When it became clear that Bush-Cheney ’04 would support a Federal Marriage Amendment, Mary Cheney – the vice president’s lesbian daughter and aide-de-camp, and the most prominent gay in a party moving to the right on gay marriage – had some decisions to make.

In her new memoir, “Now It’s My Turn” (Threshold Editions, 239 pages, $25), Ms. Cheney writes that she almost quit. “I seriously considered packing up my office and heading home to Colorado” in protest of a “fundamentally wrong” idea that “would write discrimination into the Constitution.”

She stayed with the campaign, of course. To the enduring gratitude of her political cohorts and to the hot anger of gay activists everywhere, Ms. Cheney kept exceedingly quiet about her anti-FMA opinions during the campaign. The heaping scorn she pours on Democrats in this memoir – and the expletives she poured on John Edwards and others during the campaign – partly explain why. But the act can only be interpreted as some combination of loyalty to her father, fervor for the rest of her party’s agenda, and self-advancing self-preservation.

Now she’s talking, but in ways likely to further infuriate her critics. She now argues that she “didn’t have the luxury of voting on that issue alone.” “[I]t seemed pretty clear that we needed to elect the candidate who would do the best job of defending and protecting this country, her people, and her interests” during a war on terror, she writes. Besides, John Kerry was no true friend to gays and lesbians; he waffled on this issue, as he did on others. So Ms. Cheney stayed with dad.

The reaction to this news last week was apoplectic.The Washington Blade’s reviewer said she “deserves contempt for meekly attempting to justify her silence.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius wrote that it makes her “look like a typical Washington opportunist.” And John Kerry’s spokesman told the Web site Raw Story that Ms. Cheney’s invective toward his boss seems like “a suspicious lecture from a political operative who flacked for the most anti-gay administration in history and allowed Karl Rove to divide America for political gain.”

In her critics’ defense, Ms. Cheney’s behavior has been all too convenient. Her dad and Mr. Bush got to avoid a nasty campaign fiasco. The Cheneys got to avoid a family crisis. Mary got a hefty sum (reportedly $1 million) for her book – which, beyond the gay and lesbian angle, is pretty conventional and tight-lipped, as campaign memoirs go – plus a free voice to speak her mind retroactively. So the critics can have a field day with her.

In some respects, though, they’re missing the larger point. Just who do they think will promote their agenda with the other side if not Mary Cheney? Don’t they know how the political game works? Their outrage might feel good, but it’s counterproductive – and should seem so to anyone who wants to see gay marriage be accepted widely.

Mary Cheney will be visible in American politics for at least the next three decades. She could become a towering advocate for gay rights. She’s won lasting admiration from the conservatives I know. She shares in the anger over the Federal Marriage Amendment. Sorry, folks, but there are conservative gay people too, and the more you demonize them, the sillier you’ll look in 10 years when you have no choice but to embrace them or become another permanent but small pressure group.

Of course, the gay-rights movement could continue on its current path of alliance with John Kerry’s Democratic party, outing campaigns against closeted Republicans, and the occasional caprice of sympathetic judges – an unambitious and divisive agenda.

Mr. Conway is an editorial writer at the Washington Times and a 2006-07 Phillips Foundation fellow.