

She dispenses briskly with coming out to her parents: She broke up with her high school girlfriend, crashed the family car and announced she was gay. With the exception of a brief bout of maternal teariness ("Your life will be so hard," Lynne Cheney worried), everyone, she says, was immediately accepting.

Did she wince when her mother, asked during the 2000 campaign about having "a daughter who has now declared that she is openly gay," indignantly replied, "Mary has never declared such a thing"? The episode goes unmentioned.

The most compelling aspect of her story is the strange and often conflicted life of the political child, born not just into a family business but into a family ideology. Would Ms. Cheney have been a Republican in a different, nonpolitical family? "I don't tend to like hypothetical questions," she told Diane Sawyer - then proceeded to eagerly answer a different one: whether she would have backed George W. Bush even if her father weren't on the ticket ("You bet").

The news of the book will be Ms. Cheney's denunciation of a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. She calls the amendment "fundamentally wrong - and a gross affront to gays and lesbians everywhere." After Mr. Bush decided to endorse it, she writes, "I seriously considered packing up my office and heading home to Colorado."

In the end, she not only didn't head home, she also chose not to take up the president on his offer to let her issue a dissenting statement. Ms. Cheney explains this as primarily a matter of faith in her father, who made his disagreement with the amendment clear even as he clapped for it onstage at Mr. Bush's State of the Union address.

Cynics will say she rationalized a way to keep her insider campaign job and pocket a huge advance. Maybe: Ms. Cheney is certainly no profile in political courage. As she told People, "I'm not a ramparts kind of a girl."

Still, it's awfully easy for an outsider to say what Ms. Cheney should have done when family loyalty collided with personal conviction. Those who would judge her choices ought to walk a mile in her sandwich board.

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