cbind error with check.names

Here is an example where cbind fails with an error when check.names=TRUE is set.

data(airquality)
airQualityBind =cbind(airquality,airquality,check.names =TRUE)


 I understand that cbind is a call to data.frame and the following works:
airQualityBind =data.frame(airquality,airquality,check.names =TRUE)
but I would like to understand why cbind throws an error.

I asked this question on SO here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17810470/cbind-error-with-check-names
and user Hong Ooi confirmed my suspicion that cbind was passing check.names = FALSE regardless of my setting that option, even though the help file indicates that this should be possible,

"For the "data.frame" method of cbind these can be further arguments to data.frame such as stringsAsFactors."

Is there some design principle that I am missing here?

Thanks.