The Maya Keyes story just rips your heart out:

During his failed campaign last fall against Barack Obama (D) for the Illinois Senate seat, Alan Keyes lashed out at Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Cheney. Keyes told a radio interviewer that Mary Cheney was a “selfish hedonist.” Then, without having been asked anything about his own family, he volunteered that “if my daughter were a lesbian, I’d look at her and say, ‘That is a relationship that is based on selfish hedonism.’ I would also tell my daughter that it’s a sin and she needs to pray to the Lord God to help her deal with that sin.” Maya heard the comments and recoiled. “It was kind of strange that he said it like a hypothetical,” she says. “It was really kind of unpleasant.”

The elder conservative pigdogish Keyes and his wife have disowned their daughter because of her homosexuality. I just can’t fathom that. My daughter is my life and my world and I can’t imagine anything that would make me love her any less. Sexual orientation is just that, sexual orientation . . . it doesn’t mean anything else . . . and the thought that someone could disown their child for something that is just a part of that child’s being, not a choice, just a state of being . . . neither right nor wrong just . . . is . . . well, that’s plain ludicrous. People who could even contemplate that sort of thing shouldn’t be having kids in the first place. In my not so humble and rather liberal-minded opinion.

It’s not like she’s a murderer, or a rapist, or a feces flinging fool . . . she’s just their daughter for goddess sake!

Sheesh.