If childbirth can make Vice President Dick Cheney look human, then it must indeed be a miracle.

That was my first thought when I saw the large photo of the smiling Cheney and his wife proudly holding their new grandson, Samuel David Cheney, the country’s most controversial baby. Samuel, born May 23, is the firstborn of their daughter Mary Cheney, an avowed lesbian, who plans to raise him with her longtime partner, Heather Poe.

From the start, the press and the Christian right have had a field day with the fact that Mary went the nontraditional route to conceive. It’s not that “turkey baster” babies are anything new. Lesbians have been doing it with frozen sperm for decades. The proliferation of lesbian families across America has laid to rest that tired, old Christian objection to homosexuality: “They can’t have children.” In fact, there’s been an explosion of babies in the queer community in the past decade, proving once and for all that the gene for queerness does not cancel out the instinct to procreate.

The news of Samuel’s birth has spawned the usual anti-gay rants from the right. I won’t repeat any of it. The Cheneys are being tight-lipped about the event. They issued a statement through a spokesperson. President George Bush, never a public fan of queer relationships, did concede that Mary will be a “loving mother.”

Who would have thought that the snarling Dick Cheney would turn out to be such an advocate for alternative families? In April, he told ABC News: “I obviously think it’s important for us as a society to be tolerant and respectful of whatever arrangement people enter into.”

Even before his daughter’s pregnancy, he was countering the administration’s hard line on queer relationships with one of his own. In 2004, during a debate with John Edwards, then running mate for Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry, Dick Cheney said that states, not the feds, should have the right to decide the question of gay marriage. “Four years ago in this debate, the subject came up. And I said then and I believe today that freedom does mean freedom for everyone. People ought to be free to choose any arrangement they want. It’s really no one else’s business. That’s a separate question from the issue of whether or not government should sanction or approve or give some sort of authorization, if you will, to these relationships.”

Times have indeed changed. It wasn’t that long ago that a Mary Cheney would have been forced to marry and assume the pretense of being a happy heterosexual. Some politicos still do. Case in point: Former Florida Representative Mark Foley, now in a rehab center repenting for his sexual advances to Congressional male pages.

As great as it is to see the human side of the vice president, let us not forget that Dick Cheney is still the same monster he was before baby Samuel came into the world. Still the same right-winger who helped sell America on two illegal wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), and the Patriot Act. Still part of an administration that kowtows to the right-wing Christian crazies who think homos are the spawn of the devil and that abortion is murder. Though he’s said a few positive things about alternative lifestyles, he hasn’t lifted a finger to change the laws in the very state that his daughter calls home, a state that doesn’t recognize her relationship and grants no parental rights to her lover, Heather.

Granddaddy Cheney may defend his daughter in public, but he isn’t likely to exert any of his political influence to actually do something to change the homophobic society in which she lives.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical, southern Italian, working-class atheist queer performer and writer with a website: avicollimecca.com.