At Thursday night’s Fox News/?Google Republican debate, one question, posted to YouTube, came from a U.S. Army soldier serving in Iraq. Stephen Hill, donning a gray tee-?shirt emblazoned with the word “ARMY” on the front, asked Rick Santorum if he would try to “circumvent the progress” that has been made in allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly, effectively reinstating Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The audience actually booed him. Hill, apparently, is gay, and was concerned for his future. The idea that anyone would actually “boo” a U.S. service member, serving his country, risking his life in Iraq, is beyond comprehension.
“Do you plan to circumvent the progress that has been made for gay and lesbian soldiers in the military?” The crowd booed.
Morons. Santorum’s answer makes it even worse. He clearly has no respect for or understanding of our military, but that’s to be expected:
Answering Hill, Santorum said that “sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military,” and said the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which took effect this week, was injecting “social policy into the military.”
“What we’re doing is playing social experimentation with our military right now, and that’s tragic,” Santorum said.
Asked how he would answer soldiers like Hill, Santorum said he would not “throw them out.”
“But we would move forward in conformity with what was happening in the past, which is, that sex is not an issue,” he said. “Leave it alone, keep it to yourself, whether you are a heterosexual or a homosexual.”
Oh god, he is so stupid. First of all, DADT has nothing to do with “sexual activity in the military.” Moreover, it’s not social experimentation when pretty much every single one of our first world allies allows openly gay soldiers to serve without incident. And on top of that, is he saying that he would put a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in place for straight soldiers?! I know that Santorum doesn’t consider or understand a damn word that comes out of his own mouth — that’s where his funny Google problem came from — but does he not realize that when a male soldier mentions his wife, he is implicitly stating that he is a heterosexual? With DADT gone, a male soldier is also free to mention his husband or put a picture of said husband on his desk, or in his quarters off in some war zone that we wouldn’t be in in the first place if pansy-ass Republicans like Rick Santorum didn’t support going to war willy-nilly in order to prop up their own fledgling manhood.
To their credit, the gay wingnut group GOProud actually decided to take the gay guy’s side in the argument for once, releasing this statement:
“Tonight, Rick Santorum disrespected our brave men and women in uniform, and he owes Stephen Hill, the gay soldier who asked him the question about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, an immediate apology.
“That brave gay soldier is doing something Rick Santorum has never done?–?put his life on the line to defend our freedoms and our way of life. It is telling that Rick Santorum is so blinded by his anti-?gay bigotry that he couldn’t even bring himself to thank that gay soldier for his service.
“Stephen Hill is serving our country in Iraq, fighting a war Senator Santorum says he supports. How can Senator Santorum claim to support this war if he doesn’t support the brave men and women who are fighting it?”
Because he’s a moron who cares more about his bizarre, uncomfortable obsession with homosexuality than really anything else in this life.
Look, it’s Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council hate group, clinging childishly to the belief that average Americans are bigots with weird hair like he is. It’s very, very sad, and we should all take a break from making fun of him to pity him.
He says that DADT repeal will change the military, due to the fact that soldiers who are sad bigots like Peter Sprigg will have to take up a Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy about their weird, unnatural hatred of gays. Or something. Who knows what this man is ever talking about? Meanwhile, the actual military is pretty much shrugging their shoulders at the change, because they’re grown-ups.
Lt Gary Ross of the US Navy decided to get married the moment DADT’s repeat went into effect, just after 12:00 AM today; he did it in Vermont at gay-friendly Moose Meadow Lodge. How fitting: Vermont was the first state to offer LGBTQ people civil unions (as well as being the home of Truth Wins Out). Congrats, Lt. Ross and Mr. Dan Swezy!
We’re all relieved that DADT has passed into history. Yet we can’t forget that LGBTQ soldiers still lack basic civil rights their straight buddies enjoy. According to the great state of Vermont, Swezy is Ross’s legal husband, but he is nonetheless ineligible for military health insurance. Incredibly, anal and oral sex are still court-martial offenses under Article 125 of the military legal code. Transgender people may not serve at all.
Read Nathaniel Frank’s thoughtful piece on DADT’s damage, its legacy and what its tenure says about the national psyche.
In the lead-up to DADT repeal, the Religious Right went to great lengths to portray the members of the United States armed forces as an elite fighting force which happens to be populated by people are too sissy to deal with being around openly gay people. It was super weird.
But now that repeal is about to become official [tomorrow], it looks like the military is going to be just fine, thankyew:
For some gay service members, the fear of discovery and reprisals dissipated months ago when a federal court halted all investigations and discharge proceedings under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” while military leaders prepared the armed services for its end.
Several have come out to their peers and commanders.
A few have since placed photographs of their same-sex partners on their desks and attended military barbecues and softball games with their significant others. In San Diego, about 200 active-duty personnel — both gay and heterosexual — made up the nation’s first military contingency to participate in a Gay Pride march this summer, carrying banners identifying their branches of service. An Army soldier had tears, saying she was touched by the thousands cheering them on, after hiding her identity for so long.
[...]
Air Force Capt. Diane Cox, whose gay son served in the Navy, said she got into heated debates with service members vowing not to take showers and share rooms with gays before Congress voted to repeal the law, but after the military held sensitivity trainings to explain the new rules “everybody just shut up.”
Ha. The rest of the article sadly features more “not shutting up” from, you guessed it, chaplains. They are still very worried whether or not they, who are supposed to be able to minister to any and all troops in a time of war, will still be free to get a little gay-hatin’ in on the side. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: that these chaplains are so worried about people taking away their precious right to discriminate says more about them as human beings than it does about gay troops.
[Note from Evan: This is Jenny Blair, and she's going to be pitching in a bit with the writing around here. Welcome her!]
One of only two law schools in the nation to have denied military recruiters access to its campus during the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era recently announced it will lift its ban once DADT is repealed in September.
Unlike the overwhelming majority of American law schools, the Vermont Law School has kept recruiters off its campus because the military’s barring of openly non-heterosexual people violated a non-discrimination policy that the school adopted in 1985. That lack of hypocrisy cost VLS dearly–to the tune of some $500,000 a year in federal funds since 2000–when the Defense Department decided to withhold federal funding from all universities of which any part prohibited military recruiters. [The Defense Department can do that because of the Solomon Amendment, which prevents schools from receiving federal funding if they don't allow military recruiters on campus.]
In other words, the students, faculty, and trustees of Vermont Law School said no thanks to over $5 million in order to uphold the school’s own stated principles. Who says lawyers’ loyalties are for sale? Bravo, VLS.
“Our troops’ religious liberties are in unprecedented jeopardy because the government has caved in to pressure from small groups of activists to impose homosexual and bisexual behavior on our military,” ADF Litigation Staff Counsel Daniel Blomberg said in a statement Friday.
The ADF statement came just after the Obama administration cleared the last hurdle in ending the so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which barred openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service. The ban will end after the 60-day waiting period, on September 20.
Once that happens, the first casualty may well be the religious freedom of chaplains and service members, Blomberg said. “No formal protections have been adopted despite many having been proposed,” he complained. “No Americans, and especially not our troops, should be forced to abandon their religious beliefs.”
Gawd, they’re melodramatic when they’re playing victim. Let’s break this down.
First of all, this has nothing do to with “our troops’ religious liberties.” One of the ways the Christian Right lies is by delusionally acting as if they represent the mainstream of America, or in this case, the mainstream of our troops. They do not. The majority of troops don’t care what the sexual orientation of the people they serve with is. They care whether or not they can do their jobs. It is a declining minority of troops who are so uncomfortable in their skin/religiously brainwashed that they are obsessed with other peoples’ sexuality.
Moreover, this has nothing to do with “religious liberties” in the first place. Are gay soldiers going to prevent these few wingnut soldiers from worshipping as they see fit? No? Well then, their religious liberty is intact! I am quite aware that the Christian Right views itself collectively as the World’s Best Snowflake Baby, due all the care, concern and deference their little hearts desire, but nowhere in the concept of “religious freedom” is the idea that they should be protected from people who think differently from them. Moreover, the bitching about the chaplains is always cute, as chaplains in a diverse environment such as the military are expected, as part of their job description, to be able to minister to all different kinds of people, including the many, many straight troops who have no interest in their bewildering, Philistine beliefs about human sexuality. And the idea that a wingnut outfit such as the Alliance Defense Fund is blubbering about chaplains being denied their “right” to preach hatred against gay people tells us more about their whiny, weird obsessions than it does about anything involving DADT repeal in the US military.
Finally, the quote about troops being forced to “abandon their religious beliefs” is simply insane to anyone with a triple digit IQ so I’m not spending a paragraph correcting it.
Hey ADF: stop whining. The Military isn’t whining. Try to follow their example.
Top defense officials plan to certify Friday that the Pentagon is ready to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military, officials said, a landmark moment after almost two decades of controversy.
The military now has to resolve crucial questions such as what benefits same-sex couples will receive.
While the military will be free to provide some services to same-sex spouses, such as family support for spouses of deployed service members, federal law blocks it from providing them the full range of health, housing and education available to heterosexual couples.
More good news. Though Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has technically been repealed, as we all know, there has been an injunction in place essentially preserving the ban while the military prepares for the policy change. The Ninth Circuit has put a stop to that, and the Pentagon says they’ll comply with the court order:
Even with Obama’s support for ending the 18-year-old policy, Obama’s justice department asked the appeals court to keep the injunction in place to give the military more time to prepare for admitting gay soldiers.
On Wednesday, a three judge-panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals noted that the process of repealing DADT is now “well under way”.
The government “can no longer satisfy the demanding standard” to keep the injunction on hold, the court ruled.
The Pentagon said it was still studying the ruling, but added it would comply with the court order.
Dave Lapan, a military spokesperson, said the US military was immediately taking “steps to inform the field of this order.
Step by step, the discriminatory institutions are falling away. It’s always nice when the courts give the administration a little nudge, though.
UPDATE: Predictably, the self-loathing gay wingnut part of the internet has found a reason to hate this victory, as there is no victory for LGBT rights that they are ever truly happy about.
Oh, it is so nice, at the end of certain culture war battles, battles where we as LGBT writers and activists have to deal with the kicking and screaming children of the Religious Right in order to gain our equality, to see that the actual adults affected by the changes are acting like, well, adults! Here is Michael Barrett, the top NCO of the Marine Corps, talking to Marines in South Korea about DADT repeal:
“Get over it.” That’s the ultimate message delivered to marines by the top non-commissioned officer of the Marine Corps regarding the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT).
[...]
The Wall Street Journal reports that Sgt. Maj. Barrett brought out a small copy of the Constitution and referenced Article 1, Section 8. “It says, ‘Raise an army.’ It says absolutely nothing about race, color, creed, sexual orientation.” He then asked if everyone in the group joined the Marines to protect their nation, going on to say, “How dare we, then, exclude a group of people who want to do the same thing you do right now, something that is honorable and noble?”
Sgt. Maj. Barrett concluded by saying “Get over it… Let’s just move on, treat everybody with firmness, fairness, dignity, compassion and respect. Let’s be Marines.”
I would extend that sentiment to dead-end brats like Tony Perkins and his various hate group cohorts. The rest of the country is handling this like grown-ups; it is high time that the Religious Right learns how to play well with others in a secular, diverse society.
The people in the audiences for these GOP primary debates really are the lowest common denominators of this society. First they pawed themselves with rage, in support of the state executing innocent people. Then at the next debate, they got all excited about letting people without health insurance die. And now, in tonight’s Fox News/Google debate, a gay soldier asked Frothy Mix whether he would reinstate DADT as president. So of course, the wingnut crowd [which usually attires itself in the garb of troop-loving patriots, even though they don't even know what they're "supporting" when they "support the troops"] booed the gay soldier:
