Cheney’s truth. The fact that Vice President Dick Cheney has a daughter who is a lesbian is not news. He has been confronted with it regularly as a variety of issues involving sexual orientation and civil rights have commanded public attention.

In Iowa this week, Cheney said he believes the question of allowing same-sex marriage is one best left to the states. This brought him into conflict with President Bush and legions of social conservatives who are pushing for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, limiting marriage to a union between a man and a woman.

Cheney stopped well short of advocating same-sex marriage, so the split with Bush is relatively mild, but it left a number of religious conservatives fuming.

Frankly, it’s refreshing to see that the vice president didn’t let partisanship trump his family values.

Practice civic hygiene. When advocates of water fluoridation got confused about initiative petition requirements (thanks in part to information from City Hall), the City Council gave them a break. They agreed to put the measure on the Nov. 2 ballot even though the proponents had come up with only enough signatures to qualify for the election in 2005 – assuming they actually met the lower requirement.

But they didn’t. After checking nearly 2,000 signatures to confirm they belonged to registered voters in the city, the county auditor’s office found almost a third of them were invalid.

This, of course, will not end the long-lasting debate over fluoride, and we don’t intend to take it up here. But it does raise a separate issue we will comment on.

According to John Robideaux, chairman of Fluoridation Works, some 60 percent of the signatures were collected by paid gatherers hired through a temporary employment agency. Past legislative efforts to outlaw the practice of paying people to gather signatures have been constitutionally flawed, unfortunately.

However, if lawmakers and public indignation can’t persuade initiative proponents to abandon the bogus signature-for-hire strategy, maybe wasting their money can.