The message it seems is Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter; she's just had a child with her life partner. Get over it America.
The US vice-president's daughter, Mary, delivered an 8lb 6oz boy yesterday, the first child for her and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe.
Dick and Lynne Cheney with their sixth grandchild.
Photograph: David Brother/EPA
Samuel David Cheney becomes the sixth grandchild of Dick and Lynne Cheney. So far so unsettling for a Republican arch-hawk in the Bush administration, so you would think.
But where are the predictable calls of 'hell child' and howls of consternation from the religious right?
Tom Cloyd on the Sleight of Mind blog tries to pre-empt the outrage.
"This child has a problem, however. His mother is homosexual, but that's not the problem. The mistaken view of his mother by a significant number of people in our country - that's the problem."
The Christian Newswire did play the game and released a statement in which Peter LaBarbera claims the arrival of the infant as bitttersweet.
"While we celebrate life, we cannot celebrate homosexual parenting -- which involves intentionally denying a child either a mom or a dad."
The Focus on the Family group did chip in also and said: "Just because it's possible to conceive a child outside the relationship of a married mother and father doesn't mean it's best for the child. Love cannot replace a mom or a dad."
Mary Cheney announced in December that she and Poe had decided to start a family. Her decision to become pregnant and raise a child in a same-sex relationship was predictably criticised in conservative circles.
However, Cheney surprised many by coming out in support of his daughter - after the 2004 election campaign, on which Mary Cheney worked - and said people "ought to be free to enter into any kind" of union.
Mary Cheney later called president Bush's support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages "a gross affront to gays and lesbians everywhere".
But the story seems to have barely mustered national attention, with most of the US dailies carrying a brief story and generally very little comment - then again, maybe most of the bluster was used up after the announcement by the women to start a family.
Perhaps the scariest part of the whole affair is the picture released by the White House of the loving grandparents, in which Dick Cheney sports an expression somewhere between enigmatic and the look of a man who has just urinated into your cup before serving you a cappuccino.
The religious right, it seems, is more preoccupied with why Paris Hilton is carrying a Bible around these days.
