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Comment by darpa_escapee | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't be surprised if someone they know has PTSD. There's an overwhelming trend with those types to make exceptions for their own while vilifying everyone else.

See also: my teen's abortion is the only acceptable abortion, my gay daughter is one of the good ones, my drug addict son isn't a criminal like the rest of them, etc

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Case in point: Dick Cheney changing his position on gay marriage because his daughter is a lesbian.

His position never changed. Source?

Despite popular opinion on other forums, it is faster to search the web than to post a falsehood in order to provoke someone else to do it for you.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Dick+Cheney+support+gay+marriage&i...

I swore there was an XKCD that was directly related here, but I can only find the "wrong on the internet" one: https://www.xkcd.com/386/

Cunningham’s law goes back to USENET, and was clever in a pre-Lycos internet. There is actually a reference to that xkcd comic in this article.

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

Did he previously do much to oppose it?

His statements going back to at least 2000 make his position less politically convenient than, uh, quite a few other politicians:

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/us/2000-campaign-republica...

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/high-profile-politicians-chan...

Doesn't do much to offset the rest of his record.

Gary Johnson made hay in 2016 about the fact that it took Hillary Clinton longer to change her position than Dick Cheney. I feel pretty confident that he wasn’t always in favor of it when he was in Congress or working in the Ford Administration (after all, even the Human Rights Campaign was opposed to campaigning for marriage equality in the nineties [1]).

But I take your point, and I don’t understand why it is so surprising that politicians could hold a la carte views on social issues, something which I feel used to be much more common and allowable in our culture (see also Barry Goldwater’s support for gays openly serving in the military in the late 80s, a policy that wouldn’t be implemented until 2011, which to the original point he credited to a gay grandson).

[1] http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/04/16/jo-beckers-troubli...

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