WWW – A new website wants the vice president’s openly lesbian daughter to speak out against a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriages. Since going up last Friday, the site has received 3,000 letters from people pleading with Mary Cheney to publicly oppose the amendment.

The project, www.DearMary.com, appears as President Bush is considering supporting such a ban. Some conservative groups want to make the issue a centerpiece of this November’s election.

Vice President Dick Cheney said last month that he thinks the matter should be left up to the states, but would support an amendment if the president did.

“Please help us and other people of the same lifestyle to live just as freely as your father,” one letter writer from Kansas said.

“The goal is to get Vice President Cheney to kill this amendment,” said John Aravosis, a Washington, D.C., political consultant who created the site as an offshoot of www.DontAmend.com, which launched last summer. “The tactic is to convince Mary to do the right thing.”

A gay rights activist in the past, Cheney, 34, served as a personal aide to her father in the 2000 presidential campaign. She joined the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign last summer as director of vice presidential operations, and has largely stayed out of the public eye.

The campaign did not immediately have comment.

Aravosis said they have already raised $5,000 through the site. He said at least 80 percent of the funds will go for magazine and newspaper ads, perhaps with Mary Cheney’s photograph on a milk carton with the words “HAVE YOU SEEN ME?”

“I wanted the vice president to know that if my family is relevant, then his family is relevant,” Aravosis said.

The group is also considering holding protests outside the campaign’s Arlington, Va., headquarters.